News

Ed LaDou: Father of gourmet pizza

September 12, 2004

For the past 20 years, pizza has been Ed LaDou's focus, his passion and his ticket to almost-fame, and he expects little will change anytime soon. The fun of running his own place with no one to curb his creative appetite is hard to top, he said.

"Owning Caioti gives me the chance to cook anything I want to," said LaDou, 48, pointing out the privileges of ownership. "I'll buy something like buffalo tongue to try in the kitchen, and my wife will say, 'You know no one's going to buy that.' But I don't care if it's fun. I can do it if I want, because I have no one else to answer to."

Portrait of the artist as a young man

In 1970, LaDou was a hippie high-schooler headed out of the house to live on his own. Aware he knew little about cooking, LaDou signed up for the school's home-ec class the first year it was open to boys.

LaDou turned class work into homework by preparing meals over a hotplate in his apartment, and recording his successes in a journal. The habit of detailing his food feats and errors, which he still does today, would prove instrumental in his later success as a chef.

For several years more, LaDou hopped from restaurant to restaurant, flipping burgers, serving up hot dogs and learning the tricks of the trade. In 1975 he got work making pizza at Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi Too! in San Francisco.

It didn't take long before LaDou began adding his own twists to the pies, rolling out unique toppings that customers liked, but the owners didn't.

"The owners didn't think they were traditional enough for inclusion on the menu," he said. "But I saw tremendous potential for them."

LaDou got a chance to experiment a little more at Ecco, a restaurant in a high-end Hyatt hotel in Palo Alto, Calif. After just 10 months, LaDou got tired of "the hotel bureaucracy" and took a position at Prego, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

The chef at Prego encouraged LaDou to experiment and send his creations out to waiting guests. One evening in 1980, LaDou sent out a mustard, ricotta, paté and red pepper pizza to a couple waiting for a table: The man was Wolfgang Puck. Puck hired LaDou in 1981 as the first pizza chef at his now-legendary restaurant, Spago, in Hollywood.

"That's where I really unfurled my sails," said LaDou. "Wolfgang brought in the most amazing things to cook with, like scallops with roe, baby zucchini flowers .... It was like being an artist who'd worked with 10 colors all his life and then got to use 300."

Eager to open his own place, LaDou left Spago in 1984 to work as a high-end caterer and cooking class instructor.

In 1985, while working as a consultant, an acquaintance he'd taught in a cooking class led him to two lawyers who wanted to start a pizza concept. Well financed, but inexperienced and without the chef they'd hired to start the operation, the pair hired LaDou to develop a menu and get the kitchen running in three short weeks.

When the restaurant finally opened, it was called California Pizza Kitchen.

"California Pizza Kitchen made (gourmet toppings) available to the masses. And the greatest proof of that is Barbecued Chicken Pizza. Putting it on a pizza told everyone that this is volkspizza, pizza for the masses," said LaDou, who opened Caioti Pizza Cafe in 1987 after leaving CPK.

The man now

Sixteen years after opening Caioti, LaDou seems to be getting his due; recent trade and consumer press articles are telling his story and crediting him with creating gourmet pizza.  But LaDou doesn't feel that setting the record straight is all that important.

What does matter, he said, is being able to create new dishes continually — ones that satisfy his urge to experiment, plus ones customers will buy.

"Not everything I've ever done has been wonderful," LaDou said, laughing. "People used to ask me if there isn't anything you can't put on pizza, and my answer still is, 'Anything that doesn't taste good.' "