Wolfgang Puck tells Jalen Rose about overcoming his abusive childhood

When we go to a restaurant, we order and get the dish fully formed. If it’s a fancy, Michelin-rated spot, the edible presentation might look like something that could hang in the Louvre. We eat it without any thought of how the ingredients were sourced, mixed together and put under heat to create the finished masterpiece.

The same could be said, both literally and metaphorically, for this week’s guest on “Renaissance Man.” Superstar chef Wolfgang Puck, who is best known for his Beverly Hills bistro, Spago, talked about his very humble, very harsh, sometimes heartbreaking beginnings in a small Austrian town. “I didn’t know we were poor in the countryside,” Wolfgang told me. “We had no electricity, no plumbing in the house. We want to go to the toilet, you had to walk like at least 100 feet. So they got a little shack outside. That was our toilet and in winter, we had 4 feet of snow. So it was not a fun thing to go out at night in the darkness.”