Raising a Wolf

When we go to a restaurant, we get the dish fully formed. If it’s a fancy, Michelinrated spot, the edible presentation might look like something that could hang in the Louvre. We eat it without any thought of how the ingredients were sourced, mixed together and put under heat to create the finished masterpiece. The same could be said for this week’s guest on “Renaissance Man.” Superstar chef Wolfgang Puck, who is best known for his Beverly Hills bistro, Spago, who had very humble, very harsh, sometimes heartbreaking beginnings in a small Austrian town.

“I didn’t know we were poor in the countryside,” Wolfgang told me. “We had no electricity, no plumbing in the house. You had to walk like at least 100 feet to the toilet. So they got a little shack outside. That was our toilet and in winter, we had 4 feet of snow. So it was not a fun thing to go out at night in the darkness.”

His mother was a chef. His stepfather, however, was physically and emotionally abusive. At 14, his mother landed him an apprenticeship 50 miles away in a hotel, so he was able to escape. Unfortunately the chef in charge was just like his stepfather: irrational and abusive. When they ran out of potatoes, he tossed out young Wolfgang and told him not to come back. Distraught, he decided to jump into the river, but thankfully had a change of heart — and a plan. Wolfgang pulled a brilliant move out of the George Costanza playbook. Even though he’d been fired, he went back like nothing had happened. Not that it went well. The chef still wanted him to leave, but Wolfgang, who was a child far from his home wasn’t budging. Eventually, the owner of the restaurant realized the situation and put him to work in a smaller hotel with a different chef. His tough early days molded his resolve.