Wolfgang Zwiener, who immigrated to New York City from Germany in 1960, ferried thousands of hissing platters of porterhouse to the oak tables as a waiter at Peter Luger in Brooklyn and then founded his own empire of 35 steakhouses stretching from Park Avenue to the Philippines, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Honolulu. He was 85.
His son Peter, who confirmed the death, said the cause was lung cancer.
In his 39 years at Peter Luger, Mr. Zwiener (pronounced ZWEE-ner) was on his feet six days a week. On Sundays and vacations, he liked to sleep on the beach. In retirement, it might have seemed that his only worry would be running out of sunscreen.
Peter and his brother, Steven, had other ideas. They talked him into opening Wolfgang’s Steakhouse, under the deep-blue ceiling tiles in the basement of the former Vanderbilt Hotel on lower Park Avenue. The porterhouse, the German potatoes, the apple strudel with schlag and a few more Peter Luger specialties came along. So did two men he had waited tables with, now his business partners.
As proprietor, Mr. Zwiener traded black bow ties and cotton aprons for suits, silk pocket squares and buffed leather shoes. The crisp mustache, trimmed as straight and even above his upper lip as the teeth of a barbershop comb, stayed the same, apart from growing whiter.
“He had a debonair and overwhelming presence,” said Mark Solasz, the vice president of Master Purveyors in the Bronx, the company that supplies most of Wolfgang’s meat in the United States and abroad. “He reminded me of an actor from the movies, but he was real life.”
In 2004, when Mr. Zwiener opened the first Wolfgang’s Steakhouse, one of the owners of Peter Luger assessed his odds of success this way: “He was just the waiter.”
But this waiter had the loyalty of untold diners who called him Wolfie, always sat in his section and knew he would remember how they liked their steak. Many followed him to Manhattan. Some already lived there and found it was nicer to visit Mr. Zwiener in his new restaurant than to take a cab over the Williamsburg Bridge to his old one.
He also had a sharp eye for anything in the dining room that went askew. He insisted that each place be set with a heated plate no more than two minutes before the aged prime beef arrived. If the time limit was exceeded, he would send servers back for fresh plates. Platters had to be even hotter, so scalding that the butter and juices would sputter and smoke under diners’ noses, a flourish borrowed from Peter Luger. A steak that failed to sizzle was “a D.O.A.” Those went back to the kitchen, too.
Although Wolfgang’s augmented its menu with things like crab cakes and tuna tartare, its fame rested on its prime beef. “The meat was many wonderful things at once, or in rapid succession: crunchy, tender, smoky, earthy,” Frank Bruni wrote of the first location in a review in The New York Times in 2004.
Such praise was common, but there were dissenters. Weeks after Wolfgang’s Steakhouse opened in Beverly Hills in 2008, the Austrian-born chef Wolfgang Puck sued Mr. Zwiener in federal court for trademark infringement, unfair competition and several other alleged violations. Mr. Puck, accustomed to being the biggest Wolfgang in town, said that customers at this interloper’s tables might believe they were in store for dishes from “a world-famous and award-winning chef” but would instead be getting “pedestrian” stuff.
Mr. Zwiener countersued. Both parties had agreed four years earlier that Mr. Zwiener would use the name Wolfgang’s Steakhouse by Wolfgang Zwiener in any locations outside New York City. Those were the words on the door in Beverly Hills, and a judge denied Mr. Puck’s request for an injunction. Eventually, the case was resolved out of court.
By that time, Wolfgang’s Steakhouse was growing fast. There are now five steakhouses in Manhattan, one in New Jersey, two in Hawaii, one in Cyprus and more than two dozen in Asia nations that include China, Japan, South Korea and Thailand. Fifteen more, most of them in Asia, are scheduled to open later this year.
Wolfgang August Fritz Zwiener was born on June 17, 1939, in Bad Salzbrunn, a spa town in what is now Poland, to Paul Friedrich and Elisabeth Charlotte Zwiener. A little more than 10 weeks later, World War II started.
Mr. Zwiener rarely spoke about the war later in life, but he told his children that his father, a soldier, was killed by a land mine; that their house was lost; and that food was scarce. If he ever met his father, who died in 1942 in Nowosielce, he was too young to remember it.
He was happier to talk about the restaurant and lodge that his parents once ran in Silesia, and how he had followed their path by enrolling in the hospitality program of a trade school in Bremen, Germany, in his early teens and serving a two-year apprenticeship. After graduating, he was hired as a waiter on cruise ships in the North German Lloyd line, circling the world for two years.
Back on the ground in Germany, opportunities were thin. In 1960, after an uncle who owned an elevator company in Manhattan offered him a job and an immigration sponsorship, he sailed to the United States aboard the MS Berlin. He soon met Elena Delgado, who had moved to New York from Lima, Peru, and they married in 1962. He never warmed up to pulleys and counterweights, though, and with her encouragement he went back to the trade he liked to say was in his blood.
Working his connections in the German community, he landed a job as a waiter at Sunnyside Brauhall in Queens, the banquet division of the new Hilton in Midtown, and at Lüchow’s, the stained-glass cathedral of sauerbraten on 14th Street.
Although the German family that founded Peter Luger had sold it by the time Mr. Zwiener started working there in 1964, nearly all the waiters had been born in Germany.
“They were all older, and they were all grumpy,” Peter Zwiener said. His father’s demeanor stood out: “He was the friendly guy.”
Promoted to headwaiter, Wolfgang Zwiener took charge of scheduling shifts, assigning side work and distributing tips. When Peter and his brother were teenagers, he got them part-time gigs as doormen.
He drilled his sons on the importance of saving money and going to college. He also warned them away from restaurant careers.
“You won’t have a life,” he said.
They took the first two pieces of advice, but not the last. Steven Zwiener now oversees the Manhattan steakhouses, and Peter is president of the company. They survive him along with his wife; two grandchildren, Alexandra Milligan and Nicole Wilson; and two great-grandchildren, James and Theodore Wilson.
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