How Wolfgang Puck Used Pizza To Change How People Thought About Cooking In America
It's the late 1970s in America. In terms of fast food pizza, chains like Pizza Hut, Shakey's, and Domino's were on the rise — each with hundreds of locations across the country. But, as popular as pizza was becoming, these chains didn't offer much in terms of the variety and creativity you'll see today. For example, a Pizza Hut menu from the '70s shows two types of pizza crusts — "Thin n' Crispy" or "Thick n' Chewy" — with mostly standard topping options, like pepperoni, sausage, and an assortment of vegetables.
Enter Wolfgang Puck. In 1973, the future Michelin star award-winning chef would immigrate to the United States. from Europe. After earning his culinary stripes and wowing diners in West Hollywood, Wolfgang Puck opened his first restaurant, Spago, in 1982. A new movement called "California Cuisine" was developing, and Puck was one of the driving forces behind it. This cuisine was all about sourcing local ingredients and developing creative, fresh new flavor combinations.
That brings us back to pizza. Inspired by San Francisco chef Ed LaDou — the developer of California Pizza Kitchen's first menu — and his creative takes on pizza, Puck set out to create his own form of nouveau pizza pies. From there, the idea of "gourmet pizza" was born, and Wolfgang Puck's star began to quickly rise. Within a decade, pizza took on forms well beyond a simple pepperoni and sausage pie. Perhaps Wolfgang Puck's most famous creation is the smoked salmon pizza — a far cry from Pizza Hut's $4.80 pepperoni pie at the time. It included a base of dill-infused crème fraîche that was topped with cured in-house smoked salmon, caviar, and caramelized shallots. Puck also offered pizzas topped with duck sausage, shrimp, and smoked lamb and eggplant.
From smoked salmon pizza to a new way to think about food
One of Wolfgang Puck's core beliefs is that the way you cook should express the area in which you live and the ingredients that surround you, as he told UPROXX when interviewed about the 2021 documentary "Wolfgang." When Spago opened, Puck said he didn't have access to fresh beef, so he didn't put steak on the menu. Instead, he chose lamb from a nearby farm and fish from a local fish market. Because Los Angeles is so multicultural, Puck also drew inspiration from all the other cuisines represented nearby. It was a form of authentic, honest cooking that Puck even introduced into the restaurant interior itself, as he was a pioneer of the open kitchen, where diners can see the chefs preparing their food.
By expanding the idea of what pizza could be, Puck expanded the idea of what all food could be, with the California cuisine movement serving as a forerunner to ideas like farm-to-table dining. He wasn't the first to drum up the idea of gourmet pizza, but he certainly took it to another level, having created a sensation with the 250 pizza varieties he served his A-list Hollywood clientele at Spago. While the traditional Italian-influenced pizza still dominates the market, and has itself been elevated (see chef Anthony Mangieri's Una Pizza Napoletana, the No. 1 ranked pizza in the world), pizzerias are continuing to try different ideas and combinations of ingredients with their pies. This kind of creativity has trickled over into other forms of cuisine, with menus around the world as evidence. It's impossible to deny that Wolfgang Puck was one of the driving forces behind pushing these new ideas into the mainstream.