It almost seems inevitable that Wolfgang Puck and David Gelb made a film together. Puck, the overcooker from Austria, who once taught Americans how to eat when one of the first to discover the open kitchen as a stage and thus became the role model of the modern celebrity chef. And yellow, the US director and producer who invented the modern food documentary with his Netflix series “Chef’s Table” and inspired a global audience for the vita of chefs. In food pairing, too, one speaks of “dream partners” when two ingredients go so well together.
The great success of “Chef’s Table” was also due to the escapist appetites of the audience, the fun of the quality camera work and the opulent images that raised food porn to a completely new level six years ago. Much more important, however, was that David Gelb understood better than many others: What people are most interested in about food is: people. Chefs all over the world were scrambling to be portrayed by the Master of Storytelling. And highly decorated star chefs, who were not considered by Gelb, had to learn: Cooking fantastic is of little value in front of the camera unless you have a good story to tell. Because “Cooking is a show, everything is theater, and he’s the star,” as Wolfgang Puck’s first wife Barbara Lazaroff says about her husband in the film.
As an important architect of his career, Lazaroff recognized earlier than Puck himself that he had what it takes to become a brand. The title of the documentary shows how right she was: “Wolfgang” tells the life of a cook who does not have a surname because every child in the USA knows him. The “wolf”, as people call him, owns more than 70 restaurants, its own food line and a frozen pizza empire. He’s a regular on TV shows and the Simpsons, and he does the catering at the Oscars.
Today Puck is 72 and “Wolfgang” is a worthy look back at a remarkable career. David Gelb talks about her usual good interview partners – among them many family members of Puck or Ruth Reichl, the former chief critic of the New York Times – and thus comes close to its protagonist. The director likes to portray biographies by subordinating them to a single life theme, which also becomes a narrative driving force.
Cooking is an escape and it all goes back to the brutal stepfather
In the case of Wolfgang Puck, born in the small town of Sankt Veit an der Glan in Carinthia, raised in poor conditions, it is an inferiority complex: the lack of appreciation by the brutal stepfather. A miner and alcoholic who sent the nine-year-old into the woods in the dark to look for the club that would later be used to beat him. For Wolfgang Puck, cooking is not only a talent, but also an escape. A kind of oedipal show of strength to refute the stepfather. A lifelong tour of self-realization, hungry for success, which takes the young chef via France to Los Angeles, where he later opens his famous restaurant “Spago”. Soon all of Hollywood will be eating here, whether Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks or Sean Penn.
Live your dream, you can achieve anything if you only want – the documentary is peppered with such platitudes about the American dream. If it still works over long stretches, it is also because Puck is not a boor, but authentic, even personable. And because its story carries. He was the first to teach convenience-obsessed Americans how to cook with fresh produce. His “Californian Cuisine” and his show kitchen in “Spago” have been copied so often that the New York Times of “Manhattan’s Spagonization” wrote.
The red card for frozen goods? Not with Wolfgang Puck.
(Photo: Disney +)
If other chefs offered salmon pizza, it was just salmon pizza and a copy of it. Wolfgang Puck, on the other hand, can boast of having invented the dish spontaneously because “Denver Clan” star Joan Collins always ate the famous smoked salmon on Wednesdays at “Spago” and unfortunately ran out of baguette one evening. Puck’s life is full of such anecdotes.
However, one looks in vain for facets in David Gelbs’ sometimes simple mix of food porn and soul striptease. Cooking as a cathartic process – yellow always provides a reference, and when Puck visits his mother’s grave in Carinthia or seeks reconciliation with his own son and successor, the documentary turns out to be as cheesy as a Spago pizza. The director can afford that, he knows: normal cooks would be shown the red card for frozen goods and gold-glazed chocolate Oscars. But the “wolf” is not only too big for the petty rules of restaurant criticism.
wolfgang, USA 2021 – Director: David Gelb. Book: Brian McGinn. Camera: Will Basanta. Disney +, 78 minutes.