The World-Renowned Celebrity Chef Who Can't Stand Peanut Butter

If you're a chef, you probably have a broader palate than the rest of us. It is, after all, your job to know what tastes good, and if you're trying to accommodate as wide a range of tastes as possible, you can't afford to, say, go without tasting that recipe for your delicious restaurant salad because you think raw vegetables are yucky. But chefs are people, too, and they have their own likes and dislikes, however rational or irrational they may be. Case in point: Wolfgang Puck, perhaps the original celebrity chef, has a deep and abiding dislike of peanut butter.

In a 2013 interview with The Daily Meal, Puck was asked what kinds of food he doesn't eat, and he didn't hesitate to answer. "I don't eat peanut butter!" he said. While he did say that he had no real explanation for why he hated it, he certainly didn't seem to be in any hurry to acquire to develop a love for the sticky spread. Why should he, when there's a perfectly good substitute? "We have Nutella, which is a chocolate hazelnut paste," he said. (We are, admittedly, a little confused as to why he had to explain the concept of Nutella, but we suppose 2013 was a different time.)

In the days before notorious Big Mac hater Gordon Ramsay or Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck was probably the most famous chef in America. As he proudly told The Daily Meal, his flagship restaurant, Spago, was the very first restaurant he ever opened. It opened in 1982 on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and immediately attracted attention for its fine Italian food and its unpretentious approach to fine dining. Today, Spago has nine different locations around the world, in addition to Puck's other restaurants like Cut, Ospero, and Wolfgang Puck Bar & Grill. (Oh, and he's also catered the Oscars for the past 30 years, as though all that's not enough.)

He summed up his approach to cooking to The Daily Meal. "A lot of people think cooking is all just about technique. I think it's all about getting the best ingredients," Puck said. "If you're the best chef in the world and you buy old fish, it's going to be smelly and nobody will like it." It's the same approach Thomas Keller (whose chive-chopping technique you can borrow) takes with his cooking, and it's a sound one — just so long as none of those ingredients are peanut butter, anyway.

Static Media owns and operates The Takeout and The Daily Meal.