Wolfgang Puck opens a Spago at Maui resort
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
WAILEA, Maui — Wolfgang Puck, who opened the most recent version of his Spago restaurant family at the Four Seasons Wailea yesterday, never set foot on the property until Thursday.
But, he said, he had no apprehension about opening a restaurant at the 10-year-old resort because he knew who his customers would be: The same people who are his customers elsewhere — in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, Malibu and Palo Alto (and Chicago and New York and Tokyo). The movie crowd.
Four Seasons general manager Radha Arora says 60 percent of the hotel's clientele are from the West Coast, and half of those are Hollywood types. The percentage is higher at Christmas, when 90 percent of the hotel is taken up with stars and studio execs who return every year, reserving their rooms for the following year as they check out. "Of course, we don't want to discuss names," he said, smiling.
Puck could give you names. Two years ago, he planned to spend Christmas at the Four Seasons Wailea because he'd heard so much about it from his customers, who tend to consider Puck their personal chef and Spago and his other restaurants as their second kitchens.
Then he realized he'd heard too much about Wailea.
"I must have talked to 20 customers that were coming here for Christmas," said Puck, who retains an accent and syntax rooted in his native Austria. "I thought, 'What is this? Is it going to be like a giant cocktail party at my restaurant? Are they going to complain to me about the food?' So I cancel the reservation and go to Big Island, where I can get away. Who would have known we would end up opening a restaurant here?"
Puck tells this story in a crack-of-dawn interview in the new Spago on Friday morning. He is casually dressed in an aloha shirt and black jeans, sipping a cappuccino and munching tiny almond confections brought to him by pastry chef Douglas Paul ("They know I am Austrian, I like sweets too much," he says). He is musing on the gray skies that have followed a Thursday storm on Maui, and wondering whether he will be able to shoot the planned segments of his TV Food Network show. (They go ahead, despite the stormy, gray weather.)
He breaks off to greet a guest who jokes about a mutual friend who couldn't make it to the Spago party: "Will you send a jet for him?" the man asks.
"I send yours," Puck shoots back, before returning, mid-sentence, to the interview.
It is a typical day of multi-tasking for a man who travels 200 days a year: interviews, consultations in the kitchen, a TV shoot, phone chats with his office back in California and a pre-opening VIP party in the newly remodeled 180-seat restaurant.
It is is a beautiful, bright and very contemporary room, multi-windowed and angled so as to make a backdrop of the 'Alalakeiki Channel and the islands of Kaho'olawe and Moloka'i. Designer Jennifer Johanson (who did Postrio and Spago in Las Vegas) has used wall-size murals of sea anemone life in muted gold and orange tones to acknowledge the island location.
A ceiling the color of a Japanese laqueur bowl and light fixtures of celadon green hint at the Asian fusion menu designed by Puck and chef Jason Siebert.
"I think I am very happy," Puck said. "I did not want to make like a false Hawaiian impression, a fake Disneyland-style Polynesia." His direction to Johanson was based in part on a trip he made to the Ritz-Carlton Mauna Lani (now The Orchid at Mauna Lani) 10 years ago, where the fine dining restaurant was, as he said, "buried underground."
"Why would you do that? You come to Hawai'i, you want to feel the air and see the water," he said, noting that Seasons, the former incarnation of the room, was a very formal sort of place that at one time even required a coat and tie. "This is silly," he said.
Four Seasons customers thought so, and told management, who decided to turn the room over to an independent contractor, and spent a year searching for the right name.
Spago was the obvious choice, said Arora: "They already knew our customers and they were used to catering to their every need, which is what this customer expects." (The Four Seasons Wailea is the kind of place where there's a high-speed Internet connection next to the bed, a Sony PlayStation in every room to keep the kids amused and a cordless phone so you can wander out onto the deck while you make a movie deal.)
Puck and Seibert designed a menu based on his impression of the Islands as a place that's half-way to Asia and not what he called "tropical," which to him means Latin-influenced Caribbean food. The menu employs local ingredients, including such distinctly Hawaiian foods as taro, Moloka'i sweet potato, moi and poke, but the flavor skews distinctly Asian. Just running an eye down the menu, the words pop out — sesame, miso, wasabi, Chinese mustard, daikon, ponzu, hijiki, ama ebi, potstickers, Thai basil, keffir lime.
"The menu for all our restaurants has to have a certain sense of place. But for us to come here and say we're going to make a better lu'au would be silly," Puck said. This menu, he said, is "local ingredients with Spago technique" and is touched by all the strands of his life: his upbringing in Austria near the border with Italy, his early years in kitchens in Paris and Provence and later Ma Maison in California before he opened the first, groundbreaking Spago in West Hollywood in 1982.
Today Puck and his wife, designer Barbara Lazaroff, oversee a culinary empire "top to bottom" he says. Fully integrated, in business-speak.
They have the high-end Spago/Chinois/Postrio nucleus. And they have the Wolfgang Puck Cafes (so, he explains, someone like Goldie Hawn can get the gourmet food she's used to without having to change out of her sweats) And they have airport pizza shops (the same wood ovens, the same quality of ingredients, but no truffles or foie gras, he says).
They have a catering company, which, among other things, operates the banquet room at the Hollywood and Highland center, new home of the Oscars. Last week alone, Puck and Lazaroff catered the press/VIP openings for "Ali" (Monday), "Majestic" (Tuesday) and "Vanilla Sky" (Wednesday).
They have the TV Food Network show and a line of cookware sold on the Home Shopping Network. And they have a foundation for charitable work , which recently purchased a $19,000 white truffle (1.82 pounds) to benefit the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund for families of World Trade Center victims who worked in the food industry.
He has become, he admits, "a brand." But he is a brand that still enjoys every day in or out of the kitchen, each new challenge and new product. "Yes," he says, "I think I am very happy."
