Spago is still California at its best

The trio of amuse bouche arrives like a flurry of trumpet notes before the parade. First comes a fragile bite-sized tart, two fingers wide, filled with the first peaches of the season and topped with a scoop of ethereal mousse de foie gras marinated in sweet Moscato. Attention, please!

Next is a tiny puff of dough with some seriously delicious confit of port belly tucked inside. The waiter stands up a bit straighter to announce it.

Finally there’s a sake cup of silky sea urchin pot de creme highlighted with wasabi cream and caviar. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Famous faces, extreme fashion and the crazy exuberant scene can’t tear us away from the thrilling taste of this one bite.

At Spago, the chef is definitely in. The restaurant’s executive chef is 36-year-old Lee Hefter, who has held that position since Wolfgang Puck opened Spago Beverly Hills six years ago. As Puck opens ever more restaurants and hosts a television cooking show that films all over the world, Hefter has taken on more and more. Not that Puck doesn’t pay attention to his reigning restaurant. Whenever he’s in town, he’s at Spago -- and Chinois and Granita and his Sunset Strip cafe, sometimes all in one night.

He pops from the kitchen to the dining room. He’s here, he’s there, signing a stack of cookbooks for one large table, posing for a photo with another. Across the room, an elderly gentleman makes a birthday toast. A pair of wives shrug off their wraps to air their fabulously enhanced cleavages.

This is restaurant as theater: lights, action, the swirl of faces and figures worthy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s brush. The cheese waiter rolls his cart up to a table of young television actors and introduces them to a handsome array of fromage. Suddenly there’s Barbara Lazaroff, the restaurant’s designer and partner (and Puck’s estranged wife), working her way around the room, getting a hug from Sidney Poitier, making sure financier Marvin Davis is comfortable in his custom-built chair. On any night of the week, Spago still feels like an ongoing party. Who wouldn’t want to come?

Outshining the stars

The last two or three meals I’ve had at Spago confirmed what I’ve suspected all along. The restaurant, despite its popularity, is better than ever. A number of factors are at work, including Puck’s perfectionism. But the prime ones, I suspect, are Hefter’s character and talent. He’s got the regular menu under control, and instead of boring himself silly by cooking what he knows over and over again, he’s continually challenging himself with his nightly tasting menus. And this is where everybody who really wants to eat gravitates.

I always sit down for the tasting menu with a sense of anticipation, never knowing where Hefter’s culinary passions are going to take him. He’ll have waves of inspiration, getting into slow roasting or game cookery or an Indian groove, flirting with freshly ground spices, coconut meat and kaffir lime. He brought back pommes aligot -- potatoes whipped with cheese -- from three-star Michel Bras in France, and handmade agnolotti from Piedmont. A trip to Japan gave him a shrewd understanding of the Japanese aesthetic. He may update or clarify traditional cooking, but he doesn’t bastardize the cuisine. For example, his take on a Thai seafood curry featured beautiful Santa Barbara spot prawns in a marvelous nuanced red curry with high notes of kaffir lime and Thai basil. The prawns’ heads were served as tempura on squares of white paper.

His agnolotti, postage stamp-size ravioli, are as close as it gets to the Piedmontese model. He’s reinterpreted these divine little packets with a filling of fresh sweet corn and a dab of Mascarpone and a hint of Reggiano, napped in butter and a scattering of caramelized corn kernels. An East Coaster, Hefter revels in Chesapeake Bay blue crab when it’s in season. One time he served it beneath a twirl of wild French asparagus so fine they looked like green spaghetti. Last week he sandwiched the delicate lump crabmeat between two swatches of supple fresh pasta to make an “open ravioli.”

What I love about Hefter’s food is that he doesn’t let his head rule. He cooks from the heart, and it’s as oversized as the chef himself, who could, in his ampler days, stand in for the rotund pastry cook in the German photographer August Sander’s famous 1928 photo. But then who ever trusts a truly skinny chef? His ideas grow out of tasting and working with the superb ingredients he ferrets out all over the world. That may be why his dishes seem more intuitive and organic than designed. The result is consistently interesting.

Kobe beef is grilled rare, sliced and presented with a punchy wasabi peppercorn sauce and a sprinkling of fleur de sel that plays off the incredibly sweet flavor of the heavily marbled meat. When his Kobe beef supplier began raising a Japanese breed of black pig, Hefter was the first to get it. He offered the rack one night on the tasting menu roasted and sliced, with porcini mushrooms and handmade black sausage. The rest of the rack went onto the regular menu that night. Recently I had the best rabbit I’ve had in this country. The incredibly tiny rack was threaded on a skewer with its kidney and liver. The roasted loin was wrapped in bacon and served with dusky morel mushrooms. And the shoulder and leg had been cooked very slowly in the rabbit’s blood to make a superb sauce royale. Hefter doesn’t cook for people afraid of food; that’s for sure.

It’s been fun watching Hefter grow up. He was just a kid when he was chef at Granita, Puck’s Malibu restaurant, cooking with boundless exuberance and too many ingredients. He hasn’t lost any of his enthusiasm, but it’s tempered now, more controlled. He also has the advantage of a great editor in Puck, who is indisputably one of this country’s great chefs. His staff cooks up to him.

Though Puck’s cooking is grounded in classical French tradition, it’s also thoroughly modern. But, curiously, it’s always been less about him and more about what he intuits people might like to eat. When the mood was for casual, voila Spago Hollywood and the designer pizza. Then when he sensed the moment was right, he stepped back (or forward) into more rigorous fine dining with Spago Beverly Hills and, this late in his career, kicked it up a notch.

If Hefter has a fault, it’s that he wants to hit the ball out of the park with every dish. He goes for intensity of flavor every time and occasionally falters when it comes to varying the tempo or weight of his lineup. Most nights, he personally cooks the tasting menus. They function as his laboratory, the place where he works out new ideas. Dishes from the tasting menu frequently cross over to the a la carte menu.

Although the most innovative cooking at Spago is for the tasting menus, the regular menu is not chopped liver. It changes often enough to remain fresh, but you can still always find delicious, classic Spago dishes, such as pizza with house-smoked salmon (at lunch only). Or old favorites such as Cantonese duck, (which I’ve always found on the sweet side, though it’s less so now) or a terrific prime cote de boeuf with those irresistible pommes aligot served from a copper saucepan. Puck’s childhood favorites are a plus, too: a perfect Wiener schnitzel, ravioli stuffed with farmers cheese or a bowl of chicken broth with little dumplings and bone marrow, and for dessert, a heavenly cloud of kaiserschmarren.

I’ve been in on nights when Hefter was off and had delightful meals under chef de cuisine Thomas Boyce. But I’ve also had less thrilling meals, notably in black truffle season, when truffles were shaved so thin the limp slivers hung off a rack of lamb like wisps of moss from a tree.

The human factor

The service at Spago never misses a beat. Puck doesn’t skimp on staff -- managers alone seem to number in the dozens -- and he’s smart enough to hire servers who are comfortable with people. What an idea. Most handle everyone from celebrities and self-important diners to awestruck tourists with evenhanded aplomb, though VIPs certainly get the better tables and more attention.

Sommelier Kevin O’Connor is a matter-of-fact presence in the dining room. Non-intimidating and direct, he has strong opinions and, when you ask for a recommendation, he’ll propose something not only interesting but relatively affordable. The list is grand, of course, with bottles to suit the most extravagant spendthrift, but most are surprisingly fair-priced for such a high-profile restaurant.

Pastry chef Sherry Yard used to wear a jacket embroidered with the title “pastry wench.” Rosy-cheeked, with a high, fluting voice, she reminds me of the good witch Glenda from the Wizard of Oz. She’s the rare pastry chef who never makes anything too sweet. Her confections sparkle with touches of magic and invention. Like Hefter, she seems arrive at new desserts by getting into the pastry kitchen.

Recently, she’s been making a drop-dead delicious “50 vanilla bean” ice cream that’s worth putting on just about anything. One night she served an astonishing almond glace on top of a shot of golden Chateau d’Yquem. Sometimes she’ll get into cakes, not your normal two-layer cake, mind you, but Dobosh torte with twentysomething infinitesimally fine layers. The fact that she has a cookbook coming out this fall may explain her recent obsessions.

Spago is a big restaurant, sometimes turning out 300 or more meals. It’s famous and has had a long, illustrious life. It could be resting on its laurels like any number of restaurants I could name. But after all these years, Wolfgang Puck still has the integrity and commitment to make Spago the best it can be. He’s also very lucky in his chef.

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Spago

Rating: *** 1/2

Location: 176 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills; (310) 385-0880.

Ambience: The ultimate California restaurant, with its courtyard patio, splashy decor, open kitchen and legendary scene.

Service: Professional, warm and energetic.

Price: Appetizers, $12 to $34; main courses, $24 to $42; desserts, $11 to $14. Chef’s tasting menu, available for the entire table only, $95 per person; with wine pairings, $150 per person.

Best dishes: The most exciting cooking is on the chef’s tasting menu. The regular menu changes frequently: Pizza with house-smoked salmon, Austrian chicken bouillon, farmers cheese ravioli, agnolotti, grilled prime cote de boeuf, Wiener schnitzel, spicy beef goulash, “50 vanilla bean” ice cream, Dobosh torte.

Wine list: Generous and wide-ranging, and for such a high-profile restaurant, surprisingly fair-priced. Corkage, $20.

Best table: A corner table in the courtyard.

Special features: Private dining rooms for parties.

Details: Open Monday to Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and 5:30 to 10 p.m.; Thursday to Saturday, noon to 2 p.m., and 5:30 to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, 6 to 10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking, $5.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.