Spago Maui is the Austrian-American celebrity chef and restaurateur Wolfgang Puck’s Hawaiian fine dining restaurant located in Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea. Wolfgang Puck will not cook anything for you, but his famous fusion techniques show clearly in the cuisine with a Californian and Hawaiian mix.

Casual dress code and mostly American mainland tourists are what to expect when you arrive at the busy indoor seating for up to 135 guests, but you can have private dining for around 80 of your friends or business associates as well. The style is more tropical compared to Wolfgang Puck’s Los Angeles venues and it is busy, busy, busy at least if you are having your dinner during peak season. None of us who has been to the restaurant has been seated right away but has been forced to spend up to 45 minutes waiting for the table. That is far from okay for any restaurant that calls itself a fine dining restaurant.

We have had some really bad experiences of the restaurant, with everything from the ordered meat served completely overdone even if it was requested as medium rare, being served cold food when it was supposed to be hot, impolite waiters with lack of knowledge of the cuisine served, a missing sommelier and to have no table at all despite the fact that it was confirmed both on email and by the hotel’s concierge. That incident was solved by the restaurant by adding a temporary tiny table in the aisle, resulting in people constantly walking into it.

Luckily our inspectors and the guests we have talked with have had better experiences, but none of them close to being completely satisfied. It seems to be more than a consistency problem, but that can only the restaurant’s management answer to. We got the uncomfortable feeling that Spago Maui does not care. They are fully booked anyway and the majority of the vacation celebrating clientele does not seem to bother either. The dinner experience of the Spago Maui gets better if you lower your expectations, put on a Hawaiian shirt and take it for what it is – a typical resort’s way of using a famous chef’s name and cash in on that.

Wolfgang Puck has certainly been involved in creating the menu, and courses like the grilled Hawaiian monchong and the Hawaiian opakapaka steamed in ti leave, among several others that are offered, are a tasty and clever way of fusion cuisine.

Images courtesy of Spago Maui

Written by Andy