Puck's cafes cut bigger slice of midscale pie - Wolfgang Puck

LOS ANGELES--Chef-restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, who has parlayed his culinary fame into a nationwide grocery line of frozen pizzas, again is tapping the retail mainstream by opening a modified branch of his midscale cafe chain inside a supermarket.

Puck, whose third full-service Wolfgang Puck Cafe is set to open in the colossal MGM Grand Hotel, Casino & Theme Park in Las Vegas on Dec. 18, intends to launch his fifth Wolfgang Puck Express counter-service unit next month in the Gelson's market in Los Angeles' exclusive suburb of Pacific Palisades.

In addition to an eat-in or takeout menu of made-to-order pastas and salads and pizzas from a wood-burning oven, Puck's first supermarket cafe will offer a new line of take-and-bake uncooked pizzas, ready-to-boil pastas and packaged sauces.

Selwyn Joffe, president and chief executive of the Santa Monica-based Wolfgang Puck Food Co., said its deal with the retailer could bring Express units to all eight Gelson's upper-crusty supermarkets next year. Although Puck's cafe pizzas are scratch-made on premises, their kinship to his frozen products has obvious "cross-promotional" advantages, Joffe added.

Coming in the wake of five Cafe and Express openings during 1993, the planned debut at Gelson's will extend Puck's mass-market restaurant foray into prime locations in three states and expand the fortunes of his $40 million-plus-a-year food firm, which operates separately from Puck's well-known tablecloth restaurants.

Joffe declined a divulge cafe sales volumes, but he said the units so far have performed at levels equal to the industry's one or two leading midscale concepts in terms of sales per square foot and per seat. He said the six branches currently open can average 1,000 covers a day, with per-person checks running about $12 at the Cafes and $5 or $6 at the Express outlets.

Expectations are that the Wolfgang Puck Cafe at the MGM Grand -- the world's largest hotel -- will do 3,000 to 4,000 covers daily.

"So far they are all doing great," Puck said last month at his newest cafe, in Costa Mesa, Calif. "Now that we'll have three [full-service branches, counting Las Vegas] open, we'll wait three months and finetune everything, and then we'll think about where to go next."

A French-trained Austrian who earned reown in Los Angeles in the 1970s as chef at the old Ma Maison, Puck later became widely known for the trend-setting "California cuisine" of his Spago in West Hollywood. It was followed by Chinois on Main in Santa Francisco, Granita in Malibu and, a year ago, by a Spago branch in Las Vegas.

First-year sales of about $10 million from the Las Vegas restaurant are expected to boost the combined revenues of the five tablecloth establishments to nearly $30 million.

The restaurants are co-owned by Puck's wife, designer Barbara Lazaroff, who fashioned the original Spago, Chinois and Granita as well as the vivid decor of the new cafe chain, which is punctuated with a pizza-slice-shaped border motif, inlaid tile surfaces in primary colors and framed, vintage covers of the turn-of-the-century "Puck" magazine.

Launched as an offshoot of the food company's frozen pizza business, the cafe chain debuted in 1991 with counter-service prototypes inside Macy's department stores in San Francisco's Union Square and the Mall of America -- the nation's largest shopping center -- in Bloomington, Minn.

This year the chain made its first four appearances on Puck's California home turf, with expanded-menu Wolfgang Puck Express units at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the open-air Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Each counter-service outlet is about 900 square feet, and customers seat themselves in shared common areas.

The company's first full-service cafe, which added rotisserie chicken to the menu mix of Puck's signature pizzas, pastas and salads, opened last summer with 148 seats at the bustling Universal CityWalk dining-entertainment mall in Universal City. The 142-seat Costa Mesa branch opened last month at the nation's third-largest mall, South Coast Plaza, marking Puck's first Orange County venture.

Puck, who is chairman of WPFC, said the company might expand the cafe chain to the East Coast but only if a commitment were made to multiple units for enhanced efficiencies in both manpower and the sourcing of Spago-style specialty foodstuffs. Near-term growth will more likely focus on the chain's established base in the Southwest, he said.

Joffe, a certified public accountant and attorney who grew up in his family's food business before starting his career in publishing, said expansion into any new market area would target a clustered development of at least four to eight cafes.

"I think we will be a national force, but we will grow in a controlled manner," he said. "We're looking at a very controlled manner, to control quality."

Development offers and incentives have so far been plentiful, he said. "Landlords are very interested in giving us buildouts," Joffe continued. "They view us as giving value-added to their properties."

Although operated separately from Puck's upscale restaurants, the food company and its cafes share a "cultural" bond with those operations, Joffe said. "The corporate culture, coming out of Spago, is very important. This is not mass-produced food," he commented.

Among WPFC's executives are restaurant operations vice president Mickey Kanolzer, a childhood friend of Puck's and a management veteran of Spago, Chinois and Puck's defunct Eureka brewery-restaurant. The cafe chain's executive chef is another Puck disciple, Hermann Hochmayer.

Multiunit foodservice veterans with backgrounds at established chains are not likely to join the Wolfgang Puck Cafe organization in any meaningful numbers of its grows, Joffe said. Because of its Spago-inspired cruisine and product specifications, "the typical restaurant operator may not be as helpful to us" as the Puck-trained executives, managers and cooks who are expected to continue running the chain.

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