How Curtis Stone teaches his kids to be Aussies
Curtis Stone is the Keilor East boy turned celebrity chef who now lives in a multimillion-dollar house in one of Los Angeles’ coolest suburbs. So how does he show his young kids how to be everyday Aussies?
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He’s the Keilor East boy turned celebrity chef who now lives in a multimillion-dollar house in one of Los Angeles’ coolest suburbs.
So how does Curtis Stone show his young kids how to be everyday Aussies?
A quiet surf lesson on a lazy summer day in Fairhaven, for starters.
Stone returned to his hometown of Melbourne over Christmas — with wife, actor Lindsay Price, and sons Hudson, 8, and Emerson, 5 — to spend time with family and old mates.
It should be recalled, Stone rose to the public consciousness of the nation almost two decades ago as a young, scruffy-haired chef on ABC’s Surfing the Menu.
He’s now a dad — and wildly popular in his adopted home of the United States — and showing his kids how to manage the surfbreaks he grew up with.
“I took the kids out and tried to give them a little lesson down there at Fairhaven beach. They loved it — they were terrible — but they had fun.”
But to Stone it was more than simply being in the water on a hot day.
“I’d love to end up back in Australia,” he says.
“Aussies for the most part have really good values, they are genuine, they give each other a go and are pretty fair.
“The whole idea of a fair go — that is really ingrained in our culture — I love that about Australia and I want my kids to have those values. At the moment, I’m busy in the States and I love coming back.”
He says his business’s flourishing events arm, which started in LA and kicked off Australian operations last month by catering at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Melbourne, will see him back home even more.
“I love coming back and I love reasons and excuses to do it. And this is certainly one of them.”
Most Aussies now recognise Stone as the face of $20 billion supermarket giant Coles.
In the US, he’s better known as the chef behind the exclusive — and Michelin-starred — Maude restaurant in LA’s chic Beverly Hills and his high-end butcher shops and eateries Gwen (also in LA on Sunset Boulevard) and Georgie (in Dallas).
Stone has also gained household recognition from appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show and regularly helping out on NBC’s Today as well as fronting several reality TV shows.
He says it’s the trips home that ground him.
For a fortnight over summer, Stone and the family spent time with his mum in Clifton Springs near Geelong and with his dad in Woodend. (Stone’s parents separated when he was two.)
Home, family and old chums seem to be what keeps Stone connected to the young
chef who set off overseas in his early 20s to make it big.
While Maude was named after Stone’s late paternal grandmother, Gwen takes its name from his maternal nan who lived on a farm in Woodend. Georgie is named after Stone’s niece, his brother Luke’s daughter.
The family ties go deeper, with Luke a co-owner of the restaurant ventures and catering business while Curtis’s old friend Chris Sheldon is involved in launching the Australian events business with the brothers.
Over the break, Stone and Price — who met on a blind date in 2009 — booked a house on the Great Ocean Road for a couple of days to chill out and enjoy Stone’s old surf haunts.
“I’ve surfed all up and down that coast,” he says.
This Australia Day, what does one of our most successful cheffing exports do?
“I have some stuff in the restaurant that I can’t get away from, so I will be busy that night. During the day we will organise a few buddies to come over and have a barbie.”
Stone, 44, says the concern from diners at his LA restaurants during Australia’s bushfire crisis has been touching and reflectsjust how Aussies are respected in his adopted country.
“I still think we are loved as a group of people. It’s an interesting time actually with the fires happening in Australia — they have got a lot of airplay over here.
“Quite often big news in Australia doesn’t make it all the way over the pond. The fires certainly have. But the response has been, ‘Oh my god, we love Australia, we love Australians — how can we be involved, what can we do?’ We’re hearing a lot of that over here. We’re still thought of so fondly.”
The issue of fires is a raw one for Stone who had to evacuate his Mandeville Canyon home in October last year due to the Getty fire that tore through hillside communities on the west side of LA.
Stone knows he’s lucky that his house was unscathed but says the impact on the entire community shook him up.
“It’s an interesting moment when you’re packing a bag, and putting the kids in the car, and getting the dogs and going through that whole sort of process,” Stone says.
“It’s, ‘S---, they’re making us leave because there’s a real danger the house is going to burn down’. You stop for a minute and get fearful of what the outcome is going to be and it’s not just you, it’s your neighbours and friends that live locally.”
He says the recent fires have contributed to changing his world view.
“All that stuff in some ways can create a bit of community but for the most part it is devastating and you see some peopledid lose their homes and some people were affected in a much greater way.
“You start looking around yourself. In some ways you leave a big beautiful home which is full of nice stuff and you think, ‘Holy s---, what’s it all for? Did I just work my ass off to try and do all of that and then it could just be gone in a fire?’
“I stopped for a minute and thought ‘What is actually important to me? It is what’s in the car leaving the house rather than what’s in the house’.”
Stone aligns with a different charity every year and this year is working with Drought Angels, which helps Australian primary producers adversely affected by the weather. The decision came after spending a lot of last year connecting with Aussies who work the land as well as the devastating bushfire crisis.
armers when they do it tough, they do it really tough. You have people going back to the farm and all the livestock has been killed, which means their income is gone,” he says of primary producers hit by bushfires.
“Unless you have got amazing insurance or money in the bank — what can these people do? It’s so sad to see the people who grow our food are in some of the toughest spots in the country.”
Stone will donate 100 per cent of profits from the tasting menu at Maude for three months to Drought Angels.
Stone is not one to make hasty moves. While most chefs rush to open a first restaurant, Stone waited until he was 38 before opening the high-end Maude.
So people took interest when he tweeted at the end of last year about looking forward to more projects in the new year.
“Can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2020. I’m looking at you Oz!”
Stone says his plans for Australia at the moment centre around his new events business.
“We started the events company in LA, it’s been up and running and we’ve really built some traction with it.”
The entire idea of the company was the sort of fluke that seems to bless Stone’s career. He was getting so many requests fromclients at the restaurant to do private dinners and events he thought why not set up an arm to do that? If anything it wouldtake the strain off the restaurant.
Stone insists he’s not the kind of guy who works to a grand plan, but he thinks that having waited to open his first restaurantwas a good idea. A lot of it was about recognising he needed to put his ego aside and recognise it’s not all about the food.
“I look around my restaurant now and most people are young kids — good cooks with lots of ambition and lots of creativity. But the thing most cooks don’t get — they don’t get the opportunity to be the diner,” he says.
“They cook, but they don’t really understand what it feels like to be the guest — that’s super important.
“It teaches you about the whole experience. Even if something’s amazing, if it’s not good value, you walk away from it feeling a little ripped off. If something’s delicious and it’s still good value but the atmosphere sucks, you don’t want to go backfor that experience. It’s a variety of things. Of course a young chef full of ego thinks it’s all just about the food.”
Stone has more LA projects on the cards, too. The latest, being worked on at the moment, is in the old Trust Building in downtown LA. Works are in an early stage but the plan is to open this year.
While there have been many questions of chefs being able to balance the tightrope of being successful in both a mercantile and creative sense, Stone seems to keep both sides of the equation ticking along.
“I enjoy both sides of it. I laugh about it — my mum was a florist and dad was a finance manager.”
Stone also recoils at any notion that a recipe he does for Coles is inferior to one of his restaurant creations.
“You can develop a recipe for a chef who works at Michelin-starred restaurants their whole life to follow, or you can develop a recipe for someone cooking at home in Avondale Heights to follow — for me they are as satisfying as one another,” he says.
“When you develop at that high end, it’s personally really challenging and satisfying. And if you get to see diners enjoythat — that’s rad. But you can develop a recipe which is super simple (for a Coles recipe card) and people come up to youand say, ‘We cooked fish on Friday’, and it was a recipe I developed years ago. That’s a cool feeling. That’s awesome.”
In his new US television show, Field Trip with Curtis Stone, he travels the world, mixing with different cultures and learning techniques for producing food.
In Rioja in Spain, he learned to open bottles of old wine without removing the cork. In the Kimberley region of WA, he learnedhow to put fish to sleep using the root of a local plant.
Stone says food can constantly surprise you and you have to keep seeing how different people experience it.
“Cultural context is very important. The first time you eat an oyster you may want to spit it out but over time you develop a love for them.
“A lot of people go on a journey with food.”
Stone is constantly changing and experimenting with food. His version of hell seems to be having to repeat the same iconic dishes at his fine-dining establishment.
Maude’s tasting menu changes quarterly based on what interests Stone. At the moment, it’s 12 courses inspired by South Australia after he took the team to visit the Barossa and Adelaide Hills, as well as local legend Maggie Beer.
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“The whole idea of a signature dish is never one I’ve latched onto,” he says.
“I’ve never liked cooking the same thing again and again and again. In fact, I kind of despise it. I’ve seen chefs (and) friends do that and I’ve seen them really struggle with it. Where they’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been doing this dish for 15 years’.
“It’s like the musician playing the same song the rest of their life. At Maude, we’ve made a business of changing it as much as we possibly can.”