The artist in Puck’s kitchen

It was the night before my birthday, and my wife and son and I were having dinner at Spago Beverly Hills. The courses kept coming, one after another, 20 of them in all, and every once in a while, chef Lee Hefter came bounding out of the kitchen -- a spring in his step, a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips.

Hefter looks on the kitchen as his personal laboratory, and he approaches it with the fresh-faced exuberance of a high-school sophomore in his first chemistry class. Since he was clearly having fun cooking our dinner, he wanted to be sure we were having fun eating it.

We were indeed.

At 36, prematurely bald, 5-foot-7, 225 pounds, Hefter has a roly-poly, vaguely elfin quality about him, but there’s no mistaking his enormous talent. He is, I think, one of the best chefs in the country. Of all the restaurant meals I’ve had in the last year, I’d say five were truly great -- and Hefter cooked two of them: that 20-course pre-birthday dinner early last month and a 12-course, no-special-occasion lunch for a friend and me last spring.

Hefter’s enthusiasm -- what his boss, Wolfgang Puck, calls “his real passion for food” -- infuses every dish he prepares and communicates itself to every member of the staff. I can see it in the waiter’s eyes any time I come in and the waiter -- any waiter -- says, “Chef Lee would like to make you a menu.” I also can see it in the roster of other restaurant kitchens. Already some of Hefter’s star students at Spago have gone on to run their own shows -- among them Eric Klein at Maple Drive, Richard Reddington at Auberge du Soleil in the Napa Valley and Jason Trevi at Opaline.

But I think Hefter also is one of the most underappreciated chefs in the country. He does, after all, work for Puck, the charismatic and creative chef-cum-entrepreneur who founded and still runs the Spago empire. Hefter is highly regarded in the restaurant world, but he’s by no means a household name. Even his pastry chef, Sherry Yard, is probably better known than he is.

It’s not uncommon for strong performers who find themselves in similar situations in other fields -- sports and entertainment among them -- to strike out on their own in an effort to escape the immense shadow of a dominant boss or teammate and get the recognition and credit their skills warrant. Just look at Kobe Bryant’s threat to leave the Lakers so he won’t have to hear any longer that the Lakers are Shaquille O’Neal’s team, not his.

Might Hefter do the same thing? Might he pick up his pots and pans and knives and leave Spago for a new venue, where he would be, unquestionably, the Man?

There is certainly ample precedent for such a move. Restaurants from Los Angeles to Lyon are populated by excellent chefs who once toiled in near anonymity for kitchen superstars. One recent local example: Alain Giraud, longtime No. 2 to Michel Richard at Citrus, now the top toque at Bastide.

Reveling in his freedom

But Hefter has a big advantage over these chefs. Puck allows him far more opportunity to shine than most superstars in any field give their second-in-command.

“Wolf’s given me so much creative freedom, made me a partner and made it so financially lucrative for me that I would be foolish to leave and go out on my own now,” Hefter says. “I’ve had plenty of offers, and eventually I’ll move on -- maybe when I’m in my 40s. But first I need to learn more and grow more.”

Hefter is too modest -- a characteristic as rare among big-time chefs as it is among big-time basketball players. His food is imaginative and rich and hearty, more robust than the refined, elegant cuisine of, say, Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, the reigning American master of the double-digit dining extravaganza. (I think of the gradual increase in the number of courses in Hefter’s tasting menus as the Kellerization of Spago.)

Hefter’s various combinations -- veal sweetbreads with a quince/date puree, Santa Barbara spot prawns with red Thai curry and pad Thai noodles, scallops sauteed with cauliflower, almonds and raisins -- are striking without being jarring or contrived.

He also likes to blend the luxurious (white truffles) with the rustic (veal tongue) in a way that reminds me of another great chef, Marc Meneau, at L’Esperance in Burgundy, whose lobster wrapped in lard I can still taste, almost six years after I last had it.

Hefter initially worked for Puck at the original Spago, on Sunset Boulevard, and at Granita, in Malibu (where I first sampled his cooking), and when Puck asked him to run the kitchen at Spago Beverly Hills, Hefter says, “I told him I’d take on the project if I could control the project.

“He completely empowered me to determine the direction of what we do in the kitchen. He’s a great chef. He’s my alter ego. He helps me refine and clarify and simplify my vision of what I want to achieve. But he recognizes my abilities, and he doesn’t try to force his cooking on me.”

Puck confirms that.

“If I have somebody who’s in charge, he has to be in charge,” Puck says. “I traveled 230 days last year. If I didn’t have someone really good, a very talented cook and very talented manager, a commander -- I call Lee ‘the general’ -- in charge of our flagship restaurant, it wouldn’t work.”

But Puck also says, “I don’t think Lee’s cooking, his approach to cooking, is that different from mine. If we didn’t have the same sensibility, he couldn’t work for me. We’d be fighting all the time.”

I’ve eaten Puck’s food for almost 30 years, though, dating to his days at Ma Maison, and the meals Hefter has made for me do seem different from what Puck has cooked at any of his restaurants.

Of course, that may simply be because Spago Beverly Hills is different from any of Puck’s other restaurants.

Puck is an astonishingly versatile chef; it’s part of his genius in the kitchen. He has dazzled diners with fancy French food (at Ma Maison), designer pizzas (at the original Spago), his own idiosyncratic version of Chinese food (at Chinois), his take on Cal-Ital dining (at Postrio) and specialties from his childhood in Austria (at Spago Beverly Hills).

“But except for the pizzas and the Austrian dishes, the menu at Spago Beverly Hills has been entirely mine from day one,” Hefter says. He calls his cuisine “contemporary American food, with authentic, not fusion, touches from a lot of other countries.

“I especially like the influences of Asian food -- Japanese and Chinese and Thai ingredients in particular,” he says, his hands in constant motion, almost as if he were cooking a dish as we speak.

“I went to the fish market today and got wild toro and monkfish liver and aji, and I really love Kurobuta pork from Japan. It has striations of fat throughout the meat, and that makes it softer, sweeter, juicier, more tender than domestic pork.”

Hefter says he particularly likes the belly of the Kurobuta pig -- and other “obscure meats, melting kinds of meats, pigs’ trotters and veal cheeks and breast of veal. They have very different textures than we’re used to, and it’s exciting to see how they turn into what I think of as comforting flavors when you cook them a long time.”

But he’s also a big booster of some local products. “I think Santa Barbara spot prawns are the best in the world,” he says. “They have that perfect combination of sweetness and brininess -- and a great texture. They’re our answer to langoustines.”

For all Hefter’s enthusiasm, to the public at large, Spago is still Puck’s restaurant, and Hefter is often overlooked when chef awards are handed out. He admits he was deeply disappointed when he failed to win the James Beard award as the outstanding chef in California last year after having been a finalist for the award twice in a row.

“But I didn’t become a chef to be a celebrity,” he says. “My peers know Spago is all me, and, frankly, when I see how Wolf is pulled in 80 different directions, pulled away from the most stimulating thing, the thing he does best -- cooking -- I don’t mind so much not being the star. I’ve already gone further than I ever could have imagined as a kid growing up in Brooklyn and New Jersey.”

Hefter says his mother was “an awful cook ... so bad that we ate takeout three nights a week.... That’s what drove me to cook.”

He started peeling vegetables and delivering food for a local Chinese restaurant when he was 16, and eight years and several jobs thereafter, he headed west with his girlfriend (now wife), Sharon.

He had a passion for Chinese food -- “You don’t grow up where I did, with Jewish parents, and not have that,” he says -- so he wangled a job with Barbara Tropp at China Moon in San Francisco. It was there he met Puck, who came in for dinner one night.

The French connection

Several months later, Puck hired him at the original Spago -- “sort of as co-chef,” Hefter says; as assistant pasta cook, Puck says -- but after 18 months, Hefter decided he wanted to work in France. Puck gave him $5,000, a plane ticket and an introduction to the chef at L’Oustau de Baumaniere, in Provence, where Puck began his own career.

Hefter spent seven months working in top restaurants in France, for such chefs as Michel Trama, Michel Bras and Pierre Troisgros.

Before he came home, Hefter flew Sharon over for six weeks of “really serious eating. We maxed out my credit cards and went into debt, but I considered that my tuition, my college education.”

He returned to Los Angeles in the fall of 1994 to become the chef at Granita, and in the spring of 1997, Puck opened Spago Beverly Hills -- with Hefter running the kitchen.

I was there on opening night, and while I can’t afford to be a weekly (or even monthly) Spago regular, I’d guess I’ve eaten there 30 or 40 times in the ensuing (almost) seven years. The last dinner, the night before my birthday, was one of the best:

Foie gras mousse. Lardon and borlotti bean puree. Sweet shrimp ceviche with uni. Langoustines with Thai spices, pork belly and pea tendrils. Scallop tartare with Beluga caviar. Lamb carpaccio with roasted beets and black truffles. Veal tongue with celery root and white truffles. Wild Scottish pheasant with ricotta gnocchi. Pigs’ trotters and blood sau- sage. Slices of Kobe beef with a wasabi puree and Kocho chile emulsion.

And that’s only half the dinner.

Hefter actually thinks he’s showing more restraint these days by serving smaller portions, no matter how many.

But his zeal for cooking, his excitement at the stove, is palpable, and it’s clear that when he has an appreciative diner in the house, he wants to pull out all the stops -- “How do you like this? And this? And this? And this? And ... “

Because Hefter likes to draw on various international cuisines, he also appreciates Puck’s willingness to give him time off so he can travel the world and eat and learn, trips that would be virtually impossible if he were running his own small restaurant, stuck in the kitchen every night, cooking and counting his pennies.

“I’ve taken several trips to France, Italy, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan,” he says. “Most of what I cook is influenced by what I’ve seen and tasted on those trips.”

Hefter takes his wife on these trips -- and on several long weekend trips a year in the U.S.

“I work six days a week, so I don’t usually see enough of her,” he says. “These trips give us time together -- in addition to all the eating, of course.”

Of course.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.