Michele StuevenWhile Byron Lazaroff-Puck, son of the world-famous chef Wolfgang Puck and designer Barbara Lazaroff, has some catering experience under his belt, like feeding 1600 people 25 courses at the Oscars, he’s stepping out of his comfort zone into the Rose Garden at Coachella Music and Arts Festival on Saturday, April 14, for the annual Outstanding in the Field communal dinner.
“This has the added elements of being exposed to the elements and cooking completely outdoors in a space that is not ours,” Lazaroff-Puck tells L.A. Weekly, who usually has the help of 150 chefs at the Governor’s Ball. “ But that’s one of the most exciting things when you offer something new like that to a chef, it allows you to expound upon your creativity. When you’re in the kitchen environment it’s very regimented. It can be militaresque in some ways and I’m really excited about this experience. What Outstanding in the Field ultimately does is a very freeing culinary experience. For myself and the team of four that’s coming with me, it’s going to be an eye-opening experience that we can take back to our operation. Not just from a culinary perspective, but a cultural perspective as well.”
The menu is ambitious and will be a challenge for the Director of Food, Beverage, and Hospitality for Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining, who has never seen the cooking space.
“For the bread, we’re doing an Alpine sourdough, taking part of my heritage and serving it right on the outset, made with classic Austrian style heritage flour and served alongside a Weiser Farms roasted carrot and caraway spice hummus,” he says. “Then we’re going to move into a lot of things over live fire like a Coleman Farms charred baby gem lettuce Caesar salad. And this will be the fun one – a wild mushroom risotto, which is so near and dear to my father’s style of cooking and what I grew up with. I’m working with various farms to get beautiful wild mushrooms. For the main course, I’m going to do a duo of Aspen Ridge prime tomahawk steaks and short ribs with pee-wee roasted potatoes and carrots. For a vegan option, we’ll have a marinated celery root steak. Then for dessert, we’ll have a sticky toffee date cake, an homage to the local dates, the best in the world. It’s local and as farm fresh as humanly possible.”
The young chef’s passion for cooking started at age 12 while he was working as a dishwasher at Spago Beverly Hills.
“One of my earliest memories was working alongside two of the most seminal chefs in that kitchen at the time, Hugo Bolaños and Sherry Yard. They could tell I wasn’t exactly enthused about washing dishes for eight hours a day. I’ll never forget being pulled off the three-compartment sink and Hugo coming up to me and saying ‘Let me show you our beet Napoleon salad’. It was one of my father’s absolute classics, stacked with salt-roasted beets, goat cheese, balsamic vinaigrette, and micro basil for garnish. So classic, flavorful, and beautiful. He walked me through every step of the process, and by the end of it, we had a full-fledged plate.
“At that time in my life I was enthused with painting,” says Lazaroff-Puck. “I used to go to museums all the time as a young kid with my mother and I always wanted to be a painter. Well, I can tell you flat out that none of the paintings that I brought home from school ever made it up on the fridge. I had an inkling at that time that maybe I’m not great at this, but when I saw that finished beet Napoleon that I helped Hugo create I had this wild epiphany for a 12-year-old. I had such an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the most amazing chefs in the world and not necessarily follow the path I was thinking of, which was painting on canvas. Here I had the opportunity to paint on plates. Just seeing that one dish spurned my love for the culinary arts. It was a painting in and of itself. I saw how artful this industry can truly be and that’s why I jumped straight into it head first. I still thank my lucky stars today that I have one of the best mentors in the world to still learn from.”