From developing Michelin-star restaurants to building culinary empires, Wolfgang Puck has become ubiquitous in American cuisine. When he returned to Georgetown to check up on his restaurant CUT, we sat down with the visionary chef to discuss his work in the DMV.
How are you feeling coming back to CUT this year?
I think they’re doing a good job. It’s always good to go to a place where you don’t have to scream and yell.
How has your relationship with Northern Virginia been over the years, in terms of food?
If you want a local community get interested in you, you have to be interested in a local community. So we do a lot of things like, we bought Virginia wines. And then we have some local rye whiskies, you know, let them even bottle down our name and everything. We get seafood and crab and oysters and all that stuff. To go farther inland, you have all the farmland, where they raise the lamb, you raise cattle–they have great farmers. And I’d say it’s actually in a way more exciting to be here than in California, because you have the seasonal aspect of cooking more so than what we have in California.
Why is working locally important to you?
We always ask, why bring something in from the outside? Right? Why not support the local? Our aim was always saying, OK, if we want the locals to be interested in us, we have to be interested in them. And which means to do business with them.
The pandemic has been hard on the restaurant industry. How have you been adapting?
We are not open for lunch or for breakfast in the restaurant. I cannot make people go do breakfast and then dinner. After two weeks, they will quit. So I say, what is our most important meal? It’s really dinner.
You’re opening up another fast-casual place in the Reagan airport. How did you adapt your haute cuisine approach to everyday cooking?
When I started making frozen pizzas, our customers told us, We are so glad we have that. Because we don’t want to go out to a restaurant every day, maybe one day, we just watch a movie, we can pop the frozen pizza in the oven. And it’s way better than what is out there. So the same thing with the airport. You have all these fast food chains dominate. Burger King and McDonald’s and all that stuff. They dominate every airport, basically. And Starbucks. So if you want to get a good pasta or a good pizza, or some little appetizers, people come to us. It’s better because we use better ingredients and we’re still trying to do this stuff better than the other ones.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. For more stories like this, subscribe to our Food newsletter.