Curtis Stone on life in LA during COVID, returning home to Australia
The celebrity chef comments on the state of COVID-stricken LA as he and his wife weigh up what life would look like for them in Australia.
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You live in LA with your family – your wife, actor Lindsay Price, and two sons, Hudson, 9, and Emerson, 6. How are you all?
We’re doing OK. It’s a tough time, no doubt. We’ve had a few things personally that have happened recently that have been a bit challenging. We’re also running a restaurant business [Stone opened his first solo restaurant, Maude, in Beverly Hills in 2014].
We’re doing everything we can to stay in the game and ride it out. But as I’m sure you know from the news [the US has one of the highest numbers of COVID cases in the world], it’s not pretty over here in California at the moment. We’re just doing whatever we can to stay positive.
Are you and the family planning on coming home to Australia any time soon?
We’ve been in a sort of “holding pattern”, I guess is the best way to describe it. With everything going on with COVID, we can’t come back unless we quarantine and I’ve got some commitments and stuff over here.
I’ll probably get back [at some point] this year and who knows? We’re keeping an open mind.
You hosted one of the first Australian reality TV cooking shows, My Restaurant Rules, back in 2004. Over the years, you’ve also appeared on ‘MasterChef Australia’ and ‘My Kitchen Rules’.
How do you think these types of shows have changed over time?
For the most part, I think it’s been pretty amazing. When you stop to think about it, we cook more and we take ourselves a bit more seriously in the kitchen because of the shows we watch. We just pay a bit more attention.
The shows have changed pretty drastically over time. MasterChef is the one that defied all odds, right? It’s been going on for a long time and you could almost say it’s performing close to its peak right now. It’s kind of unbelievable. But I guess TV shows come and go.
The styles come and go. We’re at the stage of reality TV where we watch people being nasty to each other and talking badly about each other. Then there are shows that are more informative or make you feel good. MasterChef is a very positive format. I think the world could use a bit more kindness at the moment.
After travelling the world with your culinary hat on, what kind of cuisine has been your favourite?
Oh, that’s a hard one to answer. I grew up cooking French cuisine so that’s probably my most familiar and certainly one of my favourites. But I love eating Indian food.
I guess historically in the home, Indian cooking would take the entire day, with multiple generations of people cooking for that meal. It’s a very humble cuisine that uses inexpensive ingredients.
We can’t go gallivanting globally right now, but we can travel vicariously with you, in your TV show ‘Field Trip With Curtis Stone’ on Foxtel.
In the series, you roam many countries searching for good food and wine. Can that even be called a job?
[Laughs]. Look, it really is an honour to do the show. It happened very organically. We were actually doing this as our research for the menus at Maude. We would go to a wine region and absorb as much as we could on a shoestring budget.
We started doing that and a buddy of mine who’s a pretty talented cinematographer rang me and said, “Are you really doing that and not filming it?” and I said, “It’s not a TV show, it’s just what we’re doing for the restaurant.” And he said, “You’ve got to let me come.” And he did. He came and shot it, and here we are!
We’re about to go into production on our third season.
COVID restrictions and being in lockdown have led to more people learning to cook for themselves. Is that one silver lining to take from this whole experience?
The truth is there are a lot of good things that came from all of this. [When I] reflect on a variety of conversations from a year or two before all of this happened, a lot of them went something like this: “If only we could slow down” and “If only there were more time to spend with the family.”
Then COVID comes along, and it’s like, “Oh shoot, it is possible to not travel” and “It is possible to communicate without actually being there in person.”
There are a variety of pluses, and I think one of the big ones is families coming together and cooking for one another. I’ve always seen that as one of the amazing parts of my job – to inspire people to cook and be creative around food.
Field Trip With Curtis Stone premieres on the LifeStyle channel on Foxtel at 8pm on February 7.
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