A master of fusion and elevated comfort food, Wolfgang Puck has always been interested in how different cultures eat. That curiosity has helped turn the ebullient Austrian-American into a global epicurean brand, making him more of a celebrity than chef these days.

The Wiener schnitzel arrives and it covers most of the plate. “That’s nothing,” chuckles Wolfgang Puck in response to exclamations that the breaded cutlet is massive. “If you could still see the plate, my father would have sent it back,” he says. Austrian-born Puck has reproduced Wiener schnitzel, a cherished childhood food his mother often made at home, at his fine dining restaurants worldwide. One of the newest is Spago, which opened at Marina Bay Sands last October.

“Well, here we use veal. At home, we used pork. We were very poor and ate meat only once a week,” he says. Today, 66-year-old Puck, the head honcho of the US’ first epicurean empire, can afford to eat top-of-the-line A5 Kobe beef every day if he so chooses. His name is everywhere in the US, from TV shows and cookbooks to frozen pizzas and high-end kitchenware. He has more than 90 eateries, from upscale Michelin-starred restaurants to fast-casual outlets at airports. And for 22 years running, he has been cooking for the banquet after the Academy Awards, hands down the biggest shindig of the year in Los Angeles.

Puck is in Singapore, just a week after the Oscars. It is a high point in his calendar, given the Instagram-worthy moments and global exposure. This year, he had more than 300 chefs whipping up bites for 1,600 of Hollywood’s movers and shakers. The spread included his signature concoctions such as pizza with smoked salmon and caviar, chicken pot pie with black truffles and a sinful chocolate buffet.

Pizza? Chocolate? Surely Hollywood types notorious for their strict diets and food no-nos would opt to refuel on less calorie-laden grub such as raw food and kale chips? Puck laughs. “They are all so hungry by the end [of the show]. There are almost no vegetarians or vegans by that time,” he tells Options.

This year, aside from must-haves such as oysters and Wagyu short ribs, Puck and his team treated the A-list crowd to new flavours such as emerald rice from China and Alaskan king crab, prepared Chinese style with ginger and garlic. The crab was one of the dishes that Leonardo DiCaprio, who bagged the award for best actor, ate. DiCaprio had asked Puck prior to the party if he was going to have some Asianinspired food as he likes Puck’s restaurant in Santa Monica, Chinois, which serves fusion dishes such as scallops with pad Thai and curried oysters.

Another standout moment from this year’s Oscars was when Alejandro Iñárritu took home the Oscar for best director for The Revenant. Whipping out his phone, Puck scrolls through until he finds a photo of the Mexican filmmaker with Byron, Puck’s 21-year-old son. Byron, who has been helping his father in the kitchen, knows Iñárritu through his kids. Iñárritu, Puck recalls, had the baked potato with caviar — two helpings — as well as Puck’s popular chicken pot pie.

Multicultural food
Melding comfort food such as baked potatoes with delicacies such as caviar is Puck’s trademark. Another is his early adoption of Asian ingredients and culinary styles in classical European cooking. How did someone from a small town in Austria, who dropped out of school at 14 to apprentice at a hotel restaurant, create multicultural food and dishes that defy borders?

“I was always interested in different cultures and how they eat,” says Puck. LA, to which he moved at the age of 26, turned out to be the perfect platform. Puck would scour the city’s ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Tokyo and Little Saigon, trying out native fare and produce. He would then experiment with local and seasonal ingredients sourced from farmers’ markets and artisanal makers in California.

“I thought we should incorporate part of these cultures into food. I wanted my cuisine to reflect Los Angeles,” he says. In 1982, when he opened his first restaurant, Spago, in West Hollywood, he roused palates with atypical dishes such as tuna tartare. “Now, it’s so common, but 34 years ago, it was available only in Japanese restaurants,” he recalls.

Spago also generated waves with its arresting takes on everyday eats such as pizzas, which came with toppings such as figs, fresh goat’s cheese and arugula. Puck also injected energy and informality into the dining room by having an open kitchen. He did this so he could keep an eye on the stoves as well as the front of the house. Diners got a kick out of it as it gave them a behind-the-scenes peek at kitchen action. Today, open kitchens are fashionable, even in Michelin-ranked restaurants.

An adventurous palate and a propensity to do things differently, coupled with a personality as effusive as a newly opened bottle of Krug (his champagne of choice), helped propel Puck from his modest roots. As a child, he spent plenty of time in the kitchen with his mum, who worked as a chef. His father was a coal miner. At 14, he traded in his schoolbooks for a culinary life, which saw him learning the ropes of French haute cuisine at coveted restaurants such as Maxim’s in Paris and L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence.

“Curiosity is probably the most important thing. That’s when you learn and move on,” he says. At 24, he packed his bags for the US, where he worked first in Indianapolis and then at Ma Maison in LA, a restaurant popular with the film industry. At 33, he opened Spago, which also gained a following among the Hollywood crowd. And Puck the chef-entrepreneur was born.

He began appearing on TV talk shows and cook shows, he penned cookbooks and in 1987, rolled out a line of frozen and packaged food, which included his well-received pizzas and organic soups. By the 1990s, he had launched a franchise of fast-casual restaurants called Wolfgang Puck Express and set up Wolfgang Puck Catering, which caters for glitzy events such as the Oscars, Grammy awards and presidential galas. He also has acting credits, having appeared in shows such as Crime Scene Investigation and Las Vegas.

Foie gras with kaya
From California, Puck took his fusion fine dining across the States, to the Las Vegas casino strip and other cities in the US. That business, which comes under the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, has been expanding to selected spots across the globe in recent years. Puck began in 2010 with Singapore, when he opened steakhouse CUT at Marina Bay Sands, a sister property of The Palazzo in Las Vegas, where Puck also has a CUT restaurant. Then came London, Dubai and Bahrain. Last year, he opened the first Spago outside the US, in Istanbul. This was followed by Spago in Singapore, the brand’s first in Asia.

The 60-seater restaurant — and its al fresco lounge that can take 160 people — sits at the pinnacle of Marina Bay Sands, offering a panoramic view of the CBD and swimmers taking selfies in the hotel’s infinity pool. The menu replicates Spago classics such as its tuna tartare in sesame cones with chilli aioli, shaved bonito and masago (fish roe).

However, there is also a surprising dollop of local flavour. Seared foie gras is juxtaposed with kaya on a toasted brioche with a slow-cooked egg yolk and a foie gras espresso mousse. Other dishes with a Singapore twist are its red snapper laksa, chicken laksa spring rolls and hamachi tiradito (a Peruvian take on yellowtail sashimi) with a relish that includes jackfruit.

“I always try to incorporate local flavours into the menu, but at the same time, we stay true to our origins,” says Puck. The chef-turned-business magnate, who spends about 100 days on the road each year and was last in Singapore about two years ago, crafts the menu jointly with his Singapore-based chefs Josh Brown and Greg Bess, and the group’s LA-based executive corporate chef Lee Hefter.

Bess, who joined the original Spago in 2004 and was part of the team that opened CUT here, says he was inspired to pair foie gras with the pandan coconut jam after eating kaya toast. “Foie gras is a perfect foil for kaya,” he says, noting that its rich saltiness goes well with the velvety sweetness of kaya. “I love the food here,” adds Bess. Arriving in Singapore six years ago, another home-grown dish that fascinated him was laksa. He tried various versions at different stalls across the island, then experimented, coming up with Spago’s rendition of dry laksa. “It took a lot of practice to get the stock right,” he says.

Catering as big as fine dining
After last year’s burst of openings, the pace this year looks more measured. One highly anticipated opening is CUT in New York, Puck’s first high-end restaurant in the city. In Asia, a 220-seater casual restaurant is slated to open at the new Shanghai Disneyland in June. This will be his second eatery in the Chinese metropolis, after a Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill opened last year. For now, there are no concrete plans for the rest of the region, but on the drawing board is an upscale restaurant in Tokyo (the group currently has eight casual outlets in Japan) or perhaps Seoul. “We don’t expand fast — only if I have the right people,” he says.

Just how does he manage this smorgasbord of restaurants, as well as his catering business, his media appearances, the merchandising and, most recently, his online cooking school? The latter is his reinvention of the cookbook and is targeted at the Internet-obsessed younger generation, which prefers videos and web-based recipes to buying and reading old-style cooking manuals.

“It’s like having three children,” says thrice-married Puck, who has four sons. “If one is not doing well, you spend more time with him.” The catering business, which is as big as the fine-dining arm profit- wise, doesn’t require significant handson input from him, outside of the Oscars. He also has six managing partners at the group level to help him run his various businesses and a long-standing coterie of chefs and managers.

It also helps that he has the energy of someone half his age. A coffee devotee who regularly has four double espressos a day, he gets by with five to six hours of sleep. “I have no problem sleeping [with coffee]; just the opposite,” he says. “But when my brain starts working, it’s very difficult to sleep and I sometimes have to take sleeping pills to sleep.”

Retirement may be nowhere near for the indefatigable chef, who is now wealthier than many of the celebrities he feeds. However, if he decides to kick back, two of his boys appear to have inherited his cooking genes. Second son Byron, who is studying at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, and third son, 10-yearold Oliver, love cooking. “Oliver loves to make eggs in the morning. To get him out of bed, I have to tell him I’m making the eggs. Then, he’ll jump out,” says Puck. That bodes well for fans of Puck’s fusion cuisine and the epicurean legacy he has built up.

Sunita Sue Leng was formerly an associate editor at The Edge Singapore and now lives to eat.

This article appeared in the Options of Issue 723 (April 11) of The Edge Singapore.