How Chef Wolfgang Puck Got Started

It's impossible to think of California cuisine without thinking of Wolfgang Puck. The man who popularized open restaurant kitchens, Puck, 64, introduced fine dining to the masses on TV and became one of the first celebrity chefs (a term he despises). Through his privately held company, whose revenues exceeded $400 million last year, he has parlayed his name into restaurants, frozen pizzas, appliances, cookbooks, and more. His story:

I was born in Austria, and my mother was a professional chef at a resort. Every summer I would visit her at work and spend time in the kitchen. I liked pastries more than anything. When I was 14, I wanted to become an architect, but my parents were poor, and we decided I should get a job in a pastry shop. So I left home when I was 14, to apprentice in a hotel kitchen in Villach, Austria, and never went to high school.

Three weeks into my apprenticeship, we ran out of potatoes in the kitchen, and the chef decided to blame me. He fired me and told me to go home. It was the darkest day of my life, and I decided to kill myself in the river. But as I stood by the water, I thought, maybe I'll go back tomorrow and see what happens. The owner of the hotel took pity on me and sent me to his other hotel to work.

Read the rest here.

NOTE At one point in the article, he gives this advice:

Talk to your customers. I feel that when people come to my restaurant, they're coming to my house. You want to be gracious to them. At home you have to feed them for free. Here they have to pay.

I can vouch that he does this. I have dined at his Los Angeles restaurants more than once and he doesn't know me from Paul Krugman, but if it was a slow period, he would always come over to my table and spend a few minutes talking.

NOTE 2 If you really want to shock a chef like Puck, who takes pride in his cooking, start pouring salt on your entree, as soon as it arrives, in front of him, before tasting it, as a date of mine once did.