Ed LaDou

Ed LaDou (October 9, 1955 – December 27, 2007) was an American pizza chef, who is credited with popularizing gourmet California-style pizzas. Ed LaDou was the first pizza chef at Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant in L.A. He also developed the first menu for the California Pizza Kitchen.

The invention of the California-style pizza begins with a Berkeley, California, pizza restaurant, Chez Panisse, and its owner, Alice Waters. Waters was the first to create pizzas with exotic and unusual toppings which were cooked in a wood-burning pizza oven. However, LaDou was a major figure in the development and popularity of these types of pizzas.

LaDou was known for introducing very unusual ingredients into his pizza recipes at a time when such toppings were highly unorthodox. Examples include duck breast and hoisin sauce pizza and barbecue chicken pizza.

Ed LaDou was born on McChord Air Force Base in Washington state on October 9, 1955. His father, Edward M. LaDou, was a United States Air Force pilot and his mother is named Patricia Gallinetti. LaDou was partially raised in Los Altos, California, and first worked at a restaurant when he was a high school student.

LaDou was working as a chef at several restaurants in San Francisco by the mid-1970s. He gained a reputation as an experimental pizza maker, which often made him popular with his customers, but sometimes clashed with the ideas of the owners of the restaurants in which he worked. LaDou was working at a restaurant called Prego, when he was discovered by chef Wolfgang Puck, who was eating at the restaurant. Puck ordered one of LaDou's pizzas, which was topped with ricotta cheese, red peppers, pâté and mustard and immediately offered him a job at his Spago restaurant in Los Angeles, which at the time was not open yet.

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