Chefs are underrated entrepreneurs. To become a successful chef is to launch an offensive against unappealing odds. There’s the question of securing one of the few spots in a reputable restaurant. To start a restaurant, chefs have to find the funding and capital to fund the initiative. And even if they manage to stand up their own restaurant, they are then faced with the abysmal unit economics of the restaurant business.
Any reasoned human-being would advise against such a venture. But many of today’s most celebrated chefs simply refused to do so. Wolfgang Puck is one of those chefs. And I wanted to understand: what kind of mindset does it take to dive into such uncertainty?
Puck, an Austrian-born chef, has launched over 20 restaurants worldwide, has a number of books and television appearances in his 50-year career. But the celebrity chef started his life far, far away from any celebrity, in a small town called Sankt Veit an der Glan, a village so small, Puck refused to even call it a village. “It wasn’t even a village, it was like two farmers and five houses.”
At the age of 14, Puck’s mother began looking around for a job for her son and stumbled on a job as a cook for a hotel. Puck welcomed the idea. He didn’t get along with his stepfather and sought this opportunity to get out of the house. His stepfather, a disparaging character, believed Puck wouldn’t be able to cut it at work and would be back at home in a few weeks. He left home with carrying the weight of his stepfather’s words.
As an apprentice at the hotel, Puck was tasked with doing most of the menial grunt work. One Sunday, a few weeks into his apprenticeship, the hotel restaurant realized they were out of potatoes. There were none left in stock. While there were the likes of 20 apprentices, Puck was singled out as the scapegoat. The chef was furious and fired Puck on the spot. Puck wasn’t sure what to do. He was devastated that his stepfather might be right. Maybe he wouldn’t amount to anything.
That night, Puck reflected on what he should do. After mulling it over for an hour, in a moment of clarity, he decided he wouldn’t accept the chef’s decision. He would go back the next day. So the next day he arrived at the restaurant and by a stroke of luck ran into another worker. The worker hid Puck in the vegetable cellar to help peel the vegetables.
Three weeks later, the chef found Puck in the den. The chef, outraged that Puck had defied his orders, began yelling in a fury. It was the hotel manager who recognized Puck's persistence and seized the opportunity. He took Puck and sent him to go cook at a sister hotel. The new environment proved Puck was no failure. He excelled in his new environment, soon becoming one of the top students in his apprenticeship. His studies eventually led him to cook in France at L'Oustau de Baumanière and the highly-reputed restaurant, Maxim’s. But the end goal had always been America.
At 25, Puck set foot in California. It was immediately clear to him that he clashed with the micromanagement style he encountered at the restaurant where he worked. One particular evening, the manager tried to force a menu onto Puck without his input. Puck quit on the spot. At the time, his only plan was to go work for two days a week at a small, no-name French restaurant, Ma Maison. It was unknown and didn’t have many customers. But Puck took to it and thrived in his new environment where he had the creative leeway to cook. It wasn't long before business at Ma Maison began picking up, soon becoming a sought-after reservation. His success at Ma Maison convinced him to start his own restaurant. That venture is now known as the famous Spago.
Puck continued to defy the regular rules of engagement and expectations even after he was acquiring prominence in the cooking world. When he announced he was starting his own restaurant, everyone expected him to build a French restaurant resembling Ma Maison. Instead, Spago had very casual, simple food. “It was not a fancy restaurant at all, but the quality of the ingredients was first class." Puck wanted to create a place where “the food was the star.”
Wolfgang Puck is not your average chef. In his Masterclass, he recounts his unusual story outlines the seven principles that he believed were instrumental in his success and perseverance over the years.
1. Take Risks
“If you want to be successful without taking any risk, it might be very difficult. I took the risk.”
Puck describes the time he opened a restaurant in Las Vegas. “In the first few weeks I thought it was the biggest mistake I ever made. We opened in the beginning of December where every show was closed...The restaurant was empty. I had nine waiters stationed in the restaurant…. So for each waiter, we had one table….I [thought] maybe this time I went too far. There’s no customer who wants to come to our restaurant in Vegas. They have all the big buffets. They’re all you can eat. I remember I used to go home at night….I used to sit on the couch with a bottle of red wine, drunk the whole bottle, and fell asleep in front of the television. [I would wake] up at 6 in the morning all crooked and saying, Oh my God, now I have to go back there again. Three weeks later was New Year’s. It got busy. And now it’s been busy ever since. For twenty years, the restaurant [has been] packed.”
2. Value Creativity
“If you were to ask me today, who do I want? A chef who’s really creative or a chef who just executes? Obviously, to me creativity is the most important thing. And I actually talked to Joe Rohde the other day who used to run the Disney studio. And I said how do you run your studio? What do you have to do for it to be successful? It’s about having creative people in charge.”
3. Always Evolve And Innovate
“It’s not because we’re successful today that we’re going to be successful tomorrow….The restaurants that don’t change, go to the cemetery.”
4. Be Open To Opportunity
Inspired by a customer who would buy the Spago pizzas and freeze them, Puck decided to start a frozen pizza line. “It was hard at the beginning….[But] it was an interesting way of starting a new business.”
5. Be Willing To Succeed Or Fail
“I just love what I do. If you have passion for what you do, if you have passion for learning new things, it’s always so interesting. I find something new and sometimes [you will be] very successful and then sometimes not. I opened in 1990 a big brewery called Eureka. It was a big brewery with a small restaurant. Twenty-five percent of the place was the restaurant. Seventy-five percent of the place was the brewery. We were supposed to make a million cases of beer a year. The restaurant did really well at that time. We grossed $5 million a year. Made $500,000 in profit. But the brewery lost over a million. And then the second year was still the same. Instead of selling a million cases of beer, we sold 30,000. Finally, I had to close the restaurant….It was a really tough decision.
“If you try new things, sometimes they are not successful. Once I opened Eureka and then closed it, I said I stay in the restaurant business. I am not in the beer business, I don’t know it that well. So let’s not do too many different things.”
6. Reinvent Yourself
“We always do something to keep the fire burning….I thought after 15 years at the old Spago it was time to change.” Puck decided to redecorate the restaurant to change the ambiance. And after thirty-four years operations, its last year was the most successful.
7. Balance What Counts
“Success in life doesn’t just mean success in business. You have to have balance. And it took me a while to do that. It wasn’t easy. If you do it too much, you overdo it….At the end of the day, [what] I would like on my tombstone is not ‘he made a good smoked salmon pizza.’ What I would like on it is, ‘he was a great father.’”
At 68, Wolfgang Puck shows no loss of enthusiasm for what he does and no sign of slowing down. Perhaps his most defining quality is his ability to buck conventional wisdom. “I’m always interested in doing things a little differently,” as he stays true to his word and continues to reinvent the dining experience. “There’s something in me that likes to take this risk, who wants to do something different, something I never did before.”
Conventional wisdom suggests that attempting to make a go of a career in an industry as economically treacherous as the restaurant business is financial suicide. But the very people who promote this idea are usually the same people who have never tried it themselves. The economically-minded never let passion propel them and the passionate never let economics stop them.
The economic landscape of so many creative industries deters talented, young people today from entering, especially as the salaries pale in comparison to finance or other high-paying corporate jobs. You can't ignore passion, though. It gnaws at you if you try to ignore it. It’s a compulsion more than a choice. And the people with the most passion exercise their creativity in finding a financial structure to support it. We should be thankful for that.
Because innovation doesn’t come from people who are driven by money; it comes from people with gusto. Puck is no exception to this rule. “It’s not always about the money. I don’t look at the business [as] first, ‘How much money are you going to make?’ Never. I always look at the business [as], ‘How can I make things better? How can I evolve? How can I stay excited?’”
Follow Stephanie Denning on Twitter: @stephdenning
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