The Essence of True Hospitality

Star chef – and ‘chef of the stars’ – Wolfgang Puck opened his Hungarian Spago restaurant on the ground floor and terrace of Matild Palace in Budapest four years ago. The anniversary was celebrated with a very special Culinary Retrospective event, where the star chef himself cooked, having brought his team from LA. With him was in the Hungarian capital his son, Byron who is very much in the gastronomic footsteps of his father, discussing their vast experience in the world of gastronomy.

Looking back over the four-year existence of his Spago restaurant here, Wolfgang Puck tells Diplomacy&Trade that it feels like making wine. “You make a new wine, oh, it's exciting, it's very good, but when the wine matures, it gets better. I think, it's a little bit the same with the restaurants. When we get the maturity of the restaurant, it is an important step because we think at the beginning it's like a love story. You meet somebody, you're infatuated, everything is new. But it actually gets better over time. And I think Spago in Budapest has gotten better. The service has gotten better. I think each one in the kitchen has become a better leader. The place has a great team and everything. So, I think I'm very happy to see the progress how we have.

Simply the best
Of course, Spago Budapest is just one of several Spago restaurants worldwide, offering ‘California cuisine’ outside California as well. As for the ‘Wolfgang Puck philosophy’ behind the culinary offerings (and the success) at these restaurants, the chef says it is really simple. “I always tell people only the best is good enough. So, we buy the best ingredients and hopefully, we hire the best people to do the job and hopefully, we make our employees happy and they make the guests happy because we cannot do everything ourselves. So, we have a lot of people working with us – quite a few of them for many, many years. And that's what makes really the difference. It's not the building, it's not just the facility, it's really about the people.”

Not living for awards
Wolfgang Puck is known as a celebrity chef welcoming celebrities at events like the Academy Awards ceremony, for instance, and is chef to America’s most famous celebrities. His empire now encompasses a couple of dozen fine-dining restaurants (many of them in luxury hotels) worldwide and he became only the second chef in history to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The latest big recognition is the ‘Grand Decoration of Honor in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria’ awarded to him by the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Christian Stocker. As to what responsibilities this celebrity status carries, he notes that “it's nice in a way to get recognized or get some awards or whatever but I don't live for that. Am I going to think about it for a long time after? Probably not because I don't live in the past. I like to live in the present time really and for the future. So, to me, it's great to get recognition, but at the end of the day, what's today and tomorrow are more important.”

No other life but gastronomy
Obviously, Byron Puck didn't really have to go far to experience the world of gastronomy. Highlighting what made him to choose this profession in the footsteps of his father, he says that he started very young “as my dad put me to work at Spago in Beverly Hills when I was about 12 years old, really just to learn about work ethic more than anything. He never pushed me into the industry by any means. Actually, originally, I wanted to be an artist. My parents used to take me to museums as a kid and I was really enamored with painters. However, I very quickly learned that I'm terrible at painting. At the same time, when I started working in the kitchen, I started feeling the energy of the kitchen. I think a couple of the chefs watching me wash dishes all day long felt a little bad and they pulled me off the line and I started learning some of the cuisine skills of my father. The first one I ever learned was the beet Napoleon salad. When making the dish, going through the techniques and the processes of cooking it and then finally plating it, it looked like a work of art in itself. I knew then and there, even at a young age, that I have a really cool opportunity in what my dad does to also take an artistic approach to this field. I didn't know right at 12 this is what I want to do for the rest of my life but I got to like it as I started working in more and more kitchens like that of Grant Achatz in the Alinea in Chicago or that of the Roca brothers in Spain or Heinz-Reitbauer’s Steirereck in Vienna. My love just kept growing and growing to the point where I felt like, this is so much fun. I understand exactly why my father loves doing this because it's about constantly innovating and being around great people and being in service of others makes yourself feel good. And so all of those things combined, I knew there was really no other life for me.”

The essence of true hospitality
When discussing culinary matters with his father, which is natural, one the things they definitely agree on is the importance of the guest experience. Byron Puck summarizes that with a simple example: “treating people the way that they would want to be treated by their mother in their living room. There is no better meal you can have than when you come home after a long day of school or a long day of work or whatever it might be, and your mother is taking care of you and feeds you an amazing meal, right? It not only feeds you, but it warms your heart and it warms your soul. It feels like that, to me, has always been the essence of true hospitality. And if we can give you even just a modicum of that feeling when you come into our restaurants, again, we make you feel something. It's not just about the food, it's not just about the beverage or the service, it's about the interaction from person to person. I think that's the secret because we've been so lucky to be around for 43 years. People come back and remember you or remember an experience in a restaurant when they felt something.”

Wolfgang Puck stresses that to him, longevity is really what he is the most proud of “because our industry has so much turnover. Restaurants come and go all the time, especially in the US and big cities. You know, you have ten restaurants opening every month and then you have that many closing. So, the big achievement is to be still there. I look at so many of my friends at restaurants in LA in successful ventures and then, they're all gone. It's such an interesting thing and for us to do still so well as we do, it's really a thing I'm very proud of. But that didn't come by itself, obviously. You need to have management with passion, leadership, which transmits the passion to the people who work there. As Byron pointed out, we are in the hospitality business, a business where we want people to feel good. We want to give people an experience. Well, some people don't remember what they have eaten, they just say, ‘we had such an amazing time there’. And I think that's really for me the most important thing. It's like having great service where you anticipate what the customer wants before the customer actually says a word or knows exactly what they want. And I think it's obvious that after so many years, we have so many guests who still come to the restaurant, they are 85 years old, they still celebrate their birthday there and they started when they were maybe 35, you know. So, I think having such a customer base is like having a big family.”