The United States of Arugula (39 page)

Puck and Lazaroff met at an LA club in 1979, when he was licking the wounds from his failed first marriage to a waitress from Ma Maison. In the
People
profile, he described being struck by Lazaroff as “a challenge, an original. She was crazy, dancing wild and falling out of her clothes.” Lazaroff hates this oft-told tale, “because it makes me sound like some sort of idiot
child,” she says. “I was premed! I was studying to be a physician!” As Lazaroff remembers it, she was trying to fend off the advances of some creep in the club, and did so by asking the guy next to the creep if he wanted to dance—“and it was Wolf.” The cherubic little Austrian with the snub nose and the self-described “Jewish broad from the Bronx” hit it off, and before long, she was helping him write his first cookbook and serving as his de facto press agent, using her connections to land him his first television appearance, on
Hour Magazine
, a syndicated infotainment program hosted by Gary Collins.

As Puck nurtured his dream of leaving Ma Maison to open Spago, Lazaroff emerged as his expert navigator of building codes, contractors, and bureaucratic red tape, using her battering-ram personality to accomplish in hours or minutes what took other would-be restaurateurs months. When Puck first articulated to Lazaroff his dream of building an open kitchen with a wood-burning pizza oven, he almost immediately cast doubt on the practicality of the idea, worrying that the fire department would never approve such a setup. “So I picked up the phone and called the fire marshal,” Lazaroff says. “It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I remember that because we were in bed. We were always in bed between lunch and dinner—that was the only time for sex. I had to rearrange my entire life around him, basically, my classes, everything. I called it ‘The World According to Puck,’ instead of Garp.
Anyway.
So I got a fire marshal on the phone and I explained to him what the idea was. I said, ‘We’ll build a counter in front of the oven, and the customers won’t be able to get to it. It’ll be like a fireplace.’ This was just churning around in my head, and it came out of my mouth. And the guy said, ‘Sounds okay to me, lady.’ Next thing you know, we were trying to raise money for Spago.”

Spago, which opened in early 1982, won over the skeptics so fast that Puck still shudders at the memory of keeping the food coming. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “I’d look out the window and think, ‘How am I gonna manage this restaurant? Everybody’s screaming at me; everybody wants a table.’ I’ve never seen a restaurant get as crazy as that one was the first six months.”

“We all looked at each other after the first day and went, ‘Whoa, what just happened? Two hundred people just walked through the door,’” says Nancy Silverton, Spago’s original pastry chef, who had trained in France under the brilliant Gaston Lenôtre, the nouvelle cuisine gang’s token
pâtissier
(an honorific akin to being Joey Bishop in the Rat Pack).

The foodie intelligentsia couldn’t contain their curiosity over Spago’s fancy-chef-does-pizza angle.
California
magazine’s star restaurant critic, Ruth Reichl, sat at the bar by the open kitchen on the restaurant’s third night of operation and received a blast not of heat from the pizza oven but of admonishment from a tired, pissed-off cook. “Why are you all here so
early?”
the cook said to Reichl, pointing out two other critics in the room. “It’s not fair to judge us now.”

Lazaroff had further ratcheted up anticipation for Spago by taking over its design planning, even though she had no experience in that realm. Puck’s pipe dream of a willfully dingy “comfortable neighborhood restaurant,” in his words, turned into a gleaming, Hockneyesque theater of California-casual event dining. Out went the “red-checkered tablecloths, sawdust on the floor, and a musician playing in the corner,” as Silverton remembers Puck’s original plan, and in came the white tablecloths, Christofle silverware, and huge sprays of gladiola. If it was glamour that Lazaroff was after, it was glamour that she got. Spago was thronged by both the older Hollywood crowd that had frequented Ma Maison—led by the director Billy Wilder, Puck’s fellow expatriate Austrian—and a younger, groovier constituency. Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson were regulars, as was David Bowie. Before long, the talent agent Swifty Lazar was renting out the whole place for his annual invitation-only Oscar-night party, effectively making Spago a byword for celebrity infestation.

“We had so little money for design, and one of the very few nice things I could have was the French tile I imported for the bathroom counters—and inside a week, the tiles had all these little cuts in them,” says Lazaroff. “I was beside myself, screaming, ‘
What are these cuts doing in my tile?’
And the bus-boys and the waiters and waitresses were giggling, and they had to take me
aside and explain about the customers coming out of the bathroom with little white mustaches. They were messing up my tile to cut up coke!” (Lazaroff credits Michael McCarty with getting off the best line about the frenetic tenor of early Spago: that it was “an ego emergency room.”)

But it was the exotic pizzas, more than the celebrity scene or toilet tootling, that truly put Spago and Puck on the map. “If people thought the celebrated chef who made nouvelle cuisine
the
thing to eat in Hollywood wouldn’t know how to produce a pizza, they were dead wrong,” Reichl wrote. “He may serve them on thirteen-inch Villeroy & Boch plates, but it soon becomes clear that they belong there.”

Deviating from the traditionalist Italian American portfolio of pepperoni, sausage, onions, and peppers, Puck topped his pizzas with everything that seemed palatable to him: fresh Santa Barbara prawns, prosciutto, scallops, Sonoma goat cheese from Laura Chenel, artichokes, eggplant, zucchini flowers. For LaDou, whom Puck permitted to cherry-pick whatever fresh ingredients the chef had procured from the markets that day, “It was like being an artist who’d worked with ten colors all his life and then got to use three hundred.” When Puck
did
top pizzas with sausage, he used duck or lamb sausage that he himself had made on the premises. Most famously, he served a pizza adorned with thin slices of smoked salmon, caviar, red onion, and dillflecked crème fraîche—a tip of the hat to the Jewish breakfast of bagels and lox that many industry
machers
enjoyed on Sunday mornings.

As the ecstatic critics noted, Spago served many other dishes besides pizza.
*
A born assimilationist, Puck soaked up whatever regional and national
culinary traditions he encountered in polyglot Los Angeles, making Spago, in a sense, the ultimate American restaurant—as conceived by an Austrian with French training. Puck bought his fish at the Japanese markets in downtown LA (“when there was no white guy who did that,” he says), and he served sashimi-quality tuna raw—sliced thick, marinated in basil-infused olive oil, and set on a bed of radicchio, with an accompaniment of sliced local avocado and rings of sweet onions flown in from Maui: Pacific Rim with a touch of Italy. In a nod of sorts to his home turf, he marinated squabs in sweet Auslese wine from Germany and served the birds grilled. In acknowledgment of his friends and forebears upstate, he composed salads of Panis-sean bravado, from the expected arugula-and-radicchio (accompanied, in Spago’s case, by goat cheese roasted in a savory herb butter) to a bed of greens topped by striped bass, yellow summer squash, and the fresh Oregon girolles, or chanterelles, that André Soltner had struggled to get his hands on a decade earlier. Puck also splurged on not one but two wood-burning ovens, the second for roasting meats, which enabled him and Peel to pull off such showpieces as suckling pig and whole roasted lamb.

A few months into Spago’s existence, a group of Japanese men visited the restaurant, taking measurements of the kitchen and clinically photographing the facility from every angle. Puck, by then used to the media onslaught, assumed his visitors were from a magazine and didn’t give their presence much thought. “Little did I know that they were restaurant people,” says Puck. “Then they came to me and said ‘We want to open Spago in Tokyo.’ I said, ‘No, this is crazy.’ But they basically told me, ‘We will do it with you or without you.’ So we became partners with them and went to Japan. They had it all laid out, exactly like our kitchen was and everything, except a little smaller.” And so, in 1983, Spago found itself with a Japanese clone, Spago Tokyo—Puck’s first, if inadvertent, step toward creating a multirestaurant empire.

His second Los Angeles restaurant and first proper branch-out, Chinois on Main, in Santa Monica, opened later in 1983. Emboldened by the fast success of Spago, Puck decided to conceive a restaurant based on his take on Chinese food, with no specifics in mind other than that Chinois would
feature … his take on Chinese food. “I knew what I wanted, but I somehow couldn’t explain it,” he says. This would prove to be Puck’s surprisingly effective modus operandi in expanding his empire: an intuitive, felt-out approach that would madden and frenzy his staff but somehow coalesce into a coherent vision by the time opening day rolled around.

He knew that Silverton’s crème brûlées were popular at Spago, so he decided that Chinois would feature “Chinese” riffs on the dessert and came up with a trio of brûlées flavored with ginger, mint, and mandarin orange, served in little sake cups (never mind that sake is Japanese). He created a chopped chicken salad that simultaneously harkened back to the Cobb salad invented by Bob Cobb of Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant in 1937 and evoked the comfort of leftover Chinese takeout eaten straight from its white carton with the refrigerator door open; the salad was made of shredded chicken breast and chopped Asian vegetables, and topped with crispy wonton noodles and a honey-mustard dressing. Smitten with the golden-brown smoked ducks that hung in the windows of LA’s Chinatown shops, Puck bought his own smoker to play with, “but I could not make them right,” he says. Instead, he struck a deal with Nelson Moy, a poultry wholesaler in Chinatown, to smoke the ducks for him, but only after Puck had rubbed and filled the ducks with his own blend of spices. The result—a Sino-French fusion before the word fusion was used in relation to cuisines—so pleased Puck that, only half in jest, he told Reichl on the eve of the new restaurant’s opening that “At Chinois, we will cook food the Chinese will be eating thirty years from now.”

While Puck fashioned his own new culinary vernacular for Chinois, Lazaroff let loose her every whim on the design of both the restaurant and the waiters’ uniforms, dictating that the dining room’s support columns be painted different colors—pink, celadon, black—and filling the room with undulating curves and, in what would become her signature touch as she and Puck opened more and more restaurants; hundreds of shiny, colorful, irregularly shaped handmade tiles. “She worked really hard at designing the places,” Puck says. “Some of them I really loved, and some of them I really
hated. We had fights about it. Like the Wolfgang Puck Cafés, with all these crazy mosaic tiles. Oh, in the beginning, they were all full of tiles! It used to drive me crazy. The café in Sunset Plaza looked like it was inside a bathroom. Now, some people found that beautiful. But for me, with my name on it, I couldn’t stand it.”

For her part, Lazaroff recalls the nerve-fraying pressure of having to rush her grand plans on account of Puck’s insanely optimistic forecasts of when his restaurants would be ready to open. “Chinois was nowhere near ready, and then he tells me he’d promised an anniversary party for David and Gladyce Begelman,” she says. “I said,
‘Are you effin’ kidding me?’
I slept two to four hours a night for fifteen years. I mean, the crazy things he made me do—I wanted to just strangle him most of the time.”

WITH HIS BRAVADO
,
her wackiness, and their very public, spirited bickering, Puck and Lazaroff made for terrific copy, and Reichl was on the scene to capture it all in print. Her “process piece” about the making of Chinois was a vibrant, detail-stuffed feature that evoked Gael Greene’s and Nora Ephron’s articles for
New York
(Reichl on Lazaroff’s demeanor at the work site: “Like a geyser, she explodes at least once a day”). From her perch in Berkeley, Reichl was also well-positioned to thoroughly chronicle Chez Panisse and its ever-growing sphere of influence.
California
magazine had gotten its start in 1977 under the name
New West
, founded by none other than Clay Felker, the visionary behind
New York
and “lifestyle” journalism, who had moved to the Golden State in the mid-seventies. As the California food scene became an ever-bigger deal, the West Coast developed its own group of gifted writers to compare with Claiborne, Greene, Sheraton,
Town & Country
’s James Villas, and
Esquire’s
John Mariani on the East Coast.

The dean of the West Coast crew was the
New West/California
food editor Colman Andrews, a suave, Francophilic food-and-wine know-it-all who cockily declared in a 1979 article that “this state has, arguably, the best French restaurants in the United States”—pointedly distinguishing French
food from “Continental” food, which he derided as a “mongrelized cuisine, in which most things are stuffed, most things are heavily sauced, and many things have cheese melted over them.” In a screwball-comedy twist, Andrews and Reichl were a secret couple, enjoying romantic trysts (Reichl was then married to another man) while they covered the birth of California cuisine.
*
Among the other writers in Andrews’s stable were two veterans of
Rolling Stone’s
early, druggy, San Francisco–based incarnation, Merrill Shindler and Charles Perry, both of whom brought a bit of gonzo sensibility to the magazine’s food coverage.
†
LA’s other heavy hitters were Lois Dwan of the
Los Angeles Times
, Bruce David Colen of
Los Angeles
magazine, and
Gourmet’s
Caroline Bates, though Bates had the whole of California to roam.

FOUR YEARS BEFORE
she wrote her making-of piece about Chinois, Reichl did a similar article about another soon-to-be paradigmatic Los Angeles restaurant, Michael’s. Michael McCarty was a real-life Bret Easton Ellis character, a precociously poised and natty twenty-five-year-old who wore suits, slicked his hair back, went to private schools, and comported himself like a big shot. “I didn’t really like him,” says Puck. “He’s completely different now, but he had too much of a big mouth at the time. He was so arrogant.”