How Wolfgang Puck’s Pioneering Fusion Restaurant Chinois Changed Dining
Wolfgang Puck’s now-iconic Chinois on Main, which pioneered what came to be known as Asian fusion or Pacific Rim cuisine, has turned 40 this year. An entertainment industry haven since the day it opened in Santa Monica at the address of a former New Wave punk club, it’s since gone from radical to old guard. The restaurant’s starry clientele has ranged from Tom Selleck and Mike Ovitz to Gwyneth Paltrow and Frank Gehry (who is now designing Puck’s planned replacement of the oceanfront Gladstone’s restaurant along PCH).
Back in 1983, Angelenos first got a streetside sneak peek of Chinois in the months before its arrival, when the chef was buying a dozen ducks at a time from Chinatown wholesalers and blowing them up with a compressor at a gas station a few blocks down from Spago, the Sunset Strip restaurant that had earned him renegade status in Hollywood and beyond when it opened a year earlier. “I’d sit in the back of my van, putting the hose into the ducks’ necks to blow them up, to separate the skin from the meat; the people would come by and just look at me,” the chef tells THR over a recent dinner at Chinois. Back at Spago, his take on Peking duck proved a hit. “Larry Hagman” — then reigning supreme as J.R. Ewing on Dallas — “came into the kitchen and said, ‘Wolf, it’s the best I’ve ever had.’ I told him, ‘It’s for my new place.’ ” Hagman was soon a regular at Chinois, too.
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Chinois’ menu remains an irreverent, tradition-unbound melding of Chinese and French. As Puck puts it, “I wanted to tell a story, what’s in my head, not in the head of anybody else, at any other time.” That meant his own spin on standbys: Instead of chicken in lettuce cups, he’d do stir-fried lamb held in radicchio leaves. For dessert, Puck would serve mandarin orange crème br?lée in sake cups. Sometimes, the experiments failed — dining critic Ruth Reichl, then at the Los Angeles Times, pronounced Chinois a decade into its run “one of America’s most exciting restaurants” but also recalled that its short-lived goat-cheese dim-sum dish had been “awful.”
“Chinois was a revelation when it opened,” explains director and fan Jon Avnet. “Somehow, it’s just as special now. There’s no restaurant quite like it.”
Paltrow has been a loyalist since she was a preteen, visiting with her family, and continues to dine there with her own kids. “I learned to love fried oysters there — still one of my favorite dishes in the world and thankfully unchanged since the ’80s — and duck pancakes,” she says. To her mind, the key ingredient in Chinois’ continuity has been Bella Lantsman, the earthy, indomitable GM who’s shepherded the restaurant since the beginning, retaining many staffers for decades. “The best part,” says Paltrow, “was always Bella and the team of waiters — also, thankfully, unchanged for the most part — and the way they made us feel. Like part of the family. And still make us feel to this day.” (Lantsman says her secret is that “whether you’re a VIP or not, you need to be made to feel important.”)
Puck’s then-wife, Barbara Lazaroff, who retains half-ownership of Chinois, is responsible for the restaurant’s design, which like the food isn’t interested in authenticity. Among other deliberate twists, the customary symbolic Chinese red is traded for fuchsia. Artisan mosaics, imported artifacts and singular objects — including a pair of showstopper cloisonné cranes in the middle of the dining room — are there simply because they are fanciful. At its debut, Vogue compared it to “the Land of Oz.”
Lazaroff, who studied theater and lighting at NYU and was also behind the much-imitated open kitchen at Spago, tells THR she was channeling “my 5-year-old’s fantasy of what China would look like.” Today, she’s the first to acknowledge this was an Orientalist vision, “a white person laying their stereotype,” devised by a Bronx-raised girl whose early memories of going to the theater included swooning over the stage set of The Flower Drum Song.
The restaurant’s early days, during which the tables were filled with the likes of Johnny Carson and Suzanne Pleshette, were frenetic. There was the scramble to connect electricity before opening day, just in time for a party hosted by the studio head turned producer David Begelman. Lazaroff recalls taking down a neighbor’s fence to deal with a rotted electrical pole. “They were angry, but they didn’t sue us — we built them a beautiful new one; it’d been horrible-looking,” she says. Then there was the moment producer Jerry Weintraub, a Chinese cuisine devotee and Puck fan, made it clear that the bill of fare had a big hole. “He tells me, ‘I hope you’re going to have fried rice,’ ” says the chef. “I’d never made it in my life. I really had to navigate.” Now, there are several deluxe varietals.
These days, Chinois has been around long enough to see Santa Monica’s Main Street go from bustling to blah (when the Third Street Promenade began pulling away foot traffic) to busy again. It’s also seen a slew of imitators, most prominent among them New York’s China Grill and Beverly Hills’ Noa Noa. (Both of which are long gone.)
While Spago and Puck’s steakhouse CUT have since become brands with global outposts, Chinois stands alone, although there once was a Las Vegas edition at the MGM Grand, as well as a series of since-closed casual concepts, given the name ObaChine. Byron Lazaroff-Puck, the couple’s son and an executive at their restaurant firm, says one of the company’s newest fine-dining restaurants, Merois, which he opened in 2021 on the Sunset Strip, was conceived in part as something of a next-gen Chinois: “Asian flavors, French techniques, California ingredients.”
His parents contend Chinois’ singularity — in its one-of-a-kind aesthetics but also its stalwart employees — has meant that, despite success, it’s been hard to replicate. “This is a very rare thing,” explains Lazaroff. Adds Puck, “We started with our ideas, but we’ve lasted because of our people.”
This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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