Wolfgang and Byron Puck host a four-hands Generational Tasting Tour dinner at Spago Shanghai, St. Regis on the Bund, for its first anniversary.
By Ned Kelly
When Wolfgang Puck opened the original Spago in West Hollywood in 1982, he didn't just open a restaurant — he changed the way America eats. Fusion cuisine, open kitchens, celebrity chefs — all of it traces back, in some way, to that little room on Sunset Boulevard.
Forty-plus years later, with 20 restaurants across seven countries and a Michelin star to his name, Puck is still at it. But these days, he's not doing it alone. Enter Byron Lazaroff-Puck, Wolfgang's son, who in 2025 became President of Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group after building his own foundation in Michelin-starred kitchens around the world. Together, father and son have been touring the globe with The Generational Tasting Tour — a four-hands dining series.
We sat down with them before the Shanghai leg at Spago, perched on the 21st floor of The St. Regis on the Bund, where they would celebrate the restaurant's first anniversary with an evening built around a simple but powerful idea: tradition and innovation, served side by side.
What soon becomes clear is that this isn't a typical celebrity-chef press tour. It's a conversation between two people who genuinely love working together — and who have thought carefully about what it means to hand a legacy from one generation to the next.
How did The Generational Tasting Tour concept come about?
Wolfgang Puck: First, I got married, and then I had two boys. So that's where the concept started [laughs]. We sent them to school — Byron went to Cornell, the hospitality school. Then he worked in some of the best restaurants in Europe.
I helped guide him because he had the passion. You cannot push somebody to do something. You want somebody to really live it. So it made it very easy for me, especially at my age, to say, "What better way than to have a family business?"
We could have sold the restaurants 10, 12 years ago for a good chunk of money, but then what? They'd say, "Well, we have to make more money." All the people who were with me for 20, 30 years, they would have said they are too expensive, let's get cheaper ones. But for me, they are also a family. Loyalty and trust. I trust them, they trust me.
Byron Lazaroff-Puck: It's been a long road. I'm very grateful and blessed. Now I get to cook side by side with my father. That's the most amazing thing you could ask for. "I got to cook with Wolfgang Puck this evening. That's my dad." And I get to do that every night. A four-hands dinner, two chefs coming together on one menu, just works so holistically between father and son.
How does the dinner evolve from city to city?
Byron: This is now our eighth iteration. We started in D.C., then Las Vegas, Istanbul, Budapest, London, Maui, Singapore, and now Shanghai. The beauty of what we're doing is my dad is pulling a lot from tradition and his own archival base of recipes, whether from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or beyond. It allows him to dip into different periods in culinary history and bring them back to life. Like any art form, everything is cyclical.
My dad, who really changed the way Americans eat, gets to bring back a starting point or style of cuisine into menus that many diners nowadays haven't had the opportunity to experience. So it's actually revelatory for a lot of people.
And then for me, I get the amazing opportunity to dip into the local ingredient space and culture of every single city and change my menu items to fit that. Everywhere we go, you learn constantly as a chef. We're all lifelong learners, so it's an amazing opportunity to expand our horizons, to learn more about a local culture, ingredient base, the producers, the farmers. My dad always taught me that restaurants are successful only if you invest in your local community. That's part of what we want to showcase: if we invest in our local community, that community will invest in us too.
What sort of dishes are you serving this evening?
Wolfgang: I'm doing some of the dishes which actually started in 1983. I opened a restaurant called Chinois where I made my own version of Chinese and Southeast Asian cuisine, which at that time was totally new. I made the whole duck menu. I made a duck liver with the salad. I made a duck consommé with little duck dumplings. And then we had the duck breast and fried duck leg and everything. I don't think I made a duck dessert, but it was close! So now we are making a duck breast here with plum sauce, like when I started Chinois.
Then I'm going back even to my childhood. My mother was also a chef, so we are actually three generations. We grew up really poor and we didn't eat meat a lot. I was born on the border of Italy and Slovenia in Austria. So we made a lot of noodle dishes and I really liked it. One of our favorite noodles she made was a big cheese ravioli. We mixed Parmesan cheese with sautéed onions, roasted and fresh potatoes, some chervil and other herbs, and a little egg, and made little balls, and then made Kärntner Kasnudeln. That was one of our favorite dishes. Now we upgraded it. We went from economy to first class. Now we serve it with brown butter still, but we add some caviar on top. The caviar gives it a little saltiness, but also this umami flavor. My mother might not agree if she were here and say, "Why you screw up my ravioli?"
Byron: That's the coolest part. It's his heritage and my heritage, but it comes from our grandmother. So it's very rooted in the past, very rooted in his childhood, but it's also how America, Los Angeles, Hollywood changed his cooking over time. And for Shanghai, I'm utilizing a lot of the amazing things we've been able to find at the wet market. Scallops with Longjing tea — tea-smoked scallops, very lightly seared. And we're also doing an abalone dish, with beautiful matsutake mushrooms, because we're right in the window of matsutake season here in China.
Beyond the plate, there's the collectible newspaper menu — and something more modern…
Byron: Dining should really be more than an experience. We're not just selling great food, wine, and cocktails. So for us, we want to build in layers to every Generational Tasting Tour stop. And one of those layers tonight is your interactive menu. It took inspiration from my father, because every morning, no matter what, he still reads the newspapers. During the week, three, and on Saturday five.
Wolfgang: The feeling of the paper — if I read on my phone, it's so boring. And then when I read it in a paper, it means something. There's a lot more feeling to it, right?
Byron: So the paper for the menus is real newspaper paper. As you flip through the menu, it tells the tale of the menu of the evening. Then, after you make it through the entire newspaper, you find yourself on the back with a QR code. You can scan that QR code and it's going to tell you to flip back to the front cover, and the front cover through your phone gives you an AR experience and it tells its own story. So in every dining experience, our goal is to create a memory. And I think you create memories through telling stories.
How is the succession plan going?
Wolfgang: I didn't beat him up or he didn't beat me up yet [laughs]. I think respect is the thing — respect and integrity. If you have respect, integrity, and love, I think everything will be okay. Yes, there might be disagreements. Maybe I would say, "Okay, I wouldn't do it that way. I would do it this way." But, obviously Byron learned a lot from me, but I learned from him too, because we have to move forward. We can't stay still.
And why do most restaurants which are owned by chefs go down after many years? Because they don't change. Innovation mostly comes from young people. When you look at Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or all these guys who invented new things, they were all young. It's hard to see somebody who is 60 or 70 years old who invents new technology or a new cuisine. So I think the willingness for me to learn, to change is very important.
After a year in Shanghai, how do you think about the split between tradition and innovation?
Byron: We always leave a lot of room in all of our restaurants for our chefs to be inspired, to be creative, to pick up local produce, pick up what may be available out in the pasture and infuse that into the menu. It's always about a 70-30 split, with 70% being that standardization. Because if you come to Spago, you come to expect certain things, whether that be on the menu or service or cocktails or certain wines on the wine list.
Wolfgang: Yeah, it's the same in fashion. If you go to Chanel, they will always have this traditional outfit, maybe a bit different way, but it's still a jacket and a skirt. But they also have a lot of innovation, a lot of new things. You look at them and say, "I would not have known this as Chanel." So it's always the classic and the modern mixed together.
Finally, what does it mean to the two of you to cook together?
Byron: Biggest honor of my life. I've been waiting and practicing and learning my entire life to make it to this moment. To actually have the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with my dad and do what we both love to do for a living. It's such a blessing. It really does mean everything. And it's just a blast. It is so much fun and it is truly the most rewarding of experiences.
Wolfgang: I think if you have children, you always want your kids to do better than you, or at the very least do well or find something they find really interesting. So far, I'm blessed. I have four sons. Only one is interested in this business. And I didn't have to push him into it. He did it because he had the passion and the love for it. I'm very happy that we work together.
I'm also excited and very happy for a lot of people because they were very nervous. People who worked with me for so many years. "What will happen if something happens to you?" So they always ask me, "Who's going to be in charge of that?" And I think now they know Byron is here and Byron is capable of running it. So I think it's great to leave what you built. You leave a great foundation and have the next generation to build on and make it even better. Soon they're not going to know who I am. They're only going to know Byron.
Byron: I think we all know that's not true!
Spago Shanghai
Location: 21st Floor, The St. Regis on the Bund, No. 538 Zhongshan Dong Er Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai
Operating Hours
Lunch: Daily, 11.30am–2.30pm; last seating 2pm
Dinner: Daily, 5.30–10.30pm; last seating 10pm
Bar & Terrace
Sun–Thu, 12 noon–1am
Fri & Sat, 12pm–2am
Last Food Order: Midnight
Last Seating: Sun–Thu 12.30am; Fri & Sat 1.30am
