Wolfgang Puck Makes Us His Signature Dishes and Talks Dining Innovation | Taste The Details

Everybody's a food critic today. I think a lot of reviewers today don't really know that much about food and are not good writers either. But we have to take the good with the bad. It's really about establishing a brand where people know we are all about quality. Wolfgang Puck's Spago put fine dining on the map in Los Angeles and allowed others to follow suit. I sat down with the legend himself to talk about its longevity, innovation, and how his mother served as a catalyst for his career. All while getting a taste of his greatest hits like the smoked salmon pizza, schnitzel, and his favorite childhood dessert, Kaiserschmarrn. I'm Reach Ginto. And this is Taste the Details. Over three decades of any constant is a landmark itself. I mean, I sometimes wonder how I made it into my 30s. But Wolfgang Puck's legendary Spago has done just that. A rarity in an industry that's as fickle as any. It's also the literal jump off for Wolfgang Puck's vast restaurant empire. To me, Spago is the mother of all the other restaurants. An amazing place which really let me grow. We opened January 16, 1982, before you were born. You were not even in diapers. I was making pizzas already. You incorporated some childhood dishes in Spago originally, right? I put some of my childhood favorites on it and it was almost like for fun. I said, you know what? I put them on just for fun. In three months, I'm gonna take them off. Nobody gonna want Wolfgang's childhood favorites. And they became so popular that I have to keep them on. Let me show you how I make one of my favorite dishes. We have flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs. We beat the eggs a little bit, not too much. You don't have to over beat them. The meat, veal loin, cut it and pound it very thin. We're gonna season it with salt and pepper. All right, so we put it first in flour, then into the eggs. Just make sure it's nicely coated and then we're gonna put it into our breadcrumbs. So now you can see it's nicely done. And then we make a few indentations. This is really from my childhood. Every Sunday or almost every Sunday, my mother made Wiener Knetzel. This is my mother here in her vegetable garden in Austria. I built this skylight here so she can watch us. My mother was also a chef. She was an important part of what I choose to do because my stepfather always said, you know, cooking is for women, cooking is not a real profession. And he went on and on and on. He was terrible. So I followed my mother and I think that was smarter. And now we have a pan with oil here at about 350 degrees. So it has to cook pretty fast. The shaking of the oil makes the breading souffle like on top. We don't want it to stick to the meat. We want it to be just like that. I think the Wiener is really nice and brown on one side. So now we're gonna turn it over. So it has to be nice and crispy. We serve the Wiener Knetzel always with a warm potato salad. That's like a staple. We always serve it like that. So we're gonna add some chopped parsley or a little chopped chives to it, just like my mother used to make it. My childhood favorite, the Wiener Knetzel. After all these years, it reminds me of my mother. It's nice. It's perfectly fried. Veal is tender. What I love about this dish is, at the heart of it is comfort food. A lot of this food came from a warm, special place for Chef Wolfgang. I think that's why this food really shines and resonates with people. I mean, 37 years, you still have people asking for the Wiener Knetzel. So it's a testament to the soulfulness of Chef Wolfgang's cooking. Years ago, I was in Houston. We had a little cafe, and I'm friendly with Roger Federer and Mirka, his wife. They come to the restaurant. I feed them our smoked salmon pizza, some salad, some pastas, and our roasted chicken. And I go out to sit down with them, and Roger said, Wolfgang, where is my Wiener Knetzel? And I said, oh ----, how are we gonna make a Wiener Knetzel if we don't have veal? I had to send somebody to Whole Foods to buy some meat, and I made him the Wiener Knetzel, and then he was happy. That shows good hospitality. Yeah, exactly. So we are here to make the guests happy. We never sit on our laurel. We have to change all the time. And if not, you fall back. But you know, we had dishes, and I talked to some customers actually a few days ago, and they said, oh my God, your chicken with the double blanched garlic and parsley and lemon at the Old Spago is so amazing. I still can taste it. Yet, I'm sure if we still would do the same chicken, we would be closed by now. Some of the dishes, we kept like the smoked salmon pizza. If I take it off the menu, it doesn't matter. People say we want it anyway. You can see it's super thin. I like my smoked salmon really thin. We have enough salmon cut here. We're gonna start making our pizza. And here we have our pizza dough. And then we're gonna stretch it. Be sure that the pizza dough is really thin. We don't want to have a thick crust pizza. We're gonna brush it with a little olive oil. Smoked salmon and onions go very well together. So this will be delicious once it's baked. It's nice and dark brown in the outside. Just the way I like it. I don't like when the dough is yellowy and not cooked because when the flour is really cooked, it tastes so much better. You can see that. Look at that. And you can smell the onion and the olive oil. We're gonna add some dill cream. This is creme fraiche sour cream and dill. And then we're gonna put our smoked salmon on our pizza. And then we're gonna put a little caviar on top. And the last bite for me. Our smoked salmon pizza is one of the dishes people always love. And even me, when I go on vacation and I come back to the restaurant, I have a glass of champagne and a smoked salmon pizza and I feel like I'm at Spago. Voila, our smoked salmon pizza with caviar. I get it. No wonder this thing's an icon. This is Chef Wolfgang's signature dish, the smoked salmon pizza. And I get it. I know why. I had dinner here probably a month ago, right? And there was this macaroon, a breakfast macaroon. And everybody thinks a macaroon is dessert. But it came in one bite. Just one bite, it tasted like all of breakfast. If you would get a big macaroon, it wouldn't be the same, but just one bite is perfect. I think it's a brilliant dish. It's so clever and it's a good indication of where Spago is at right now. Okay, so about this bacon macaron that still lives rent-free in my head. It's got bacon that's been cooked until it reaches a point of tenderness that's basically melting in your mouth. And the macaron shells, they've got maple syrup infused in them. But the genius doesn't stop there because it's finished with egg yolk jam and grated coffee beans. It's breakfast sorcery, my friends, all in one bite. You know, Los Angeles now is such a great city, but even in the 80s, a lot of innovation came out from Los Angeles. To me, to find the right proportions of innovation and tradition is really important because we always innovate, we always change, we always attract new guests. But mostly, it's important for us not to get bored. And I think I have to instill in all my chefs in all of our restaurants that they have to do new things. And I think LA really changed the dining scene in America more than any other city. Let's make our Kaiserschmarrn. So we have some fromage blanc here, creme fraiche. We didn't have a lot of money when I grew up, so we actually ate sweets for dinner. Like, Kaiserschmarrn was one of them. For us kids, it was the best thing. I separated the egg yolks from the egg white. So we whisk it so that it gets nice and creamy with no lumps in it, you can see that. Now we're gonna add some raisin. Often, when we do the raisin, we marinate them in rum. And then we're gonna add the raisin with part of the rum right in here. And we mix the flour with our batter here. As kids, we love to taste it. So now, we're gonna add the egg whites to our mixer here. I'm gonna add a little cream of tartar and a good pinch of salt. I'm gonna add a little sugar. Now here, I'm also gonna sugar my pans a little bit. Now we're gonna add the rest of the sugar. Now we're ready to fold them into our batter. It's almost like making a souffle. Mix the egg whites in gently, so that way your Kaiserschmarrn will be nice and fluffy. It's gonna take about 12 minutes. While we are baking the Kaiserschmarrn, I'm gonna prepare some strawberries here. I have a little raspberry sauce here. Now we're gonna warm up the strawberries. We don't wanna cook the strawberries, just warm them up. If you cook them too much, the strawberries will fall apart. Now in Austria, when we didn't have strawberries, we used plums, or my mother used plum compote, which she used to make in the summer times, and then she put it in mason jars, and then we had it all winter long. All right, our Kaiserschmarrn should be ready now. You can see it has a beautiful color. We could serve it like that, but in our restaurant, we cut it out and spoon it on here. And then a little powder sugar. And now you don't have to go to Austria, you just come to Spago. Our favorite dessert reminds me of my childhood. But sometimes when some Austrians come here and they tell me, that's not Kaiserschmarrn. I say, what do you mean? That's the new version of the Kaiserschmarrn. Everything old has to be new again. We don't have the same clothes as we had 50 or 100 years ago, so we make food a little different today too. What better way to end a Wolfgang Puck meal than with an Austrian dessert? This is Wolfgang Puck's Kaiserschmarrn. I thought it was really cool that he ate this for dinner growing up. Yeah, that's perfect. Wolfgang Puck's innovation has been the through line of this episode. Especially with what he's brought to the culinary world throughout these years. From the open kitchen concept, to his signature salmon pizza, to all the cutting edge moves along the way, Puck has been the master at adapting and evolving the fine dining experience. Through this pandemic, he's been able to pivot to continually make the Spago experience relevant to all diners. And now, he makes it possible for his guests to feel comfortable and safe dining in. For Wolfgang Puck's latest innovation, he's elevating the outdoor dining experience without sacrificing safety, by creating a one of a kind space to accommodate such a vision. Right on Cannon Drive, the street where Spago is located. Construction is currently underway, with the space including slotted walls, separate vented semi-private seating areas, a cocktail lounge, and welcoming lobby all covered by a large tent with massive archways. The structure is fully modular, and allows for each section of space to evolve as dining experiences continue to shift with the times. Once again, this is Wolfgang Puck placing innovation and the diner's experience at the forefront for every Spago customer. We have to take the good with the bad. 10% of my life, I think sometimes, what did I do? What I do right? What I do wrong? But the rest, it's today and tomorrow. I really think more about the future than anything, you know, because the past can't change anymore. It's really about establishing a brand where people know we are all about quality. I think that reflects in your style of cooking. The reason for Spago's longevity.