176 N Canon Dr
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Tel. (310) 385-0880
Website: www.wolfgangpuck.com
Opening Hours:
Lunch: 11:30am – 2:15pm, Monday – Friday
Noon – 2:30pm, Saturday
Dinner: 5:30pm – 10pm, Sunday – Thursday
5:30pm – 11pm, Friday & Saturday
Credit Cards: All Major
Prices: Expensive
I began to dine at Spago from its very beginning when it was located on the “Sunset Strip” and I go even farther back with Wolfgang Puck, to the days when he was the chef at Patrick Terrail’s very successful Ma Maison Restaurant on Melrose Blvd. Patrick was having a hard time when he first opened to find a good chef. I happened to be there one evening when he had a big problem because he had no chef and to make it worse a full house, and among the guests, two of Los Angeles’ top restaurant critics and Patrick had no other choice then to cook himself. His problems in that department ended when he found Wolfgang Puck.
While Wolfgang was working at Ma Maison he met former A&M Records receptionist, Barbara Lazaroff whom he married. The two were a good team, Wolf as an excellent chef with proper French training and Barbara a born promoter with a keen sense of business acumen.
They eventually put together a formula that was startling at the time, an incongruous mix that fell somewhere between Alice Waters Chez Panisse and Prego in San Francisco. It became an instant success with the film business power brokers. Irving “Swifty” Lazar was famous for throwing his post Academy Awards parties that began at Romanoffs and moved on to the Bistro Gardens and finally Spago until his death in 1993.
A few years ago they moved Spago from the premises on Sunset to the former Bistro Gardens location on Canon Drive; it necessitated closing down the entire street to deliver a huge olive tree for the patio, which replaced the row of poplar trees that previously lined the terrace.
Wolf told me it takes him anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes to complete the rounds of all the tables in the dining room at Spago, Beverly Hills, chatting with this table and joking and laughing with another.
The cooking still remains good and Wolfgang is dedicated to Spago, so much so, that when he returned from his wedding and honeymoon in Capri to Gelila Assefa, he still turned up at Spago to greet the Saturday night crowd, even though he must have been exhausted.
