Photo by Amanda Marsalis.

Chef Wolfgang Puck is probably one of the most well known chefs in America, and became one of the first “celebrity chefs” in the U.S. with his opening of Spago. Born in Austria, Puck trained in France before coming to the U.S., making a stop in Indianapolis before settling in Los Angeles. Along with running catering operations (he is the official caterer of the Academy Awards Governor’s Ball), writing cookbooks, hawking his own line of wares on QVC, playing himself and voicing characters in movies (he’ll be playing Chef Smurf in The Smurf Movie), Puck owns over 15 restaurants, including The Source, located in the Newseum.

Between wine dinners, we were able to catch up with the charming chef to ask him about his path to becoming a chef and what inspires him.

I was doing some research for this interview when I found a project for children that you participated in, Best Story Ever, where you talk about baking a cake for your grandmother that came out rock hard and was saved by being soaked in rum. Can you tell me more about it?

My sister and me ate it, and we fell asleep. So it ended up really good for [my grandmother] because she didn’t have to worry about us for the whole afternoon. I was like 14 or 15. I was a little guy. I was so small that when I was in the kitchen the stove used to come up to here [points to the area below his sternum]. Most guys normally get dirty around here [points to his waist], but I would get dirty up here [points back to the bottom of his sternum].

I read in The United States of Arugula that you had a very challenging time when you were starting out as an apprentice. Were you interested in cooking prior to that?

I was interested in pastries when I was really young because I love sweets. But I couldn’t find a job as an apprentice at a pastry shop, so I went in to a restaurant in a hotel and started an apprenticeship there. Really the first thing I wanted to do was be an architect when I was 13 or so. Because when I saw these big buildings in America like the Empire State Building, I wanted to build one like that in my town. I asked someone who builds them, and they told me it’s an architect.

Well, now you can kind of do that with your restaurants.

And I became friends with a lot of architects like Richard Meier, Frank Gehry… so I met a lot of the big time architects.