13 Questions with... Wolfgang Puck | Condé Nast Traveller

I'm Wolfgang Packer, I'm a chef and restaurateur and I'm here in our restaurant, Spago at the Mathild Palace in Budapest. My best memories from Austria are about food. I still remember my mother's cooking. She was amazing and just the smell of it when she made Wienerschnitzel, you could smell it outside I love to travel. You know, we have restaurants all over the world. So that keeps me on the road probably six months a year to watch all the restaurants. And I'm always very curious. I don't want to go somewhere where I know everything already. I know Justin Bieber comes to Spago and we make him a five course white truffle dinner. Now you would say, well, anybody can make food taste good with white truffles, but I think to make it really special and see young people enjoying it, it's really good for me. The first thing I do, I take a shower and then go for a walk and experience the new site, the new city, the new place. And maybe stop somewhere if it's in France, somewhere have a little aperitif, sit on a sidewalk and look around and really experience the city right away. I really love Turkey, especially Southern Turkey, Dimaris, Yalikavak, Bodrum, that area, Gocheg, because the water is amazing. This beautiful midnight blue color, the water is warm. There's not as many people there. So for me to be on a boat in Southern Turkey is really a lot of fun and special. I grew up in Austria and learned a little bit about Austrian food. I left school when I was 14, started my apprenticeship. I went to France and really learned more in the seven years in France by far. So when I started in my maison in Los Angeles, I made modern French cooking, you know, the way they did it in France in the upscale restaurant. And then little by little, I said, you know what, we are in California. Our cooking should reflect a little bit the people who live here, the cultures who are there and the local ingredients. My perfect dinner is to go to restaurants which I know well already because they make me feel special and they make me feel good. Now, obviously in between chefs, we have friends all over the world. So we generally go and visit restaurants where friends are, where I know the owner and the chef. I think it's really an amazing experience then. We got married in Capri. So to me, Capri is always a special place. You can walk around in these tiny streets and go to really good restaurants. And I know like, I love like Aurora and Apollino and so forth. And then come seven or eight o'clock at night, you have a drink on the terrace of the Crisisana. I think you have such a great feel and you really feel like you're somewhere else. Well, I was just in Austria. My nephew was getting married in Altaussee which is near Salzburg, a beautiful place. And I ate a lake fish there, cooked the way my mother used to cook it with parsley, potatoes, really simple. The chef made a little sauce on the side. But when I ate it, I said, oh my God, it's like something my mother used to make. So it was old school, but prepared really well. I think if you can give people a flavor, a taste, a dish which gets engraved in their brain, in their memory and they cannot wait to get it again, that's really, I think important. Like we have one lady when she lands in Los Angeles and it's on her way home. And she tells them, you know, I want a chinois lobster. And she told me, you know, she sings on the plane from New York to LA already about eating the lobster. She said, I won't touch anything on the plane. I just do that. The worst thing really for me when I travel, even when I travel with my wife, Galila, she loves potato chips. And then sometimes she looks at the mini-pond, they have potato chips. She starts to eating potato chips. Then the whole room smells like it. I don't like it. California is really like a dream for a chef because we have the best ingredients. You know, the weather is great. We can have fresh ingredients all year long. And I tell all my friends in New York, when they say, oh, we got strawberries or raspberries or this and that from California. I said, yeah, we only sent you the leftovers, the ones we don't want. I just came from Salzburg in Austria. And there, there is a Viva Maya. I don't know if you heard about them. It's like a detox thing. So for me, so I said for one week or 10 days, no alcohol, just a little chicken or a little fish, mainly soups and vegetables and so forth. I got up every morning at 6.30, just when the sun was getting up. And then the sun lights up the top of the mountains. Like there's a mountain called Dachstein. It has a glacier on top. And when the sun shines on it, it's like a light thing on top of the mountain. And I said, wow, this is really beautiful. I wanna come back.