When Wolfgang Puck opened the original Spago in West Hollywood in 1982, he helped shape a style of cooking that drew on California's seasonal produce and mix of culinary influences. More than four decades later, Spago has arrived in Shanghai, bringing its California-inspired cooking to a city with an established food culture of its own.
Located on the rooftop of The St. Regis on the Bund, Spago Shanghai opened in late 2025 as the brand's first restaurant in China. Its approach is to bring California-inspired cooking into conversation with local ingredients and flavors. On October 13, Wolfgang and his son, Byron Lazaroff-Puck, brought their Generational Tasting Tour to Shanghai, offering one example of how that might work in practice.
California Cooking, Shanghai Ingredients
Wolfgang has spent much of his career treating tradition as a starting point rather than a set of rules. During the interview, he put it more directly: "If you sit still, you go backwards and sooner or later people get bored."
His dishes for the dinner included dry-aged duck breast with Sichuan spice and poached pear, as well as Kaiserschmarrn, the Austrian shredded pancake dessert, served with plum and marzipan ice cream.
Byron's dishes drew more directly on his time in Shanghai. One course paired Longjing tea-smoked scallop with lotus root, fermented rice, Chinese celery and ginger. Another combined abalone with matsutake mushrooms, chicken jus, bamboo and black garlic. Byron said he had been exploring local wet markets and found excellent abalone, an ingredient also used in California's coastal cooking.
Local flavors appeared beyond the main courses, too. A cocktail called 1929 combined Shaoxing wine and chrysanthemum tea, while Byron's dessert featured osmanthus, jiuniang and candied kumquat. He said the aim wasn't to add Chinese ingredients to an established menu, but to understand how they are used locally and what they bring to a dish.
"It's not tradition versus innovation," he said. "They're not against one another."
A New Home on the Bund
Spago's rooftop location gives it a very different backdrop from its original home in West Hollywood. Set above the Huangpu River at The St. Regis on the Bund, the restaurant looks out toward the Bund, the high-rises of Lujiazui and the historic old city around Yuyuan Garden. The terrace makes the most of the view when the weather allows, but the setting is only part of what makes the Shanghai location distinct.
For Wolfgang, opening a restaurant in a new city is about more than business. He's interested in the ingredients, the local food scene, and what he can learn from a new place. When he's in Shanghai, that also means finding time to go out for dumplings.
Byron was drawn to the city's mix of old and new, from the historic buildings along the Bund to the skyline across the river. He also spent time learning about local food culture, paying attention to ingredients such as osmanthus and chrysanthemum that appear in everyday cooking.
For Spago Shanghai, those observations are part of figuring out what the restaurant can be here. It still draws on the California-inspired cooking that shaped the original Spago, but the ingredients, the setting, and the diners are different. How those influences come together will help define the restaurant over time.
Beyond the Menu
The dinner included a few personal touches beyond the food. The menu was designed to resemble a newspaper, inspired by Wolfgang's habit of reading several papers every morning. There was also a reworked poster inspired by Byron's favorite film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, along with an augmented reality feature accessed through a QR code.
Wolfgang and Byron both spoke about the team behind Spago Shanghai and the importance of creating an experience that feels distinctly connected to the city. For them, the restaurant's future is about continuing to build on that connection while staying true to what has defined Spago for decades.
For Wolfgang, a successful dish is one that makes people want to come back. It's a simple idea, but perhaps that's what matters most: not just giving people something new to try, but making them want to sit down at the table again.
