There are two at O’Hare airport, one inside the Museum of Contemporary Art, and now one anchoring downtown Evanston’s new 18-theater movie complex. They aren’t gift shops or snack shops; they’re Wolfgang Puck cafes–downscaled versions of the chefs famous Asian-fusion restaurant Spago. And in the last few years, Chicago seems to have become a target market for them.
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Puck first expanded his operation beyond fine dining back in 1993. At the time he owned and operated-five upscale restaurants Postrio, Granita, Chinois, and Spago in southern California and a second Spago in Las Vegas. He wanted to improve on the usual standard of mall food, and his solution was Wolfgang Puck’s Cafe in LA’s Universal City, which features 14 of the most popular and least expensive dishes from Spago, with a particular focus on his signature woodoven pizzas. (Not long after, he launched a frozen pizza line.) Robin Stotter, Puck’s current regional chef for restaurants outside California and one of the original chefs at Spago in Las Vegas, recalls Puck’s motivation: “He wanted more people than the Hollywood -crowd to eat his food,” says Stotter. “I was concerned that we were selling out by. opening the cafe,” but Puck convinced him that “we’re really just making our fare more accessible.”
The Puck strategy for opening multiple restaurants is as corporate as it gets. Management-level employees are sent to Puck, University= actually the cafe in Orange County, which also serves as a training center-for a twoweek session. Trainers also travel to new locations to coordinate hiring and training of employees. Two weeks before the Evanston cafe opened, close to 50 trainers flew in from Orlando, Denver, and Los Angeles. They stayed for anywhere from two weeks to a month, phasing out as-the new employees showed their aptitude. “We’re hesitant to open a new restaurant until we’ve got a secure support structure in place,” says Stotter, who oversees each new restaurant opening.
–LAURA LEVY SHATKIN
