Behind the scenes of Wolfgang Puck’s quiet grab-and-go empire

Imagine that you’re at an after-hours wedding inside the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. You’re marveling at the sea creatures in the sweeping space while nibbling on passed hors d’oeuvres like asparagus tarts and fennel-crusted seared tuna. The food is pretty good, you think. I wonder which local restaurant catered the night?

As it turns out, the evening’s menu was first conceived 2,100 miles away by one of the biggest culinary names to come out of Los Angeles — or anywhere, really — in the past 50 years.

Superstar chef Wolfgang Puck’s name has become ubiquitous in the food world, at pretty much all ends of the spectrum: He’s known for catering luxe events like the Oscars and for high-end dishes like his signature smoked salmon-topped pizza at his formerly two-Michelin-starred Beverly Hills restaurant Spago. He’s also become a household name for more approachable concepts like airport cafes and frozen supermarket pizzas. 

Unbeknownst to many, though, the catering arm of Wolfgang Puck’s sprawling enterprise has landed contracts at museums and cultural institutions across the country, making it a prominent player in a lucrative but little-seen space. Today, contracts for full-service restaurants, cafes and event services at various prominent venues across America, from an aquarium in Georgia to obscure museums in Texas, make up roughly 35% of Wolfgang Puck Catering’s portfolio, according to President Pamela Brunson. What’s more, the contracts allow the company to work on everything from fundraisers to weddings to corporate events within some of the most stunning spaces in the country.

Wolfgang Puck Catering has 10 such contracts: In Los Angeles, those venues include the Grammy Museum and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where, in addition to catering, it operates the full-service restaurant Fanny’s. Wolfgang Puck Catering’s partners outside of California include the aforementioned Georgia Aquarium, Texas’ Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (where it also operates Café Modern) and, of all things, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a high-end but rural campus stuffed with priceless pieces bought by an heir to the Walmart fortune, is also a catering customer.

According to Brunson, who started as Puck’s assistant at the height of Spago’s popularity in 1985 and later opened Puck’s now-shuttered Malibu restaurant Granita in 1991, high-end catering started right out of Spago’s original, compact kitchen on the white-hot Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. (The restaurant moved to its current location in Beverly Hills in 1997.) 

“If I look in the way-back machine, Wolfgang had been asked here and there, when he had a much smaller amount of restaurants, to do events, mostly in homes,” she says. “Catering became a natural extension of the restaurant.” Puck now operates more than 20 restaurants in Las Vegas, Singapore, London, Bahrain and elsewhere.

Puck also launched an exclusive, star-studded Oscars party at Spago in the 1980s, which was co-hosted by legendary talent agent Swifty Lazar.

“It was very A-list. There were no other parties at the time. It was this special dinner followed by a crazy who’s-who afterparty with no media allowed,” Brunson says. “It was an intimate experience of being able to engage with other industry folks.”

Catering came naturally for the gregarious, high-energy Puck. “We did mostly weddings, bar mitzvahs and stuff like that — fancy dinners and in people’s houses for 20 people, 10 people or 150 people, a lot of it benefit dinners in the big houses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, you know, so that was our main business,” Puck told Meetings Today in a 2023 interview. “And it’s only later on when we started to do more corporate events and corporate business, like Sony Pictures and NBC Universal and things like that.”

Wolfgang Puck Catering officially became its own business in 1998. 

“The vision was really to take that restaurant experience that Wolfgang is known for and bring it into nontraditional settings,” Brunson says. The company’s first cultural client was the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business; it still works with the school’s Gleacher Center today.

“Museums and cultural centers became a natural offshoot of what we were doing,” Brunson says. “At that time, 20-plus years ago, food was still a very functional, necessary part of the service component for many museums. When you look around today, museums are looking to create much more engagement and community, and to give people reasons to come back.”

Brunson notes that while museums can present some challenges — such as interesting architectural details in the buildings and staff training on how to safely work around multimillion-dollar art — they are also a huge opportunity for the company to put on one-of-a-kind events.

“The Georgia Aquarium built a ballroom with access to the whale and shark tanks. It’s a really immersive experience just being there,” Brunson says. “We can serve up to 4,000 people if you do a complete buyout of the space.”

Of course, in an increasingly volatile environment for restaurants, the catering arm of Puck’s business provides a level of security — and a further opportunity for branding, along with his packaged goods — during tough times, in an industry that’s projected to make $110 billion by 2030. In 2004, the company partnered with Compass Group, the largest catering outfit in the world, and now operates under the Compass USA umbrella. Puck himself is 76 years old, and while he still shows up for big-time events like the Governors Ball, the catering company is one way to keep his name (and, by extension, his face) in the public eye and bring his signature take on California cuisine to the masses.