A documentary on Disney+ goes back to chef Wolfgang Puck’s beginnings
Film traces the chef’s origins from abused Austrian child to restaurateur to the stars
He has about 100 restaurants, frozen foods in seemingly every grocery store in America and an international reputation as chef to the stars.
But before ruling his vast culinary empire, Wolfgang Puck was the illegitimate son of a pastry chef, growing up in small-town Austria under the thumb of a relentlessly cruel stepfather.
“His voice really got into my head,” says Puck, who will turn 72 Thursday. “I remember being like 8, 9 years old and he would come home drunk and say, ‘You go in the forest and pick your stick.’ I felt like something in my inside was shrinking. And I said, ‘You know, I want to get out of hell.’ ”
That’s the strength of character that drives the biography “Wolfgang,” a new documentary streaming indefinitely on Disney+. Director-producer David Gelb’s film takes viewers back to a time when restaurant owners were king and there were few celebrity chefs, chronicling Puck as one of the first. It also shows he didn’t get there by himself.
Fired from his first kitchen job as a teenager, he walks all night and stands for an hour at a bridge looking down in the water before deciding not to jump. Over time, as he faces greater challenges, the voice in his head returns and he still has doubts. But Raymond Thuilier, founder of Michelin two-star restaurant L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, recognizes Puck’s talent.
He’s encouraged, eventually makes his way to California and finds there’s nothing he can’t do without his new family, friends and helpers at his side. They star in this film: his wife, designer Gelila Assefa; one of his exes and a longtime business partner, Barbara Lazaroff; superstar food journalist Ruth Reichl; legendary talent agent Michael Ovitz; and renowned chefs Nancy Silverton and Evan Funke.
Puck is honest, admitting he regrets not spending enough time with his first set of children. One followed in Puck’s footsteps and is now a chef, but he said he had to eat at Spago several times a week just to get in some semblance of a “family dinner.” “I started working at Spago as a 13-year-old peeling potatoes,” Byron Lazaroff-Puck says in the film. “Seeing him there as the leader was just amazing for me to watch as a kid.”
With his fun-loving and larger-than-life personality, Puck is still entertaining. So, we had to ask what it was like for him to appear in a film where he’s just as big a star as the glitterati he still serves in his restaurants — during the go-go days of Spago in West Hollywood, his staff had to read the trades just to know where to seat the industry types.