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Com slash DoBes Media. In 1982, the restaurant Spago opened on West Hollywood

Sunset Strip, quickly becoming a Mecca for celebrity diners like Barbara Striseand, Dolly Parton, and Sylvester Stallone,

and making a celebrity chef out of founder Wolfgang Puck.

Puck's then novel fusion approach of merging cuisines from different cultures

birth one of his signature dishes.

Salmon and creme-fresh pizza, a mashup of a bagel with locks, and a Neapolitan style pie purportedly created to

satiate a ravenous Joan Collins. In 1985, dismayed after an unresolved trial

outcome, federal prosecutors Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax abandoned the courtroom in favor of an even

tensor biome, the kitchen.

And while they didn't have much expertise in the restaurant business, they had a focused concept, a California-style pizzeria and

Tony Beverly Hills, and made a savvy hire, poaching Puck's pizza chef Ed Laddu to oversee the

menu. While Spago's salmon pizza appealed to Hollywood elites like Bert Reynolds,

Rosenfeld and Flax's barbecue chicken pizza appealed to the masses, and in the ensuing

four decades, the chain has grown to nearly 200 locations in 11 countries, not just to sit-down chain

restaurants but as kiosk versions and stadiums and airports.

Today Pucks once artisan pizzas are produced in factory kitchens and sold in the frozen foods aisle of grocery stores,

as are those of Flax and Rosenfeld's Simulacrum.

The natural progression of restaurant success, from fine dining destination to mass market

microwave meal. As for these lawyers now 40 year old concept the verdict is

...