He cooked a pizza without tomato sauce and spread dill cream on it, covering it with smoked salmon and topping it with dollops of caviar.
That’s an anecdote to make you hungry, which happens a lot in “Wolfgang,” a Disney Plus documentary that tells Wolfgang Puck’s story, and does it justice, in a crisp light 78 minutes.
But the other element of the Pizza Factor is that even as Puck was bringing the revolution he called California Cuisine to Los Angeles and, as it turned out, to the rest of America — a revolution in flavor, in farm produce savory with its natural essence, in the fusion of French cooking techniques and a kind of promiscuous American bite — the fact that the restaurant made a divinely hip dish out of pizza became an advertisement for something: that Wolfgang Puck never forget his pleasure center .
We see photographs of it prior to the renovation, and it’s a horror show — like the “before” scenes from an episode of “Restaurant: Impossible.” They decided to have an open kitchen, which was, at that point, a totally out-of-the-box idea.
He explained that he would turn down any attempt to seat him at one of the déclassé tables, because that would have made a statement about his clout in the industry.
And Wolf changes that, in a really big way.” He worked with a perfectionism culled from his training in France, yet part of Puck’s talent was also his gift for cultivation.
He took off as a television personality, becoming a fixture on the morning shows and “Late Night with David Letterman,” and it’s no exaggeration to say that the spirit he brought to it — the zest and wit, the cooking seriousness, the anyone-can-do-it casualness — essentially launched the concept of the Food Channel.
restaurant Ma Maison, with its AstroTurf carpet, he explains with a laugh how terrible the food was there, and how he knew he could redeem it when he found the Chino Ranch in Del Mar, which grew produce comparable to what he’d seen in France.
When he introduces Wiener schnitzel at Spago, and it becomes a huge hit, you feel his story come full circle — and the dish looks so golden crispy luscious you want to order it right there.