Wineries, Chefs Ready for Festival

Just how great will it be when Wolfgang Puck and Vincent Price host the 6th annual American Wine & Food Festival to benefit Meals on Wheels? Will 19 top American chefs, wines from 52 wineries and tons of Alaskan seafood be enough to put the event on everyone’s social schedule?

“I’ll just stop by on the way to my wedding,” socialite-producer Sandra Moss joked over breakfast at Spago. Moss will wed Lew Hyman on the night of the Sept. 17 event.

Breakfast at Spago (a rarely served meal at the Sunset Strip restaurant) is a great annual perk for the quintet of coordinators--Moss, Pam Korman, Joan Kardashian, Beverly Singer and Judy Gethers. They were joined by old hands Puck, Tom Kaplan, Pamela Slate and Barbara Lazaroff, all in their roles as part of the Wolfgang Puck Charitable Foundation.

Six years ago, Puck raised $2,000 in the inaugural festival. It went up to the tens of thousands the next year when the event still was held at the restaurant and when Gael Greene, the New York restaurant critic, came, saw and imitated it in wildly successful fashion in Manhattan. In 1986, sponsors of the West Coast event called on friends like Moss and Korman, all regulars at the restaurant and veterans of the Los Angeles charity game.

This year, Puck and his friends see $250,000 being netted--all going to the West L. A. Chapter of Meals on Wheels and for the Wilshire-area Cuisine a Roulettes. The profit is assured since Kaplan and cohorts have mastered the art of successful fund-raising--they have a dozen-plus sponsors and underwriters, headed by the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute and including Piper Sonoma Sparkling Wine, the Westwood Marquis Hotel, USAir, Beefeater Gin and the Universal City Studios Rental Division Group.

It’s a great deal for one’s charity dollar. They’ve kept tickets at the relatively low cost of $150; for that charge, guests can wander through the Main Street set at Universal’s back lot, starting at 6 p.m. and going to about 11 p.m., sampling dishes from some of America’s great chefs.

“And not a little sample. No, no,” Puck said, shaking his head. There will be big samples, from Alice Waters of Chez Panisse preparing summer vegetable salad with cured salmon; Bradley Ogden of S.F. Campton Place’s cooking up a New England style clambake; Mark Miller of Santa Fe will do scallop and salmon tamales; New Orleans’ Paul Prudhomme will have Cajun popcorn and jambalaya; and Alfred Portale of the Gotham Bar and Grill will have a selection of wild game terrines and charcuterie.

Last year, everyone felt that “they got a wonderful deal for their money,” Gethers said, and the group agreed.

Korman, Kardashian and Moss all are veterans of SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly). They also took a few minutes to discuss Moss’s upcoming Hollywood Ladies of the ‘80s Calendar, going on sale this fall and benefiting SHARE. (There is a male calendar in the works, including a Thanksgiving shot of Puck, Milton Berle and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The calendar carries quotes with the pictures; Ruth Berle had contributed one from Walter Winchell: “Nobody likes Milton Berle except the public and his mother.”)

Moss also dropped the news that Lee and Walter Annenberg were looking for a Los Angeles house--and the former White House chief of protocol would be by her for-sale Holmby Hills estate sometime this week.

The bride-to-be looked great. But Puck insisted on teasing her about the date of the nuptials. “If she had done it the day before, the chefs would have catered the wedding,” Puck insisted.