SPAGO Saudi Arabia

A founder’s standard in the open kitchen

The tuna tartare arrives in sesame-miso cones, a Spago gesture carried to Riyadh by Wolfgang Puck, Founder of SPAGO Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. The format is familiar to anyone who has followed his California cooking: a small cone, crisp shell, cold fish, a calibrated hit of miso, tobiko at the top. It is not a replica for its own sake. In Al Hada, inside VIA Riyadh, Puck’s house style bends toward the local table, with Saudi ingredients and Middle Eastern references worked into the same à la carte structure that made Spago legible far beyond Los Angeles.

Puck’s lineage here runs through the original Spago in West Hollywood, opened in 1982 and run through 1997, then through Spago Beverly Hills, the address tied to Two Michelin Stars. The Riyadh restaurant does not ask that history to sit in a frame. It asks the kitchen to keep using it. California cuisine, in his hands, has always meant produce, seasonality, and a willingness to let Europe, Asia, and the American West meet on the same plate without apology. In Saudi Arabia, that method finds a different pantry and a different guest rhythm, but the founder’s operating principle remains plain: quality before trend.

California technique with Saudi inflection

The menu keeps the Spago grammar visible. Big Eye Tuna Tartare Cones set the tone at the counter between snack and signature; Miso Marinated Black Cod holds the richer, lacquered side of the kitchen; Australian Wagyu Tenderloin brings the steakhouse register into the room; Fried Blooming Whole Seabass gives the table something architectural to pull apart. Around them, the Riyadh kitchen uses charcoal grilling, smoking, careful seasoning, and compotes rather than a fixed tasting-menu progression.

The local turn is most direct in dishes such as charcoal-grilled spicy camel kebabs with lemon yogurt, sumac, and pistachio. The outpost does not repeat Beverly Hills; it keeps Puck’s California habit of absorbing place into the plate. BBQ pizza with smoked beef and caramelized onions sits beside braised short rib rendang, black pepper tiger prawns, grilled octopus, burrata with fig compote, and desserts that move from Basque Cheesecake to Kunafa with mango salsa, passion fruit mascarpone, and saffron ice cream. The beverage program follows the same constraint-led discipline, built around mocktails such as the bellino with white peach and moscato grape juice, and the zalloti fizz with zalloti cordial and soda.

The room under the olive trees

The room is light and deliberately spacious, with plush upholstery, marble, brass, olive trees, and enough air between tables for conversation to stay at table level. The open kitchen matters here because it puts the method in sight. Plates do not simply appear from the back; the pass gives the dining room a working pulse, especially when the larger dishes move out whole and the cones leave in small, repeated runs.

On the terrace, the restaurant softens into a quieter garden view, but the craft still belongs to the same station work inside: fish marinated and finished cleanly, prawns seasoned hard enough to carry their pepper, mocktails built to stand beside spice rather than replace wine. If the next chapter is not stated publicly, the present work is concrete enough to end on: Puck’s Riyadh table is being defined one sesame-miso cone and one charcoal-grilled camel kebab at a time.