Decades after he first stepped on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as an awestruck newcomer in Los Angeles, chef Wolfgang Puck has a star of his own.
Puck's star for his television accomplishments was unveiled Wednesday in front of the Hollywood & Highland center. Puck's star is the 2,608th since the completion of the Walk of Fame in 1961 with the first 1,558 stars.
He recalled his first visit to the Walk of Fame in the 1970s.
"I came up here on the boulevard and I saw all the stars and counted them," he said. "I always thought, 'What does somebody has to do to get a star?'
"For me, it's really an amazing thing. I'm really proud to be a citizen of Los Angeles."
Puck hosted the series "Wolfgang Puck" on The Food Network for five seasons, beginning in 2001. He has been a regular guest on ABC's "Good Morning America" since 1986, the year he produced his first instructional cooking video, "Spago Cooking with Wolfgang Puck."
Puck is regularly seen on the Home Shopping Network, demonstrating recipes on his line of Wolfgang Puck-branded housewares. He operates more than 100 restaurants and cafes worldwide and writes a syndicated newspaper column, "Wolfgang Puck's Kitchen" that appears in 30 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.
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Puck began cooking as a child at the side of his mother, a chef in the Austrian town where he was born, Sankt Veit an der Glan. He began his formal training when he was 14 years old. As a young chef, he worked in some of France's greatest restaurants.
Puck moved to the U.S. when he was 24 years old. His first American job was in 1973 at La Tour in Indianapolis, where he worked for two years.
Puck came to Los Angeles in 1975 as the chef at Ma Maison in West Hollywood. Puck created his first restaurant in 1982, Spago in West Hollywood, which won the James Beard Foundation Award for restaurant of the year in 1998. Puck won the foundation's outstanding chef of the year award in 1991 and 1998, the only two-time winner.
NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd contributed to this report.
