#35. 'Wolfgang'
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The main event is Wolfgang, the Disney+ documentary on celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck: Sonny calls it interesting but frustratingly slight at 75 minutes, too fixated on Puck's abusive-stepfather backstory and not enough on his actual theory of food or how he builds a menu (he singles out the Spago smoked-salmon-and-caviar pizza story as the kind of detail he wanted more of). JVL shares those frustrations but pushes back on the "it's about the food" framing, arguing the documentary is really about how Puck (helped by Mike Ovitz, who brags on camera "I made him") turned himself into a TV-fueled industry the way Schwarzenegger (a fellow Austrian) turned bodybuilding into one, seizing on Puck's own on-screen question — "What am I? Am I a chef? Am I a character?" — as the film's one honest moment. Vic, who once interviewed Puck by phone about steak sauces, scores it a documentary Quadrant A- (docked for skimming the surface) and an A+ for sex/nudity, since the slow-motion sauce-stirring cinematography amounts to outright gastroporn; he then spends a huge stretch of the show riffing expertly on restaurant history — Michel Richard, Daniel Boulud, Eric Ripert, Sirio Maccioni's Le Cirque, Ma Maison owner Patrick Terrail, the dark footnote of Puck protégé John Sweeney's murder of actress Dominique Dunne, plus asides on Jacques Pépin, Giada, Emeril, and his least-favorite celebrity chef Sandra Lee. As usual the first third is pure banter: JVL delivers a Flash tournament update (undefeated in pool play, then a heartbreaking loss to a stacked New York team on a bizarre "first team to score in extra innings wins" rule despite Flash's game-tying homer) plus a La Quinta billing dispute; Sonny closes the loop on last episode's tuxedo-shirt saga after his new Bonobos pique shirt's studs literally popped off, forcing a return to his decade-old wedding shirt; and Vic recounts a chaotic Maine vacation — a mobbed Bar Harbor, Cadillac Mountain, visiting friends the Messengers and Eastlands, a lobstering trip with Perfect Storm captain Linda Greenlaw, and a gout attack he blamed on new Chacos sandals but was really caused by 76 oysters, whole-belly clams, and a lobster roll. The show closes with shout-outs (a priest-anniversary and a cornhole desk-set gift), a debate over bread-basket etiquette, and Vic's story of a young Maine waitress catching him eating everyone's leftovers and calling it "adorable, my dad does that too."
From the show notes
On this week's episode we go deep on celebrity chefs, picking Vic Matus's brain about the nature of dining culture. A Flash update! Maine! So much show; it's a packed episode, folks. Hopefully you enjoy it!
Full transcript
Sonny00:00:00Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck.
Guest00:00:03People knew who owned the restaurant. They really knew who did the cooking. Wolf brought the chef into the limelight.
Vic00:00:09You know what you have to thrive.
Guest00:00:12When Wolf opened Spago, he's serving this very simple food that's incredibly flavorful.
Mike00:00:18Celebrities loved going there. Choice one, two, and three was Spago.
Guest00:00:24Wolf got to know all the movie stars. The age of the celebrity chef had begun. Everything was a huge success. But I ask myself, who am I?
Vic00:00:46Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Sub-Beacon. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a reminder, the Sub-Beacon is now available through Patreon. Go to subbeacon.com. You'll easily find us. Tell your friends. Please subscribe. And don't forget about the Sub-Beacon merchandise store at tpublic.com. Gentlemen, how are we? JVL, Sonny, we're all back together now.
Sonny00:01:10Hey. Yeah, it's been a couple weeks.
Vic00:01:12How was last week's show?
JVL00:01:15Good show. Good show.
Sonny00:01:17Good. KSA. Good. Filled in for you admirably. No quadrants. Did you go see the movie so you can give us a quadrant rating?
Vic00:01:23Oh, thank God I did not. I just cannot write. And I think I might have weaseled. I got out of the last one, but I can't remember if I did or didn't. There's one of these movies that you guys always do, and I keep on finding ways to sneak, and it's like I have yet to see it. I might have seen F8, I think. But it's like you have to actually, you know, see all of them. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like family.
JVL00:01:47You skipped Hobbs and Shaw, I think. Oh. I think you saw Fate of the Furious, but you skipped Hobbs and Shaw.
Vic00:01:54I saw the one where they go back to the Rocks Island. And his Polynesian. Polynesian family is there.
JVL00:01:59That is Fate. Okay.
Sonny00:02:00No, that's Hobbs and Shaw. That's Hobbs and Shaw. Yeah, I saw that.
JVL00:02:04Yeah, who could say?
Vic00:02:05Yeah, maybe you're right. Rampage is the one I never saw. You'd think that I saw it, but I never saw it. Okay. JVL, what's going on?
JVL00:02:14Do you, gentlemen, are you interested in a Flash update? Sure. From his tournament? So I taped last week's show from the La Quinta Inn in Salisbury, Maryland.
Vic00:02:26And that's how you pronounce it? That's correct.
JVL00:02:30After the first night, we switched hotels. I couldn't live like that anymore. And the mold on the ceilings and the, it was, it was very bad.
Vic00:02:40It's a La Quinta. How could that be?
JVL00:02:44This was a bad La Quinta. And upon checkout, the front desk clerk was very apologetic and said, don't worry, we'll only charge you for the first night. And then two days later, I got my email folio from La Quinta, and they charged me. They charged me for four nights. Great. So I got to get on the phone with La Quinta and argue, and I'm sure they'll tell me that, like, like your gym, Sonny, you have to travel to the state where you were staying in order to dispute the charges.
Sonny00:03:09But also, I mean, also, though, you were there, like, you were there during the, like, stay that you had booked, right? Right. I'm sure there's some sort of, like, cancellation policy where you have to cancel 48 hours in advance,
JVL00:03:19otherwise you're just charged for everything. I'm sure, you know what, even if they wind up charging me for everything, it was worth it not to stay in that dump. And I will return to Twitter just a shit all over La Quinta if they don't make it right. Did you stay at a better place then? I mean, we stayed at a country and in suites that was clean. So, yes, it was better. It was better. It was clean. That's all I care about. So Flash's team won their pool. The way these tournaments work is you have pool play, and then you go to, depending upon how you finish, you either go to the good bracket or the loser bracket. They went undefeated in pool play, went to the good bracket, the gold bracket as the three seed, and pulled a very, very tough draw. Pulled probably the second best team, a team that was down from Arcadia, New York, I think, or Arcade, New York, someplace up in New York State. And this might have been the best travel team I have yet seen in our three years. They were very good. The coaches started one of the other kids, and he gave up three runs in the first inning. And then in the second inning, he put runners on the corners with only one out, and then they came in and went to flash. And over the next five innings, he struck out 11, allowed one earned run, three hits. That's how good this team was. They got three hits off of flash in five innings. And then we, so we get to the bottom of the sixth inning flashes team trailing by one and flash homers to tie it. Oh my gosh. After which we learned that the
Sonny00:05:14in tournament baseball, the rules
JVL00:05:16are the first person to score an extra innings wins.
Sonny00:05:20What? Which is the most ridiculous thing maybe ever.
JVL00:05:29Yeah. That's not how baseball works. That is not how baseball works. So in other words, the other team does not
Vic00:05:35get a chance at the bottom.
JVL00:05:38Correct. Which means that if you're the visiting team, you have a very large advantage.
Vic00:05:44It's like those weird NFL tie-breaking things where if you can, you know, overtime games where you, if you can run all the way down on the first play, you win or something like that. Right? Yeah.
JVL00:05:56But, uh, so anyway, in the seventh inning, the third baseman makes an error, so a runner reaches first
Sonny00:06:04and then steals a base, then scores on a pass ball.
JVL00:06:07All that matters is as I was ranking the best possible outcomes for this tournament, the best outcome was that they win the whole thing. The second best outcome was that they lose the first game.
Sonny00:06:24Because then you could just leave.
JVL00:06:26Yeah. Right. The worst thing you want was, because if they had made it all the way to the championship game, we would not have left Salisbury, Maryland until 9 p.m., would not have arrived in New Jersey until 1 in the morning. It would have been absolutely horrible. That's brutal. And as it was, their game at 7 a.m. was done at 9, and we were able to just get out on the road. That's it. You're free.
Vic00:06:50Done. Very nice.
Sonny00:06:51It was great. Very nice. 11 Ks.
JVL00:06:54It was... dominant.
Sonny00:06:58Why didn't they just play him? Why didn't they just pitch him to start?
JVL00:07:02Well, so this is... So, in tournament play, being the visiting team, which is a coin flip, right? So the two coaches meet up and they flip a coin to decide who's going to be the visitor and who's going to be the home team. And the winner of the coin flip gets to choose. And being the visitor is an enormous advantage because you get
Sonny00:07:24to bat first,
JVL00:07:25and see if you get any runs on the board. And if you do, then you can decide which pitcher you want to go to first.
Sonny00:07:35Oh, you don't have to have your lineup all set?
JVL00:07:37Your lineup does not have to be set. So you can make a decision, especially when you have to play, in tournament play, three games in one day. Everything is about scarce resources and pitching. So you have, you know, 18... You have to get through 18 innings of a game where the games are progressively harder, and so in theory, you want to hold your best pitchers till late.
Sonny00:08:00Right? Yeah, that makes sense.
JVL00:08:01And also, as it turns out, it's a big advantage to the visiting team, because if you wind up tied at the end of the sixth inning, you can walk it off at the top of the seventh.
?00:08:11So...
Sonny00:08:11I mean, that's ridiculous. That's insane. I, like... I don't understand how that can be... how it works.
JVL00:08:18Yeah, because it's not actually baseball. But then, tournament play isn't baseball, right? There is no world of baseball in which you play round robin and then you went to single elimination and you play three games in a single day. It's only in this cock, maybe. But, you know, there were teams from Ohio, teams from Washington State. And I gotta tell you, if our coaches came to us and said, hey, we'd like you to book cross-country plane tickets so that your 12-year-old boys could go play baseball, I would say, I don't think so.
Vic00:08:53I know lots of people who do Who would do that? They'll drive down. Believe me.
Sonny00:09:01It's one thing to drive across the state. It's one thing to go from New Jersey to Maryland or, you know, D.C. Even, like, North Carolina or something, right? If it's once a year.
JVL00:09:13For a once-a-year big regional tournament, that's fine. But even that is a little much, right? Saying, like, hey, you gotta spend $700 on hotel rooms for this stupid tournament is a pretty big ask, I think.
Sonny00:09:28I agree. I mean, like, the whole travel world, my parents were like, you can't, you are not, you can play rec. We'll buy you tennis lessons. But you are not doing... Middle States. You're not going on one of these travel soccer teams. And I was a decent soccer player having, like, spent four years in England playing soccer with real soccer players. I, like, it was... It was a thing that I could have done, and I am so glad that they never... That they put the foot down and was like, no. No travel soccer for you.
Vic00:10:01When you played soccer after being in England and you came to the United States, when you played soccer, did you say a lot of... Oi! Oi! Did you say that a lot?
Sonny00:10:10Oi! Yeah, I dropped the C word a lot, which was not appreciated in the Florida
JVL00:10:14rec leagues. Ah, you balmy...
Sonny00:10:16The U10 rec leagues. They're like, Oi! Look at this Guy Ritchie wannabe. He's got a movie that's gonna come out in 10 years, and everyone's gonna talk about how he uses the C word in it, and this is the kid
Vic00:10:28who's gonna remind us of him. And you were ahead of your time, yes. Sonny, what's going on with you? Not
Sonny00:10:34much. I have a tuxedo shirt update. We discussed tuxedo shirts on the last episode. Why do you... Because I was wearing a... I was trying to decide between the peak front shirt, you know, with the kind of textured or the traditional pleated. I ended up going with the traditional pleated that I actually wore to my wedding 10 years ago. I wore the wedding tux. But the only reason this happened was because... So I bought this new shirt because I wasn't 100% sure that the shirt from my wedding was going to survive the dry cleaning process. If people remember, it was a bit of a disaster. And I put the shirt on, the new shirt, the new pick front short peak... Is it peak? P-I-Q-U-E, peak? Peak. Peak. Peak, yes. Peak? I put it on and I got, like... I tried it on when I bought it. You know, it fit. I was like, alright, great. And then it's a slightly slimmer cut of shirt than the other shirt that I have. And the first time that I went to put my jacket on with, like, the little pips, you know, the little... They... All four of them just flew off. Just popped right off. I was like, oh! That's not gonna... Because when I tried it on, I tried it on with the detachable buttons, you know? Like, the detachable mother-of-pearl buttons. The studs. It, like, fit fine. No, the... Yeah, right. The studs were what I put on when I was, like, putting the actual tux on. And when I, like... Again, when I, like, like, flexed out to put my jacket on, just like... That's what you want to call it. Like, well, I mean... Shrapnel. You know what I mean. Like, when I, like... When I, like, expanded my ribcage, they just... They flew off like they were shot out of a gun. And I was like, well, that's not, uh... That's not great. Wow. Uh, Bob. So I ended up going with the pleated uh, the pleated front shirt, which, again, for my wedding, still fits perfectly. Uh, it is not quite as a slim-a-cut as these new-fangled what these kids are wearing today. No, the new... In 2021.
Vic00:12:45It's too thin now. All the suits, everything models against these Europeans that are very tight. Yeah, that's the problem. Very narrow people.
JVL00:12:51The cuts are much thinner. We haven't gotten older and fatter. No, no, no, no, no.
Vic00:12:56They're very narrow people. They're very narrow people now. Well, no, no, it was
Sonny00:12:59so I actually, I remember, I, when I ordered the shirt, I was talking to a guy from the store. I was like, hey, I wear this cut shirt from Brooks Brothers. I wear, I wear a 15-5 uh, collar, 33 arms in a, in the like, slim, whatever it's called now,
JVL00:13:13the region fit. Vic is like that too. He wears a 33 collar. I'm a 17 and a half. Sorry, I'm a 17
Vic00:13:20and a half, 18, really comfortably. But 17 and a half, but a 33 so basically kind of like a a Shrek-sized dimension here like neck versus arm. Okay.
Sonny00:13:29Yeah. So I, and I'm talking to the guy it's Bonobos, you know, the
JVL00:13:33Yes, Bonobos. You bought a tuck shirt from Bonobos? Yeah, and I was
Sonny00:13:37like, I was like, hey guys, I'm I, this is the shirt that I wear for Brooks Brothers. I wear, you know, the slim cut, the region fit or whatever is, like, I know Bonobos is a little bit slimmer, but is it, is it fine? And they were like, well, what's your height and weight? And I tell them, and they're like, oh yeah, you'll be fine. This, this shirt's not that slim. Our slim cut's not that slim. The fucking lie of what that was. Why did you
JVL00:13:59choose to buy from formal wear from Bonobos? Which is like a beach kind of
Sonny00:14:05brand. No, no, it's not, that's not right.
JVL00:14:09That's not. No? They're not like a beach casual Martha's. But it
Sonny00:14:13fits well. It's like modern office wear. It's like. Also
Vic00:14:17his jacket and pants are from Tommy Bahama.
Sonny00:14:20But. Yeah, well, I mean, this was the wedding was on a beach. Ah. So, I don't know, I don't understand what JVL's problem is. Fair, fair enough. Yeah, so anyway, I ended up going with the pleated, again the shirt that I got married in, so hopefully it will bring my friend Brandon and his lovely new bride a very lots of luck as it has brought me and my bride lots of luck over the years. Good.
JVL00:14:43Hey Victorino. JVL.
Vic00:14:45How was Bahama? Oh my gosh, it was a mob scene, so we ended up going to Northeast, which our friend Robert Messenger said, don't even try to go to Bar Harbor, it's going to be a mess and it was. It was like I don't know, it felt like Mardi Gras down there I mean, it was like Bourbon Street, it was insane Also, we were in What is Bar Harbor? That's in Maine and that is down East Maine it's on the peninsula. Yeah, like Bourbon
JVL00:15:09Street where everybody is white and nobody's net worth is under $5 million
Vic00:15:13No, you should have seen this, it was like everybody was there everybody was there and it was like you couldn't get on the street. So Bar Harbor
JVL00:15:21How many people of color did you see in Bar Harbor? I think
Vic00:15:24counting myself and my kids and my kids can count as one because they're two they're half, so you know, like two of us That's how it works A three-fifths rule, if you will But no, it was that's like Bar Harbor was like, I don't know my impression of it was like, eh so it was not fancy at all whereas Northeast which is a different town, that was very fancy so I just turned around, I can't even get parking down here so, I mean, it was just a mob scene and we went up, and there was just a ton of tourists, there was just a ton of tourists and it was during this heat wave in Maine which never has a heat wave, and it was hot and it was humid, and of course because it's hot and humid, and nobody in Maine has air conditioning that's the insane, because they don't need it so this was, it was like 88 degrees, and it was humid, and so made it up to, drove up to Cadillac Mountain, which was great in Acadia and that was beautiful, but on our way down it was all of a sudden, and everybody just showed up, and you know and it was just people just, you know and there's no ropes, so it's like you could fall off a cliff and that's the end of you and people, and there were Chinese tourists and I felt very uncomfortable with that, I'm just going to say, because you know, where did they come from how did they get here and thank God they had masks outside, I don't care it's outside, I don't know where you're from, you know direct flight from Bangor to Wuhan, I don't know, it's very very uncomfortable for me, so I said we got to get out of here kids, so anyway, no, but there were a lot of people
JVL00:17:00they're probably from Marblehead, you know, these Chinese
Vic00:17:02tourists, no, I mean there's like buses I mean everything, everybody gets bussed in and it was just insane so that part was insane it was great to see our friends the Messengers and the Eastlands and Terry is doing, it was nice to see Terry and Jill and a highlight, did they move up there they did, they did, to be close to the Grand and I will say that's a little very few people will appreciate that very few people will appreciate that line 15 listeners and I said that several times on the trip by the way, and to Terry and we had dinner that was just lovely, and they live in Castine and that is very nice, and actually you know who I saw there in Castine, it was Mark Salter Small World of Small Worlds and but the highlight for me, my son and I went lobstering on a boat with the great Linda Greenlaw the captain, the swordfish captain portrayed in The Perfect Storm by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
JVL00:18:01Does she look just like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio?
Vic00:18:05At the time, she probably did but she's like in her 60s now, that was a long time ago that movie, in The Perfect Storm but she was very cool and she's written like, I don't know, 9 or 10 books, so of course eventually I came up to her later on and told her, oh you know, I'm a writer myself, and she says and I've been reading her book, The Hungry Ocean which is a terrific book and she says, oh, well, you know, as I say I mean, what you guys do, I mean, that's really
JVL00:18:32hard work, and I said, yes it is yes it is, and she says
Vic00:18:36she'd much prefer swordfishing out in the, she's been to the Flemish Cap, and she says that's much easier than sitting down and writing and so far, I felt vindicated So
Sonny00:18:47what's her dealings? She's now retired, so she does charters. So she takes tourists
Vic00:18:54out to, you know. Yes, she takes tourists out her and first mate Keith and you go out they have lobster traps, and my son hauled them up, and you gotta go in, grab take out all the excess that doesn't that's not lobsters, so we're talking about stone crabs, which I did not know were in harbor, in Blue Hill Harbor. Stone crabs flounders, spiky fish eels, you name it and then you take the, and then he was able to take the lobsters, and they taught him how wearing gloves, obviously they all wear gloves and how to check if it's male or female, if you have to throw it back you do the measuring thing with the little ruler that they have, and then you put the rubber bands on the claws, and you dump them in I did all the video, that's all that was my job. I don't
Sonny00:19:37do you get to take the crabs home? Or is this just labor? No, no, this is just you're just working. Exactly You pay money to go and work on this
Vic00:19:47lobstership? That's right, and to get, because he wanted to go lobstering
Sonny00:19:51This is why nobody should ever go anywhere Nobody should ever go on any vacations ever, because this is the biggest scam I've ever heard I was thinking about you. We can get these dumb rich people to give us money to come on our boat and put
Vic00:20:09lobsters
Sonny00:20:11in buckets for us?
Vic00:20:13You put them inside, put them in the tanks, you put them in the tanks. It was very exciting for my son, he wants to now be a lobster-er and he prefers that over reading and yeah and I thought maybe we can do the same where we can pay people to have like a guest editing thing you know, just for the experience of like editing. Where people
Sonny00:20:37could pay you? Well that's what internships are I bet
JVL00:20:41I bet if you talk to your wealthier readers, you can find all sorts of people who'd be willing to pay in order to
Vic00:20:47be a guest editor You ever notice people say be a guest writer? Yes, that is a completely different experience. I have some thoughts
JVL00:20:55I'd like to tell you. Oh, we've
Vic00:20:57done that. I think we did that. There was somebody you remember, what was his name? Patterson? At the Weekly Standard? Oh boy, that That was insane That's right, so we do have the equivalent of that Anyway, but that was it. And the other experience I had was of course I was wearing, you know, to go hiking I was wearing my new hiking sandals, Chacos. I got Chacos and I was very excited until all of a sudden on my left foot right around the time we were up in Castine I developed this terrible swelling in my left foot from the Chacos
Mike00:21:36and I was like
Vic00:21:38I hear that noise What is that? These damn Chacos and I said, you know, the straps are too tight and it's caused me to feel like I broke my foot or now it may be I think I sprained it on one of the hikes, you know, in Acadia and then it was Kate who said, I don't think that's a sprain. I think that's yes, gout.
JVL00:22:01Was it the lobster?
Vic00:22:02Yeah, I think it was because my right
JVL00:22:05foot. How much lobster did you
Vic00:22:07eat on this trip? Okay, so it normally goes in my right foot. That was the weird thing. It was in my left foot and it was not by the big toe but by like at the base of the middle toes. I actually did not have that much lobster. I had a lobster roll, but then I had fried haddock and then I had seafood pasta at the Eastlands and then I had 76 oysters. I had whole belly clams which I'm a suck. I love whole belly clams fried and the difference
Sonny00:22:38between whole belly clams and other sorts
Vic00:22:40of they're not the whole belly clam is whole right there. Whole belly clams
JVL00:22:45have, you know, they have all sorts of problems down in Appalachia and opioid abuse and you have to really understand the whole bellies the whole bellies and so you need a Yale trained lawyer to really explain the whole
Vic00:23:00bellies to you. So I got the whole belly clam, which was delicious, but sure enough, it was a gout because that was the but I blamed it on the Chacos Wait, so did you did you have the eruption at the top of the mountain? Like no when we got out of I was driving. I you know, you drive most you have to drive everywhere around there and I got it when I got out of the car when we went to visit Jill and Terry and all of a sudden I'm hobbling if there was a race between me and Terry, he would have won I just put it to you that way. It
JVL00:23:30was pretty bad. Did you have your bracelet on?
Vic00:23:33I guess I had to press the alert, but they don't go there. So then but then mysteriously the next day it began to subside and then two days later, it was okay. And then I was back in running, but I tell you I love the seafood up there in the lobster and the clams and they put that on everything in rolls and sandwiches and platters. The only thing they don't do is put on a pizza. They only do that in California. Speaking of which,
JVL00:23:56this
Vic00:23:57week we're talking about the documentary Wolfgang over on Disney+. Sonny, how about a big boy review?
Sonny00:24:07So this documentary on Disney Plus about Wolfgang Puck is 75 minutes long and I mention that because it is not nearly as in-depth as I would have liked it to have been on all sorts of different facets of Wolfgang Puck's life. I mean, it's very much a movie about like Wolfgang Puck grew up and he had an abusive stepfather and he has been running from that ever since, you know, into the arms of food and into his massive success is kind of couched as this attempt to escape from his abusive stepfather's unhappy family, etc. etc. And it does a lot of things that I don't like when documentaries do them, like recreating scenes of children running for no reason. It's like he talks about, you know, running and running and then we
Vic00:25:01see a little... I thought that was actual footage of
Sonny00:25:04him as a kid. Video footage of some random kid running. It's like, okay, I know what a child running looks like. I don't need a visual manifestation of it on the screen. It drives me crazy when they do stuff like that. But it was still, it's still an interesting if slight documentary because I find him to be a fascinating American figure, like a kind of crucially... Again, he is like a crucially American person in a bunch of different ways. Not just the fact that he's an immigrant success story comes to America, becomes a citizen in 1999, you know, which they don't really talk about at all, which I found kind of surprising. Whatever. He's an immigrant, comes to America from Austria by way of France. Starts working in kitchens in Los Angeles and is kind of horrified by the terrible quality of the food and starts his... Starts out as the chef at Ma Maison and then, of course, opens Spago and from there it's history. He's like the first huge... He's the first of the modern wave of huge celebrity chefs, right? With his chains of restaurants and airport stands and freezer aisles and whatever.
?00:26:19So...
Sonny00:26:20Again, I find this all very interesting and I would have liked to have a lot more of it. I wanted to know more about the individual restaurants. I wanted to know more about how he puts together a menu. There's this really great moment where he's discussing the development of what I guess is kind of a signature dish at Spago. The salmon pizza with caviar. The smoked salmon pizza. With the caviar and how that came about just like as a... It was like a moment of panic. He had a famous... Joan Collins. Joan Collins walks into the restaurant and she wants his brioche and smoked salmon and he's at a brioche. She's like, what am I gonna do? I don't know. So he makes this pizza and it's very interesting. But I wanted more of that. I wanted to know more about the recipes. I wanted to know more about the fusion. I like how he decides to put these things together. How the different styles work. How they complement each other. How they contrast with each other. I wanted more of his theory of food. If that makes sense. I wanted to know more about what he actually thinks about the actual ingredients of the food as he's putting them together. So look, it's an interesting documentary, but it's slight and it cares about stuff I don't care about like his family and his childhood. I just don't... I'm not trying to get the rosebud of Wolfgang Puck, right? I just want to know how he builds a restaurant and how he does what he does. Because the celebrity angle of it is kind of interesting but pretty obvious. I mean he's like a celebrity chef in Los Angeles and he's rubbing elbows with movie stars and he's getting on TV all the time. That's not rocket science and it's not frankly that interesting. It's the food that's interesting and this doesn't have enough of it. So I'm very mixed on this movie. It is about an interesting person who I think is great in a very again specific and American way but the documentary itself is just kind of lacking. It's very on the surface. Thank you.
Vic00:28:23That's all I got. Thank you Sonny. Did you see Churro Dreams of Sushi?
Sonny00:28:27I did. I did which I liked more but that may just have been because it's more exotic and I knew even less about the subject.
Vic00:28:34There's some things that they have in common which is sort of the drive and the commitment, the passion but two different, very different lives. One is monastic and the other one built an empire. But anyway. JVL
JVL00:28:44you just saw this movie.
Sonny00:28:46You turned it off moments before the show started.
JVL00:28:48Before the show. So I share almost all of your frustrations with the documentary but I've been really looking forward to doing this show because I feel as though we have a resource sitting right here with us who probably is going to be able to answer all of the questions that we have.
Vic00:29:06I was going to say finally a movie that spoke to me.
JVL00:29:10I have one big question that I want to ask Vic later but I disagree with you Sonny that it's all about the food. I don't think it's about the food. I think it is that he turned himself into an industry and one of the things that I find interesting, there's a moment where he's walking through it's footage of him walking through a Ralph's, you know, looking at the shelves. He says, what am I? Am I a chef? Am I a character? And that's an excellent question. It's the only real moment of introspection about his career that the, I understand this is a very this is all a sanctioned, authorized piece. So there is no you know, there's nothing in this that the wolf doesn't want himself to have in there.
Sonny00:30:05But there's also there is that introspection except that it's immediately dismissed by every other talking head in the thing. You know, the other sous chefs and assistant chefs and those guys are all like yeah, but he's a celebrity chef who can actually cook. Like everyone is very clear on that. Yeah, but
JVL00:30:22his success his success is I would say certainly his later success is immaterial to his ability to cook. Because he's not you know, his empire is so big like what does he do? The shots of him walking through his kitchen saying yeah, don't overburn this. You realize seeing that he has no control over what's going on there day to day. You know, like this is just like the old man walking through yes chef. You know, yes chef. But the other thing that I want to just point out before we turn the show over to Vic is the so much of his life feels like it is from a million years ago. I mean you see him with Johnny Carson, Bryant Gumbel, Debra Norville these people who have been off stage in American life for 40 years, some of them and he's still around. He was a famous guy and a comer then and is still that guy now and these people are just gone.
Vic00:31:22And the
JVL00:31:24final thing I'll do the analogy I kept coming back to actually was Schwarzenegger. So Schwarzenegger is two years older than he
Vic00:31:34is. Fellow Austrian.
JVL00:31:35Both from Austria and like the wolf Schwarzenegger just had this drive to be famous and he used this weird thing bodybuilding to turn himself into an industry and become famous and that's what Puck did. He took this weird thing cooking and used it to turn himself into an industry and I find that very interesting. With all that said Vic just go. I want a total brain dump here.
Vic00:32:12Okay so I gave it a documentary quadrant score obviously. An A. I gave it an A- actually because I wanted more. That's so funny you should say that. It skims the surface. I enjoyed it. I enjoy these kind of things. But I could have had another I don't know. I mean think about how many documentaries or movies we've seen that were way too long. I wish you could transplant like 30 minutes off of one of these shows that we had to go sit through and put it on this one. So you can dig deeper. And I actually gave it an A-plus under sex and nudity because it's actually gastropornography. Because it was great. You just want to stick your teeth into it. Super slow motions of them like stirring the sauces. You're sitting there like money shot. That's the stuff I passed out.
Sonny00:33:07There's one shot kind of late in the movie where Wolfgang Puck is cooking and there's like a setting sun behind him and the flames and the smoke and stuff are all just mixed up in it. And it looked very good in 4K on my TV. And I was like I could literally just, I could make this my, I could make three hours of this, the like background image on my TV when it goes to sleep, you know. I just wanted more of that. That's all I wanted.
Vic00:33:35He was very driven, as JVL says, coming from a very small town, Sankt Veit-en-Degland, right? That's in Carinthia. And Schwarzenegger was from the neighboring province, which is Asteria. But again, he starts off with there's an interesting commonality he has with some chefs which is growing up under terrible father figures. And for him, it's his stepfather. For Michel Richard, it was his father who was an alcoholic. And then after he left the family and divorced, then the stepfather came into Michel Richard's life. And then Michel, had to leave. There was no room for him in the house. And he had nowhere to go. It was terrible. And then he went, you know, studied under a very, very difficult and abusive first chef who trained him. And then Eric Repair from Liberta Den also had a very abusive stepfather who played all sorts of mind games with him. And then the same thing with Wolfgang Puck telling him that he's worthless. And you get the impact it has on kids. I don't know to the extent of the I'm going to jump off this bridge moment that they play up in the documentary and Sonny, you're talking about this because this is all recreation when they do that. But what happens is he's in Villa at this small hotel and he screws up because they run out of potatoes. And then he thinks about and then he gets fired. And so he's told in the kitchen that he's worthless and he's told at home that he's worthless. I thought it was so remarkable his story that his only option in his mind was to come back the next day, even though he's fired. And just say, no, I'm staying. And somehow he lucks out. And then from there goes to Beaumont and then over to the United States. It's great. I mean, following there was a time where you know, it was the restaurateur who was the boss and they bring this up in in the documentary because it was him versus the Patrick Terrell, I think his name is. Terrell. Patrick Terrell, who was at Mameson and he was the owner. And the feeling is, at the time in the 70s, you know, the restaurateur is the he's the celebrity. He's a star. He's the one. And he was. And Terrell was friends. He did business with all these famous people. And Wolfgang is great, but he's just a chef. And that goes way back to Le Pavillon, right? The first fancy French restaurant in New York City, which started after the World's Fair and Henri Soleil was the proprietor. He was famous and he was the he was the face of the restaurant. And so that's still like a remnant of that. But clearly that changed. And I think part of it is because Wolfgang was very charismatic and people really liked him. And so when he goes to open up Spago, everybody goes with him. And the rest is history.
JVL00:36:42So can I can I break in here, Vic? Because so you hit on something. That's very interesting. And I wonder if it is because of Wolfgang or if this was a shift which was going to happen no matter what. So this is this all part of I think it was Tyler Cowen who wrote the book about like the superstar class. Right. And about how you know, we are seeing in the in all the creative economies a the elevation of superstars because it turns out the superstars have so much value that it makes them almost a different different type of creature. And if that was going to happen with chefs at some point because the truth is the restauranteurs were extracting more value than they added to the enterprises and that this shift which I think is now complete, right? I mean every time I go even you know down down to the beach the new fancy fancy, you know beach standard fancy restaurant is fronted by a chef. Like this is the, I don't know who this guy is but his name is the name that's on the thing and it's not a, it's not just a restaurateur, it's not an impresario. So this is my, one of my many questions I have for you Victorino was do you think this shift was inevitable without Wolfgang or was he just or did it require him
Vic00:38:14I think it required him to be at the right place and the right time Los Angeles, you know, and he happened to be at the hottest restaurant at the time, Mame Son so because I'm trying and I'm struggling right now and maybe listeners will have thoughts on this but you know if not for him, what was the other, what were the other restaurants at the time where they were developing? Well where is Michel Richard
JVL00:38:37then? So at the same time the Wolfgang is at Mame Son, where is Michel Richard?
Vic00:38:44Gosh he had he might have already been in the early 80s, maybe by then he was at Citronelle in Georgetown, but he was an entirely different, I mean he like for the longest time was only on, you know focused on several restaurants, he expanded and then he contracted and then you know, but he was there Daniel Ballou is another interesting character because he's a great French, one of the great French chefs and he, much like Wolfgang Puck but after, he's a few years behind Wolfgang because Wolfgang is older, Daniel Ballou was at Le Cirque in New York and that was famously under the restaurateur Sirio Macchione and it remained that way and when Daniel Ballou left, Le Cirque was still a popular restaurant, you know, under Sirio everybody knows about Sirio, I mean but that's you know, they had to serve and there was always the tension between chef and owner and then you start and then until eventually the chef becomes the owner and then that's, you know, they reach their their perfection for them but the, but that came later so I think it's just a matter that he was the first Wolfgang was the first and then these others chefs followed along the way, same thing with, you know I don't know, Eric Repair at Le Bernardin which is like, you know, the highest rated of all the French restaurants I think in New York he started under Joel Robichon but he was a chef, an insane person in France so it I think a lot had to do with Wolfgang being who he was and also I mean, again, he was at the right place but it is, you know before he was there, I mean, clearly it was a popular restaurant even though they were serving crap, right? I mean, everything was frozen, they said, the food wasn't that great, then it finally got a bad review
JVL00:40:31so it says that everything was, it was popular but it was facing bankruptcy so it wasn't actually profitable you know, it was a place in decline
Sonny00:40:41and there are places like
Vic00:40:43you know, everyone just goes there people, in D.C. people talk about Duke Zeeberts and the food was just okay but you had to be there, you had to be seen there
Sonny00:40:51you know. Well, the French restaurant that he kind of studied at in France is that a they don't really talk about that very much at all, he's like in and out of there
Vic00:41:03but it's in Provence and it's not I don't know if you asked me, not that I've been there but there are a lot more famous French restaurants out there, he went to you know, I mean, but you know and he studied in Dijon as well you know, that's where again, there was that connection with Dijon but yeah, I mean, that's why he talks about wanting to work at Ma Maison because Patrick Turrell was the nephew of the owner of Le Tour d'Argent, which is a big restaurant in France, you know, or Trois Gros there's all these other big places, Pyramide at the time, but it was fine, you know, I mean, you learn, he learns a lot and that's the way to do it, and you go out there to France and you make your bones you don't make anything, and then you work your way up and he worked at, but there's a lot that they skip like Wolfgang worked at Maxime's you know, lots of famous people worked at Maxime's in Paris you know, Jacques Pepin worked at Maxime's but there's a lot that they do leave out, they leave out, I'll tell you what they leave out, which is really sort of a dark story is Ma Maison when Wolfgang was the chef, one of his underlings was John Sweeney, and when Wolfgang Puck moved and opened up Spago, Sweeney became the sous-chef at Ma Maison, and then he murdered the actress Dominique Dunne do you remember this JVL?
JVL00:42:28it's a famous, it's Dominique Dunne is this the Black Dahlia murder?
Vic00:42:32no, this was like in 83, 84, it was shortly after she was the actress from Poltergeist, who was murdered and the daughter the older daughter, and she is the daughter of Dominique Dunne and the niece of Joan Didion and this is how Dominique Dunne became like, remember he became this writer, I think for Vanity Fair about bringing the killer to justice because Sweeney got out he was supposed to serve a long term, like 15 to life and then he got out on a technicality after three years and he stabbed her to death and then he opened up a restaurant and then people went to the restaurant, it was messed up but anyway, that's like the dark side, they don't talk about that
Guest00:43:15they don't talk about this
Vic00:43:17they didn't ask hey, how well did you know John Sweeney they didn't ask him that, apparently not not well but they sent him to France Wolfgang sent John Sweeney to France to learn how to cook, but apparently he was very hot headed and was very jealous and there was that the other thing they don't mention is that Puck was married three times, not twice so you see her, his wife Barbara it was just like for a few like for four years in France you know, when he was in France and then Barbara Lazaroff came later and she was obviously the very important figure in his life and then his current wife
JVL00:43:55so here's a question I feel like the documentary gave her quite a lot of credit but maybe even not enough because it seems as though the entire concept for Spago of trying to turn him into a star with an open kitchen which treats it as a stage so that people will look at him seems to
Vic00:44:21have been her idea. They make it seem that way or at least at the very least it was a joint collaboration and certainly she gets credit because she's got to raise the two kids at home too and I mean it's one of the interesting things is when they talk about where the son Byron Puck says that just to have a family meal. He had to eat at Spago's because it's the only time you see him and they say that. I mean Michelle said that to me. It's like you feel bad when you're at the restaurant that you're not with your wife and kids but you're married to the kitchen. But a lot of these famous people cooking or not even in cooking in other fields of celebrity that's the sacrifice you make for being famous and you've got to go all over the world. It's very difficult.
JVL00:45:09It's how all of us feel about our work, right?
Sonny00:45:13Vic, have you ever
JVL00:45:15I'm not kidding. I'm being totally serious. When I'm not working, I feel guilty for not looking like my kids. When I'm with my kids, I feel guilty for not working.
Vic00:45:28That's true. Sonny,
Sonny00:45:30have you ever actually met Wolfgang Pax?
Vic00:45:34We had a lovely conversation on the phone and it was for a piece I was doing. In Austrian? A little bit. You know how people talk and they mix English and German
JVL00:45:46or English and another language together.
Vic00:45:48I ended up doing that more and more in later years. It's just easier that way. And they did it in the documentary where he's talking in some With his sister. Oh, and I love listening to it because it is the thickest Austrian accents I've ever heard. So, for example, you know, in normal Hochdeutsch and normal German, you would say if you say I'm hungry, right? You say Ich habe Hunger. Ich habe... And when he opens the door, it's good that they have the subtitle because he literally says, he goes, Ich habe ein Hunger. Ich becomes E. Everything is E. Like, I hope you hope, you know. And so it's very funny to listen to that. But he called. It was very funny. I was working on a piece on steak sauces that there was like all these places were having steak sauces suddenly, you know, on their menu. And isn't steak supposed to be so good you don't need to put it on with sauce? And Wolfgang has sauces on his menu. So, and it was a piece for the Washington Post. So he got a quick callback. So I get the phone. I see the... And it's funny because the caller ID on the phone when I was at the Standard at the time, it just said Spago's on it. So I knew that. And like it had the ID on it. And so I just answered. I said, Victor, you know, Victor Matus. And then he just says, Hello, Victor Matus. It's Wolfgang Park. And then off to the races. And I said, why? And I remember asking him. I said, why? So like, you know, what is it about steak? Like, you know, like steak shouldn't need a sauce, right? And he said something to the effect of like, it's like when a woman is so good-looking, she doesn't need any clothes. But sometimes, but sometimes a little bit is okay. That's what he said. Sometimes a little bit is okay. And then he just admitted that he likes sauces. He went to Dijon. They love sauces, you know. But, you know, because it used to be that meat was so bad that you needed a good sauce. I think the French were so good with their sauces. You know, because they cover up bad meat. But now it's so good. But anyway, he was great and he was very helpful. And I talked to his, and I was going to Vienna and he was telling me what to do and what to eat. And we had a conversation about serving German food in his restaurants and that's when he brought up the schnitzel. Because, of course, he says, you know, that he does it at Spago's, the chicken schnitzel, but not Toffelspitz, which is another piece I was working on, which is boiled beef and things like that. But he was great. He was very helpful. But he spends all this time. That's what he does. He just spends time talking to people and doing all
JVL00:48:05the stuff. So, anyway. So, for something like this to happen, for this industry to happen, you need a confluence of things. You need more TV channels with more time to fill. Right? Which then creates a demand side for celebrities, right? So, you know, TV needs celebrities to put them on to fill airtime. You need a nationalization of cuisine where we all start eating basically the same things. And you need to have somebody who is the first at it. The first to become the celebrity chef. Which is one of the weird things, like it ends with Wolfgang saying, the show ends with Wolfgang saying, you know, now I have these hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of people who want to go and become celebrity chefs like me. And I feel bad if this is what these people want because you can't become this anymore because he was the first and that was the whole thing of it. It's like you can't become the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. You could become a famous person, but you have to do it in a different way than Schwarzenegger did. And you have to do it and you now have to do it like the way Rachel Ray did it, which beats the fuck out of me. I don't know how Rachel Ray became Rachel Ray. But you know, she's
Vic00:49:27a famous person. I would say also my favorite of all of them, of all of them is Giada. It's Giada. I could watch her. Chopping, mincing, any sort of movement that involves
JVL00:49:45swaying
Vic00:49:48vibrations. I don't know who this is. You don't know Giada? Oh, come on. Giada De Laurentiis, who is like, what is she, the granddaughter of Dino?
Sonny00:49:59Yeah, she has a relation to the great Dino De Laurentiis, the producer. I love her.
JVL00:50:07So, again, it's the same question, but a different thing. Was it we were going to get somebody like this? Something like this? Was the celebrity chef going to happen? I mean, yeah.
Sonny00:50:21I think it's worth noting that the celebrity chef was already a thing before Wolfgang Puck.
Vic00:50:27Julia Child. But Julia Child did not run a restaurant, per se. I'll tell you what's interesting in this movie is... She was a celebrity author. She was an author who went on TV. But I'll tell you what's interesting. She had her own show, right? Didn't you find interesting how seemingly instrumental Mike Ovitz was in this documentary from Disney Plus? He made it. That's what he said. He said, I made him. That's what he said.
Sonny00:51:01It is a story in Michael Ovitz's book is that he like basically talked about how he made Wolfgang Puck a household name is that he, you know. So I'm sure.
JVL00:51:17And TV is the key ingredient in all of this, right? You can't achieve the escape velocity required to become a celebrity chef without television. And that's why when I pushed back on the idea that it was about the food, I don't think it's about the food. I think it's about TV. And he was good on TV. And that's what turned him from a guy who ran a trendy a trendy restaurant in Hollywood into an industry. And there is, but which is a separate question from the cuisine question where his influence seems to be very, very real. Unless I'm misreading this, Victorino. The whole idea of California cuisine
Vic00:52:00comes from him. California cuisine, Asian fusion, and the open kitchen.
JVL00:52:06But those are, yeah, so those are real innovations. He did real things. Which he ought to be more remembered. But this is, so the tragedy of Wolfgang Puck is that he seems to be a guy so relentlessly moving forward because he thinks that he has to expand that he has lost sight of what it is he really wants to do and why he's expanding. It's like watching a tech company that's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger without ever keeping focus on its core mission and core competencies. And that's what the industry of Wolfgang Puck looks like it did. And the thing doesn't take, you know, like those Wolfgang Puck cafes that were in like the Pentagon City Mall. Express.
Sonny00:52:53Were at the airports. Those things
JVL00:52:55are all gone. Yeah. You know, I don't think I see the pizzas very often anymore in the frozen pizza aisle, right?
Vic00:53:01I see the cans of soup, but I have to confess maybe I've only got it a couple times just because I needed a, you know, a broth or a stock. You know, in a pinch or something like that.
JVL00:53:10It's a weird thing. So there, you know, there have been backward steps, but this really shows the limitations of documentary as a form on Disney Plus. Because Disney Plus is clearly not a place where anything that is remotely objective, let alone critical, can be done.
Sonny00:53:31Yeah. Well, this is a thing that is designed to be shown at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Disney World. This is a thing that is meant to be playing on a loop while you're eating your Chinese chicken noodle
JVL00:53:45salad. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Which is why
Sonny00:53:49it's frustrating. I wanted so much more from this, because it's not a very good documentary, if I'm just being totally blunt. It is perfectly functional, but it is so surface level. It's a love letter. Kind of.
JVL00:54:08Yeah, not even.
Vic00:54:08I would like a love
JVL00:54:12letter, like a genuine, deeply researched love letter would be sort of interesting. But he does seem like a guy who merits a serious documentary treatment. Oh, sure. Right? I mean, it's just like you said.
Vic00:54:23But as you said also, and I think that really is an important point, is that it was how TV and cable sort of revolutionized. And they show you clips of old cooking shows prior to the basic cable access. The first one they showed was like the old Cajun chef, this old man, and he's like with his Cajun accent. They were all on public television. That's the thing. They were all on public television. Jacques Pepin and Julia Child and Martin Yan and all these guys. Because the cost of programming was zero. Yeah, right. And then next thing you know, he is on. And then after that, of course, forget about Emeril Lagasse, who took Celebrity Chef really to the next level at the time. And again, Emeril's old, too. Emeril came from Commander's Palace in New Orleans. And I recently saw him on TV, and it was one of those it's like on a Sunday before actual programming happens on a main network, and so it's just an infomercial. And it was an infomercial for his I think it was some sort of an air fryer that he was advertising for. And you know how they have, it's an infomercial with an audience, you know, in front of the live audience so they can go ooh and ah, and he just does this thing and shows what you can put in the air fryer. So you look at this and you
JVL00:55:51So this is what I mean when I'm leaving. You get to a point in life where you can do basically whatever you want to. What sort of guy says, I would rather be a pitch man like the Bimmer, the Billy, the Oxy God the bearded Bill, what was his name? The famous pitch man, he died of stomach cancer like six years ago or something like that. I'd rather do that late in life like Errol Godsey than be standing up a new restaurant. Right. And putting together a new memory a new menu and doing something interesting that scares me. That's a weird it seems like people have lost track of why they do what they do.
Sonny00:56:35I mean I'm sure if you get a paycheck, it's a good paycheck. You're like, I'm going to pay you $250,000 for you to cook for two hours on this air fryer.
JVL00:56:45Okay, but also there does come a point where you're beyond that. And it's different for different people at different levels. But where we are in our lives, if somebody came to us and said, I'd give you
Sonny00:56:58Here's $250,000 to cook on an air fryer I'd be like, yes! Yeah! Let's do it! Give me that money!
JVL00:57:04Here's $200 to come and write a piece about XYZ, something which doesn't interest us at all. We'd say, no. No, I'm going to spend that time doing something I enjoy. I don't know. And when you have had a show on Food Network for 20 years and you have an entire line of cooking utensils and oven mitts and whatnot, I think that you probably don't need that $200,000 for doing the pitchman stuff, right?
Vic00:57:32Or what happens is they get too old and your contract expires and the Food Network no longer wants you because you're not young and a woman or, you know, an attractive, then you know, then you got it. You're gone, you know, and that's probably what happened with Emeril, you know, because
JVL00:57:48he's old. But again, this is a guy who wants to be on TV and not a guy who wants to be cooking, right?
Vic00:57:54This is right. If you were, I guess, I guess, but it is, you know, I mean, talking about the menu and both of you, can we talk a little bit? His idea, his idea at end in life, like when he's at Spago Spago is now at Beverly Hills, right? When he called me, it was Spago is Beverly Hills and bringing like what am I, what else I want to do and he home cooking the idea that he was going to cook Austrian food. What a great idea. And the chicken schnitzel, it's I mean, you could do pork. That's what a lot of places do. Veal is the authentic, but it's too expensive and people have issues with that, especially, you know, he's in California. So so he does that and just watching him. I mean, it's a great idea. And again, we when I when I spoke to him, the only thing that he has isn't really the only thing that he said he missed was the Viennese desserts or the Austrian desserts, which for some whatever reason he hasn't brought him, which are fantastic, but he didn't bother to bring that to his restaurants. They have other things. But yeah, it's you know, I could have a good 30 more minutes on that would have been great.
Sonny00:58:58Can we can we can you actually just talk a little bit about how the fusion ideal has seeped into every every other aspect of the restaurant industry? Because I do feel like it's it's a it's kind of it's a weird thing taking all these different used to have French restaurants and Chinese restaurants and you know, steak houses and now everything everybody tries to do a little bit
Vic00:59:20of everything. Well, and we don't really think about it anymore because it just is you know, when you have I used to joke around that California pizza kitchen was, you know, like if you ordered their Thai pizza, they would just take, you know, Thai food from a restaurant and then dump it on top of the pizza and you here you go. There's your pizza for you and that was it or their Mooshu pizza. That's all I do. Just take the Mooshu and put it on top. You know, I mean, obviously Wolfgang put a lot of effort into, you know, thinking about how this is going to and the Asian chicken salad isn't even really his his idea, right? I mean, it was like prior to people say that it was, you know, what's her name Marilyn blue or somebody from like 1020 years before that who had come up with it, but he made it more famous. Either way, he's at least partly responsible for that. Um, I don't know. I mean, you think about it now and uh, you know, it just is. Although I feel like we've, you know, we're constantly looking for the new new. And so I mean, like what happened to LA? Nobody talks about California cuisine anymore. You know, it's just not a thing of, you know, and LA is no longer the city that it was in that sense. You know, so that was it. Um, before we go, uh, Sonny, you want, did you want to talk? Uh, but still staying on the topic of food, you had some issue about bread in a basket.
JVL01:00:44Oh, save that for the outtakes. Save that for the outtakes.
Sonny01:00:48We'll talk some more food at the end.
JVL01:00:50Victorino, I have two questions for you. One, your friend, Ruth Reichel? Reichel, yeah. I never met her.
Sonny01:00:56I never met her, but I've read her books. But you did read a book by, you've read a book by her. I believe
JVL01:00:59I heard on this podcast once that you
Vic01:01:02read a book by Ruth Reichel. I read three of her books. I've read three of her books.
JVL01:01:06And two, could you give me a ranking of the three worst celebrity chefs? Oh, okay. The three celebrity chefs you disdain
Vic01:01:16the most. Um, I was not a fan of Sandra Lee. Neither was the late Anthony Bourdain. He used to say some really terrible things about her. She ended up becoming the girlfriend of, uh, Andrew Cuomo, I think. But just, you know, I mean, the stuff that she's putting together
JVL01:01:33on the Food Network, if I recall,
Vic01:01:36is not really appetizing stuff you don't want to see. It's just not great. It's hard for me to be put on the spot thinking about celebrity chefs I don't like. Um, besides Chef Jeff. If you were a celebrity Sonny, maybe.
JVL01:01:54Oh! Burn.
Vic01:01:58Yeah, burn. Sick burn.
JVL01:02:00Uh, but uh, yeah. Anyway. Okay, well give me top three. Your three favorite celebrity chefs. Daniel Ballou
Vic01:02:09who is great and uh, Eric Repair who is also I think I have a bias with French chefs and I like Michel Richard because I knew him the best. And you know, I spent a lot of time with him.
JVL01:02:23Of these three celebrity chefs you just mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong, you have sat and eaten privately with all
Vic01:02:29three of them, correct? No, you know, I interviewed Eric for the Free Beacon actually, um, but did not, uh uh, did not uh, dine with him. Although he is very charming and attractive and uh, yeah I'm just gonna throw it out there. Uh, Ballou is great. People, they're very generous with their time in terms of just talk, you know, in terms of just wanting to pick their brains about food. Oh, and Jacques Pepin. Ah, man, that's hard. Uh, he's great and he's a legend, right? He goes back to uh, gosh, I mean because he's very old now. He's in his 80s and uh, he was there at the same time with Julia Child and uh, and he worked as the he almost took a job at the White House to be White House chef for Kennedy. His friend did it and instead he became uh, the head chef or the corporate chef for Howard Johnson. Mr. Howard Johnson himself and came up with the food including the he came up with a lobster roll for them and that's what I got the idea to eat a lobster roll with Jacques Pepin which was a great experience for me. The one thing he says and people forget this is um, in that movie Julie and Julia, a bit Julia and Julie, right? The one with um... With Julia
JVL01:03:43Stiles. Yeah. Julia
Sonny01:03:45Stiles. Uh, Julia
Vic01:03:47and Child, well okay so it was Meryl Streep. Julie and Julie and Julia. Yes, it was Meryl Streep and Amy Adams and they toggle back and forth between the life of Julia Child and the other who is not such a great person uh, based on her second book. I think it was called Cleaver or something like that. Uh, there's a scene in that movie where Amy Adams' character, the real Julia, uh, is getting excited because of a famous, uh, food editor who is, I believe, Julia Child's editor, was gonna come to, uh, dinner and she was gonna, to the blogger's home for dinner because she was a food blogger and she's gonna impress him, she makes all this stuff and in the movie uh, and I guess in the book, um uh, she doesn't make it uh, over because uh, she's not feeling well and it was raining uh, but Jacques Pepin told me that the truth is she had no desire to go to this woman's home because you know her loyalty lie with julia child it's like what are you trying to do here so anyway all right that's it uh and this is the best show ever but it's uh uh yeah it's great and uh so those are my favorites i think yeah jack pepin is up there balood is up there um and maybe michelle michelle is nuts was nuts he died uh and sad you know i there was a moment you remember this we had i had a i was i was i was uh i was fuming uh mad with him because i was planning to do a book on him and uh they were it was supposed to happen and when i met with the publicist his publicist at the time they told me that they had already promised uh you know a book or that he would do this with bill buford the author who did um pete and i thought that i didn't know if they were lying but i just didn't it didn't sit well with me uh but it turns out they were telling the truth because um buford did write the book dirt and there is a part of it with michelle richard but it was just a chapter and buford took forever to write the book so i mean honestly you know yeah that's that was unfortunately too
Sonny01:05:59bad what if the the vic mattis i would have turned you know because i don't have that luxury
Vic01:06:03like bill buford at the new yorker where they oh you know why don't you take uh six years and you could live in france away from your children which is what he did he had twins
JVL01:06:12and he just left them like i'm not that i'm bitter why he took six years vic buford out
Sonny01:06:18he waited for them to be grown before he had to see the kids again it was like are you kidding me
Vic01:06:24ah is central still there yeah central is there um his protege uh became the chef there he was very good i i think it's there he he made a great fried chicken because michelle richard he fell in love with the old kentucky fried chicken for the 1970s not the one now which is awful but the original one which is really really bad for you but delicious and he made a great recipe for fried chicken um at central and he and he shared with me the recipe but i was so drunk i don't remember it okay well wow that's the story of my life though but it's a story but also
Sonny01:07:03but he was you know i you should write a book about you the the first chapter is you uh forgetting the uh the recipe and then the last chapter is you recreating it but i'm sure buttermilk was
Vic01:07:17involved maybe cornflakes uh and i don't know about this part but i'll share it anyway you know in in the end uh i was with michelle i think maybe a month or less before he died but by then his his faculties were not the same but he was still there so he'd have moments he'd have moments of where of clarity uh in between other moments where he'd like flick me on the head you know because he was mad at me or he was convinced i was talking about him they get paranoid and so you just have to like take the abuse and then uh but then like the filter was gone and so we were sitting outside and in in um outside his restaurant an attractive woman will come by and he would just blurt out boobs boobs like that and you know and and i know i said and i said you're so lucky you have an excuse that you can say that and i i tried to do it myself i tried to do it myself but it didn't work out anyway okay uh let's move on uh corrections shout outs i have a couple uh shout outs uh congratulations to sub-beacon listener and friend father anthony for celebrating five years as a priest congratulations and also uh thank you to friend and listener robert little who sent me a desk set version of cornhole i just played that with my wife it was great uh see thank you thank you for the background the over the desk over the desk over the desk in and out shout the shout outs today were sacred and profane okay uh that is all the time we're giving to this episode questions comments compliments tweet us at sonny bunch at victorina mattis again be sure to subscribe to us on patreon just go to subbeacon.com we're there
Sonny01:09:03tell your friends until next time oh go ahead talk about the bread basket sonny well there was
Vic01:09:18just this thing on i do have i do have another thought but i'll somebody somebody got lit up
Sonny01:09:22on twitter because they they were like they put up a poll and it was like should you eat bread immediately when it comes to the table or should you wait a decent amount of time and she was losing three percent and was and she followed it up with another tweet that was like you should wait five minutes before you eat that bread and i like i like everyone else was like why on earth would you wait to eat the bread if the bread is still there after five minutes something has gone horribly wrong with the bread at your table what if the bread is warm yes yes i don't i don't
Vic01:09:54understand it's not like popcorn is there it's not like popcorn is there an etiquette yeah it's not like popcorn where some people wait for the movie to begin to start eating the popcorn i know people do right versus like you sit down on you know by coming attractions as have we done uh no i will i nowadays it depends if it's just your typical bread basket i might try to skip it all together because you know i don't i'm trying to cut back and i don't need it you know well
Sonny01:10:21there's a reason i mean that's a reason not that's right there's a reason not for me i'm like oh i
Vic01:10:24can i get however if especially if it's like a nice restaurant where it's like something that's
JVL01:10:33different rules for different company right if the three of us are sitting down that's one thing if you are taking out to lunch a new person who is senior to you who you know who you have not met before and it's it's a new relationship maybe you don't want to like dive in head first right
Vic01:10:52away oh i would you know what absolutely right i would no i would defer and let that person yes offer like do you let them make the move would you like some don't don't take before they do no in fact i might even lift the basket up and like like nudge it over like huh give me that
Sonny01:11:08basket of bread and a bottle of wine send it right over is it how about sometimes sometimes they have
Vic01:11:16like one of these big thin wafer things very nice reference i know nice reference uh one of those like fans of crusted bread like that like a thin wafer thing is it okay for me to snap it off or do i just take the whole thing yeah take the whole thing if you're touching it yeah all right sorry what was your other thing victory okay so when we were in maine we were at a lovely we were just like we were exhausted for the first day you fly in blah blah blah and you know it's hot uh we made it into this lovely cafe in blue hill called sandy's cafe and it was lovely we're all sitting around and had a lovely waitress um oh boy her name was melanie and she's that's her real name and she's 22. uh she comes from one of the massive boston suburbs boston suburbs but really cute kind of like a little nose little little earring just a small one in the nose just a small one and uh i'm holding back so many other things i was going to say but that's okay anyway have a lovely conversation chatting about where you know like the whole deal and and she's so friendly and nice and i'm just striking up a great conversation with my family in front of her yeah she says oh your granddaughter don't even take it away from me so then uh later we're about to finish dinner we're about to finish up lunch and i am taking everybody's foods you know like because i hate wasting like don't waste food so i'm like give me this and give me this mattis the mattis garbage disposal the vacuum is turned on i'm like bring it in and so i'm i i put my head back and i
Sonny01:12:49loosen up my throat muscles so while it's while it's happening i can't believe you only had half
Vic01:12:54of your you know wrap your wrap look at eight the other half and then melanie shows up again and you know to take out some of their tables and she notices of course there are other food now on my plate that did not belong on the plate and i was like oh i'm sorry i'm sorry and she goes no no she says i think that's adorable my dad does that all the time
JVL01:13:13that was the first time she called you daddy oh that's not fine
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