The Wolf That Ate San Francisco : Wolfgang Puck doesn’t have to call Alice Waters long-distance anymore

Midnight and the bar is packed. Wolfgang Puck is drinking Champagne in his brand-new restaurant and looking around with a bemused smile. Isn’t this the city that sleeps? Why aren’t all these people in bed? Just then a man walks up, taps him on the shoulder and says: “I’m from L.A., but I’ve been living in San Francisco. I’m just so glad to finally see some L.A. style up here.”

But you don’t have to be from L.A. to love Puck’s new place. Postrio is the toast of the town.

And everybody seems surprised. They shouldn’t be: Puck hasn’t missed yet. First Spago went global when it opened in Tokyo. Then Puck branched out and opened Chinois in Santa Monica. His assault on the supermarket came next as the Wolfgang Puck Food Co. started manufacturing frozen pizzas and desserts for home consumption. Puck’s got cookbooks and videos, a regular slot on television’s “Good Morning America”--and two new restaurants in the works.

Next year, Malibu residents will be able to stop commuting to Spago when Granita opens at the beach. He’s even got the beer bunch in mind: Puck is a partner in the Los Angeles Brewing Co. which will open this fall in West Los Angeles. But all that’s in the future: Right now Puck and his partners are pursuing San Francisco.

“I thought I was gonna have to beg people to come in,” says Puck. “I thought we’d do about 50, 60 dinners to start. I was so apprehensive. You know how people in San Francisco hate Los Angeles.”

Yes, they hate it so much that at the ripe old age of one week Postrio was already being hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as a “masterpiece.” Hate it so much that Puck has become a local celebrity. Hate it so much that Postrio, in Puck’s words, “is a nightmare. It’s worse than Spago. It’s already booked through June.”

What is going on here? San Franciscans have traditionally turned up their noses at Los Angeles. They think that everything about their city--the air, the ambiance, the scenery--is better than it is down south. And when it comes to food, Los Angeles can’t touch San Francisco. Just ask any San Franciscan. So why is San Francisco eating up Puck’s new restaurant?

San Francisco restaurateurs would certainly like to know. “Why is it,” asked one, “that some guy can blow in from out of town, open a place and get all the media attention and rave reviews right out of the box? Some of us have to work for years before we get any notice at all. What’s Puck got that we haven’t?”

“Glitz,” says San Francisco Chronicle food editor Michael Bauer. “People here are starved for that bit of glitz that Wolf is bringing with him.”

‘I should have worn my gold lame,” says one diner, looking wistfully at the impressive stairway by which Postrio’s diners make their entrance. “I’ve never had a place to wear it before.” She’s got a place now--and San Francisco residents are reveling in it. The stairway is a dramatic device that offers everybody the opportunity to be a star. People dress up just to come sweeping down the stairs, pausing in mid-flight to survey the room--and let the room survey them. “Everybody in the restaurant looks like they came from L.A.” is what people in San Francisco say.

The glitz factor is shared by the room itself. And this despite the fact that it was not designed by Puck’s wife, Barbara Lazaroff, but by San Francisco designer Pat Kuleto (who is also responsible for the Fog City Diner). He has employed a ribbon motif that threads its way through the rug, down the stairs and, without interruption, right onto the marble floor. Brass ribbons on the banisters and on the huge, luminous light fixtures pick up the theme. The room is so wrapped up in glittering ribbons that it looks like one great big birthday present to the city of San Francisco.

The art is pretty glitzy, too. This is not your ordinary restaurant mood stuff. A significant Sam Francis adorns one wall. An enormous Rauschenberg is splashed across the other. How did they come by such major works? “Oh,” says Puck nonchalantly, “I called Bob (Rauschenberg) up and asked if he had something I could use for that wall. He said: ‘You’re a friend, I’ll make something.’ Now I’m afraid to call and find out what it costs.”

This is heady stuff for a town where people still strut around the streets in Birkenstocks. But Postrio isn’t all glitz; the people who come here may dress like stars--but their tastes are very down to earth. “People in San Francisco eat and drink a lot more than they do in L.A.,” says Anne Gingrass, the former Spago chef who now shares the position of head chef at Postrio with her husband, David. “People sit down and eat all evening. Three- and four-course meals are common.” They not only eat more--they eat differently. “We sell things here,” says David, “that you couldn’t sell in L.A. to save your life.”

That may be, but if you’ve been to Spago, there’s not much on this menu that will come as a surprise. Before the restaurant opened, Puck went around saying that the food at Postrio would be “updated San Francisco classics.” He must have changed his mind, for this food is unadulterated L.A.--pretty pure Spago with a pinch of Chinois thrown in for good measure. The biggest seller is the Chinese style duck; a spicy mango sauce barely differentiates it from the one that’s served at Spago. The lobster with fried spinach leaves closely resembles a dish that’s served at Chinois, and appetizers include a very familiar marinated tuna with avocado and a lime ginger vinaigrette. There are, of course, the designer pizzas, including Puck’s signature “Jewish pizza” topped with smoked salmon, creme fraiche and golden caviar. San Franciscans like the pizzas so much that, despite the fact that they are sold only in the bar, they are selling at the rate of 200 a day.

Sausages sell well too. Postrio makes lamb sausage for the pizzas, duck sausage with pistachios for a lunch entree, sweet herb sausage for pastas and home-cured salami for an appetizer plate. “We never sold much sausage at Spago,” says David Gingrass, “people down there don’t eat anything with saturated fat. But here we sell so much sausage that I had to hire one guy just to make it. Veal, on the other hand, which sells well in L.A., you can’t sell at all in San Francisco.”

At the moment, though, it seems as if there is nothing that Wolfgang Puck can’t sell to San Francisco. People are here at 7 a.m. gobbling up homemade corned beef hash, Hangtown Fry, buttermilk pancakes with blueberries. And they are still here at midnight eating desserts and pizzas. Is Puck really surprised?

Probably not. Long before he even thought of opening a restaurant in San Francisco he said, “You know, sometimes publicists call up and want to know if I want them to work for me. I ask them how much they’ll pay me. ‘No,’ they say, ‘you don’t understand, you pay me.’ I say, no they’re the ones who don’t understand. Think how good it would be for a publicist to say that he worked for us. It would make his business.” Nobody understands the meaning of celebrity better than Wolfgang Puck.

Now he says, “The thing about San Francisco is that they’re more star-struck here than anywhere.” Puck’s genius lies in being the first to recognize this fact. Just as he was the first to recognize that people in Los Angeles were tired of stuffy French restaurants. When Puck opened Spago, he changed the way Los Angeles goes out to eat. And now he’s out to do the same for San Francisco. “He’s added a whole different personality to the San Francisco dining scene,” says the Chronicle’s Bauer, “and I think it’s going to have a major effect here.”

Just now the restaurant is only a couple of weeks old. And at the moment Wolfgang Puck does not look like anybody who is anxious to have a major effect on anything. It is 1 a.m., he has been at the restaurant since 8 a.m.--and he looks tired. “I must be getting old,” he says, “I never used to get tired.” He looks around the room, shakes his head--and remembers that they start serving breakfast in six hours. “We even do a big breakfast business,” he laments.

* BOOM TOWN: But how is the food? Why are several fancy restaurants opening in S.F.? Pages 98, 99.