How Superstar Chef Wolfgang Puck Got Back Into the Restaurant Game

How do you know when you’ve made it as a chef? When you stroll through the farmers market noshing without getting side-eye from a fruit monger? When you charge containers of berries and tell the produce guy that someone will pick them up later? When you try to pay for $5 of dates with a $100 bill?

When you’re Wolfgang Puck, and you oversee a $400 million gustatory empire, you just know. The original celebrity chef’s 40-plus-year career is a study in high-low cooking: He slings pizza at Spago and in the frozen-food sections of supermarkets; he feeds Academy Awards attendees and airport travelers; and he paved the way for similarly inclined chefs such as David Chang and Marcus Samuelsson. In other words, Puck can usually delegate a produce run. But at 7:30 on a recent Wednesday morning, he arrives at the Santa Monica Farmers Market eager to find ingredients that would shine at the Rogue Experience, the 10-seat restaurant he was opening in Los Angeles’s West Hollywood neighborhood that night.