Wolfgang Puck

Does Wolfgang Puck ever sleep? What with his Food Network show, appearances on "Good Morning America," a new line of wood-fired pizzas and a posse of restaurants from Los Angeles to Chicago and back, it's a wonder that the ebullient Austrian-born chef ever gets in forty winks. A friend once saw him at Spago on a Saturday night, then flew up to San Francisco and decided to have breakfast at Postrio, Puck's San Francisco restaurant. He arrived a few minutes too early. Guess who opened the door?

Surrounded by family photos in her Hawthorne apartment, Martha Pinzon waits for her boss to call. Despite the lingering sadness, she's ready to get to work at the airport. For $7.92 an hour, she'll arrange a ride to LAX, wait in line with passengers to pass security and spend eight hours in the kitchen of Wolfgang Puck's, making salads, soup, sandwiches and pizza. "I like to work with all my friends," Pinzon says. The call doesn't come on this day. But that's OK.

Wolfgang Puck is just back from Italy with an 827-gram white truffle (that weighs in at about 1.82 pounds), for which he paid a record $19,000 at the annual truffle festival in the town of Alba. The truffle is about the size of a small cantaloupe, but it's knobbly, like a petrified brain. "If I had a brain that large, I would never have bought the truffle," laughs Puck. "But every couple of years I have to have a folly--a little craziness, and this is for a good cause."

Mark Carter makes an interesting attempt to reinstall French cuisine as the only candidate for "fine dining" and to blame Wolfgang Puck for its migration from L.A. to San Francisco ('The Trouble With Spago," April 8). It may rather be time to realize that, as good as the French are, their cuisine no longer reigns supreme, to paraphrase the host of the "Iron Chef" TV program. Classic French cuisine depends on meat stocks, wine and fat (mainly dairy fat such as cream and butter) to enhance flavor, a strategy partially employed by American fast food.

Spago. Can you hold? Spago. Can you hold? Spago. Can you hold? Hello. A table for 8 o'clock? I'm sorry, we're booked. Hello. Sorry, we're full. Hello. Sorry, we're full. Spago. Can you hold? * Groucho Marx once said he didn't want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.

The reality of this reality show is that it takes more than a half-hour to get a duck cooked to perfection, chat a little about the best red wines to accompany it, and serve it all up to some happy-to-oblige taste testers. So, there were actually six ducks in various stages of preparedness, ready for their close-ups, during a taping of Wolfgang Puck's new self-titled series on the Food Network. And, as for the wine, well, color was examined, aroma was sniffed, glasses were drained.

Spago Hollywood, the restaurant of the stars where entertainment careers soared and crashed over California fare prepared by chef Wolfgang Puck, will close its doors March 31, eclipsed by the newer Spago Beverly Hills and the loss of its celebrity clientele. The success of Spago made Puck, who opened the 180-seat restaurant in 1982 on the Sunset Strip, a star in his own right.

As the Democrats book their parties at restaurants from downtown to the ocean, and the kitchen at Spago starts peeling potatoes for 1,000--all by hand--the question is: Will there be any potatoes for the rest of us? More important, will there be any decent tables left for Angelenos? Not at Spago in Beverly Hills, the archetypal L.A. restaurant owned by Wolfgang Puck. It's been bought out for convention parties four nights in a row.

Wolfgang Puck Food Co. will operate a 250-seat seafood restaurant with a 100-seat cocktail lounge inside California Adventure, the Walt Disney Co. amusement park that opens next year in Anaheim. Disney said Tuesday that the restaurant, Avalon Cove, will resemble a sand castle from the outside and will have an undersea motif inside. Puck Food's president, Frank Guidara, told The Times a year ago that Puck would run a restaurant inside the park, but no details were disclosed at that time.