Wolfgang Puck creates bright and flavorful dishes at Spago

July 15, 1999
Web posted at: 3:27 p.m. EDT (1927 GMT)

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- California's famous light and fresh cuisine is reason enough for a vacationer to nosh a path through Los Angeles. But the best restaurants also turn the tables on this star-centered city so that the food is the starring attraction, and the celebrities become the audience.

If your vacation budget includes only one special meal, Wolfgang Puck's Spago could be just the place at its original location, or in Beverly Hills.

Puck, who has grown to international fame, still creates tantalizing new recipes at Spago, where his wife Barbara Lazaroff helps run the show. She confirms the Hollywood elite often meet there to eat.

"It's very much like watching a movie except you're very much apart of it. It's participatory theater," Lazaroff says.

An open kitchen allows diners to watch a bustling cooking staff of 95 create Chef Puck's newest recipes. And while some type of clever California pizza is always on the menu, other dishes are ever changing.

"You know cooking, in a way, is like fashion, it changes all of the time. Skirts are long, then short, more Asian, and more European, however we feel," explains Puck.

Veggies get a special touch at Patina

Also very "California" is the cooking of Joachim Splichal, the head chef at outstanding Patina Restaurant on Melrose Avenue. Patina was one of the very first to popularize dishes based on fresh produce and light seasonings.

The Patina menu is also filled with novel combinations of sometimes exotic ingredients, such as a quail's egg perched on cucumber mousse, fennel and tomatoes, with olive tapenade on a garlic crouton.

Sushi gets a Patina touch, from delicately structured dishes like scallop ceviche with avocado and cilantro to flavor blockbusters like an Ahi tuna tower with roasted scallion and pickled onion.

"I think people want to eat light," says Splichal, "and fresh seafood -- slightly undercooked, raw -- they love that."

This dish in honor of Marilyn Monroe is a tasty combination of artichoke, soba noodles, and shrimp

In Beverly Hills, where trendy restaurants abound, Chasen's Restaurant manages to balance nouvelle cuisine with classic dishes. Chasen's has been feeding Hollywood in style since 1936, although its Beverly Hills location is relatively new.

Andreas Kisler commands the kitchen now, and his innovative dishes include Ahi tuna tartare with an eggplant caviar parfait, and an Asian-inspired scallop entree with a cabbage slaw and lemongrass flavored cabernet sauce.

For movie buffs, Chasen's offers some dishes that honor Hollywood legends such as Marilyn Monroe. For that Monroe, sliced artichokes are placed in the shape of a star, with soba noodles twirled and piled in the middle (Kisler says that's for the star's blond hair), and crowned by three succulent shrimp.

On the traditional side of Chasen's menu, there's cheese toast, calves liver, short ribs of beefs and chicken pot pie. Kisler says creating a traditional dish that people have loved for years is his most difficult task.

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