“I was always skiing,” says Austria-born Wolfgang Puck, the celebrities’ celebrity chef. “When I was a child, we skied right out from the house, so we had to walk up the hill.”
With the building of a new house — the fourth iteration of his signature restaurant, Spago — there’s no need to walk up the hill anymore. He’s set up shop just off the grand-lodge lobby of The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch, which itself is tucked away in the most exclusive end of Vail Valley. The lifts, and some of the most appreciative foodies in the mountains, are right there at his door.
“The hotel itself,” says Puck, “is the most beautiful winter sport hotel in America. If I went to Aspen or anywhere, no place comes close to the way it is built.” Indeed, the rough-hewn yet stately luxury of the hotel curves around the bottom of a perfectly powdered slope, almost as if it were holding up the mountain itself. Spago founding partner Barbara Lazaroff describes the new hotel as “a fairy-tale environment of snowflakes and the most sumptuous beds in the Rockies.”
It’s a match made in heaven, perhaps, but one that took some thinking through. “We did a conference with The Ritz-Carlton owners and management, and we told them, ‘You might have a good brand as a hotel, but not as a restaurant,’” says Puck. “There was no identity. If we have a Spago, we do it the way that’s right for us.”
And do it right they did. A design team headed by William Paley from New York’s Tony Chi and Associates eschewed a traditional mountain lodge setting — which the surrounding hotel has in spades — for a whimsically modern and sexy $5 million extravaganza, with amber-hued leather walls, a giant hand-woven red tapestry, and playful cowhide-covered chairs that complement the giant black-and-white photographic murals of the surrounding mountains.
There’s a feeling of high luxury, European style, that extends beyond the décor. Spago’s impeccable service and divine cuisine encourage wine-infused lunches between powder runs and haute cuisine après-ski dinners. The menu is as bright and refined as the room: spicy tuna tartare in sesame-miso tuile, roasted beet and warm goat cheese layer cake, handmade autumn pumpkin, and mascarpone agnolotti in sage butter. Chef Mark Ferguson, a 16-year veteran of Puck ventures including Spago Las Vegas and Trattoria del Lupo, deftly helms the signature open-air kitchen, serving up seasonal American fare with Asian accents, such as spicy big-eye tuna tartare with avocado, micro cress, and wonton chips. A nod to the Rockies takes the form of savory pan-roasted buffalo filet with kabocha pumpkin flan and yellow turnip purée, and the Alps echo through Puck’s favorite childhood dish: spicy Austrian beef goulash with sautéed spätzle. Pastry whiz Sherry Yard even mastered the feat of making Spago favorite Kaiserschmarren — a crème fraîche soufflé pancake — at 8,300 feet.
There’s plenty of criticism thrown at celebrity chefs for the licensing of their names to restaurants they never visit, but there doesn’t seem to be a danger of that happening in Bachelor Gulch. “I am really, really happy to have a spot up here,” says Puck. “Austria is a little more like the East Coast; when we had powder snow it was like a holiday,” he recalls. “Expect to see me at least three times a season.”
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