Curtis Stone’s LA restaurants Maude and Gwen
The chef who became famous by surfing and appearing on supermarket ads has ridden the wave of success all the way to LA.
Curtis Stone had a big problem. It was London, 2003, and the 28-year-old was on the phone to a television producer who was asking him to be part of a new show that followed two of Australia’s “hunkiest chefs” cooking and surfing around the coastline. It was his dream job, but Stone did not know how to surf.
“I thought, f**k it, I am just going to say yes, and that was the start of Surfing the Menu,” he tells WISH. “If you watch the show, you will see it wasn’t pretty when I was out there on the board.”
That phone call, and Stone’s decision not to reveal his lack of surfing prowess, changed the course of his career. He went from being a chef running fine-dining restaurants under British cooking’s enfant terrible, Marco Pierre White (the youngest chef ever to receive three Michelin stars) to an international celebrity chef living in Los Angeles and sharing the screen with Oprah, Donald Trump and Ellen DeGeneres. He was on everything from Miss USA 2010 to The Biggest Loser and The Celebrity Apprentice.
Back home in Australia, Stone became famous for being the face of supermarket giant Coles and creating meals for everyday people for their everyday lives. So many are still surprised to know that the chef has just marked five years as a successful restaurateur; his fine-dining establishments Gwen and Maude have been consistently named among the best eateries in LA (and the world).
“No, God no!” is Stone’s response when asked whether he thought he would end up in Hollywood as a bona fide celebrity chef. “I always dreamt of owning my own restaurant. I am pretty ambitious so I would have expected to have a few. In the past five years I have got back to restaurants, and I love cooking that type of food where you have more time and you get to elevate it more than you do at home or television. In some strange way I have taken a massive detour, but I am in that place.”
‘Shannon came up with a cunning plan to go and meet girls, so we kind of fell into it’
Stone first got into food when his high school classmate, Shannon Bennett, convinced him to enroll in home economics to meet girls. The pair went to the all-boys Essendon Grammar in Melbourne’s north and the only way they could get to the nearby girls school was to take cooking lessons.
“Shannon came up with a cunning plan to go and meet girls, so we kind of fell into it,” Stone says, laughing, of his first proper exposure to food. “We were a little naughty, I am not going to lie; we used to have a bit of fun. I don’t think we did very well with the girls but we learnt how to cook.”
Stone and Bennett crossed paths again when they were trainee chefs for White in London before Bennett returned home to open his famed fine-dining eatery Vue due Monde (and his subsequent empire). The pair also appeared on MasterChef Australia in 2015 along with White, this time as chefs instructing students who were far more attentive than they ever were as teenagers.
It may be unfair to characterise Stone’s first steps into cooking as entirely the result of a 14-year-old’s spur-of-the-moment decision to pursue the opposite sex. He had been baking with his mother and grandmothers as a child and loved it, and also thought a friend’s dad – a chef – was pretty impressive. “I sort of looked up to him a bit,” Stone says on the phone from LA in the midst of a fairly packed schedule of radio and television appearances. “He was a cool dude, had long hair, had a couple of tattoos and didn’t conform to most of the dads at that school.”
Stone followed suit and did not do what all his classmates at the prestigious Essendon Grammar did – head to university. Instead he took a job at the now defunct Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, where most of his days consisted of chopping up onions. “Back then it was totally uncool to be a chef; this was way before Jamie Oliver and any cooking shows,” he recalls. “And we used to wear these ridiculous outfits, tall-boy hats and gingham pants, clogs. I can remember getting dressed in all that stuff and feeling like a real idiot. And I wasn’t 100 per cent sure of my choice. I didn’t love it from the start.”
Stone’s mother, a florist who raised Stone and his brother by herself, was supportive of her son’s decision to ditch higher education for a career as a chef (“she got it”), even if his father wasn’t. “My dad was an accountant and he thought I was out of my mind,” Stone says. “I actually got the marks to get into law. Dad was like ‘go be a lawyer – you are crazy, you don’t want to be a cook’. I am grateful that I did not take that advice.” That small but significant decision to keep going – even when he doubted the decision himself – led him to an apprenticeship at the Savoy Hotel. “The more I got into it the fewer mundane tasks you were given and there were more exciting things to do,” he says. “By the time I finished I had fallen in love with it.”
The newly qualified chef then got his hands on a copy of White’s game-changing cookbook, White Heat, and decided he wanted to be a part of this “new rock and roll” London restaurant scene. He booked a flight to Heathrow and turned up on White’s doorstop. “I spent the next eight years slaving away in his restaurants and it was a pretty amazing education,” he says. His next significant career step – jumping from the kitchen to the front of television cameras – came by total accident.
“I got asked by someone at the BBC to do a live appearance with Ben O’Donoghue, who was another Aussie chef I hadn’t met at the time, and they asked us on Australia Day to come and make an Aussie hangover cure,” Stone recalls. “Ben did a Bloody Mary and I did poached eggs and fried mushrooms. We met that day and we did the segment, messed around and it was fun.” A few days later, Stone got that phone call to see if he wanted to be a part of Surfing the Menu with O’Donoghue.
‘I couldn’t remember my lines. I had to do everything 10 times and I knew I was terrible.’
The show was a huge success and it led to an offer by Channel 7 to host My Restaurant Rules in 2004. This, however, was not such a success. Stone lasted just one season. “I was horrible at it,” he says. “When we did Surfing the Menu it didn’t feel much like making a television show; I just felt like I was on the beach with a buddy. Ben and I became really right and we would travel around, have a bit of fun and take the piss out of each other. It just happened there was a crew around us. I thought My Restaurant Rules would be easy enough, but I showed up and it was a very different format. I was the host and had all these scripted pieces. I couldn’t remember my lines. I had to do everything 10 times and I knew I was terrible.”
Fortunately he did get better at television, and the next phone call he got was from a producer in the US to do a “little show” called Take Home Chef, in which he randomly approached a stranger in a supermarket, went home with them and cooked them dinner. That little show turned into 140 episodes and made Stone famous.
His status went next level in 2009 after he got an invitation from Oprah to cook on her show. “The first thing Oprah said to me was ‘do you need a cup of tea?’” Stone recalls, laughing, of meeting the media queen. “She was walking from one part of the studio to the other and as she walked past me she said ‘do you need cup of tea?’ And we went and made a cup of tea together. She was very down to earth and cool. It was a very funny experience.”
Stone also met the actual Queen on the other side of the Atlantic, along with her husband Prince Phillip, when he was invited for afternoon tea in 2004. “I remember getting this letter and it said something like ‘By order of her Majesty the Queen, your presence is requested at Buckingham Palace’. I thought it was a joke,” he explains. “I remember being so excited and so stoked to go to Buckingham Palace. I have had a few moments like that in my life – getting a call from Oprah, that was another one. It was almost like getting the envelope and phone call was more exciting than the actual moment.”
That said, Stone says the tea and scones were very good and he was also on the receiving end of one of Prince Phillip’s famous sarcastic quips. “I had a ridiculous haircut; it was spiky and all over the place. And I walked in and Prince Phillip said ‘I am very glad you did your hair before you came here, sir’,” Stone says, laughing. “I always remembered that.”
Many more television gigs in America followed – including a stint on The Celebrity Apprentice with Trump (Stone got down to the final four contestants before being fired by the future US president), co-hosting Miss USA 2010, appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Biggest Loser and NBC’s Today Show – so he decided to stay in Los Angeles. “I had been gone from London long enough to question whether I should go back there. All my stuff was still packed in boxes in a storage unit, but I was like, what should I do? So I stuck around for a little bit longer, and then I met my wife.”
Stone and his wife, US actress Lindsay Price, met on a blind date in 2009. She was 45 minutes late but thankfully Stone stuck around and neither wanted their date to end. The pair got married in 2013 and have two sons, Hudson, 7, and Emerson, 4. It was the birth of his first child that made the chef re-evaluate what he wanted and finally pursue the dream of opening his own restaurant.
‘What I really wanted for my son was for him to see me get up every morning and go to work.’
“I remember being at the park with Hudson and looking at him and wondering what he would think of me,” Stone says, “thinking of my dad and of my relationship with him, and thinking, ‘I wonder what this kid will think of me one day’. His mum is an actress, and at that point I was making television shows and writing books. I realised what I really wanted for my son is for him to see me get up every morning and go to work and see someone who works hard for what he has. I had been contemplating restaurants for a year or two, but that is what solidified it for me.”
Stone opened Maude (named after his paternal grandmother) in 2014 and Gwen (after his maternal grandmother) in 2016. Located on a boulevard in Beverly Hills, Maude is a venue you could easily walk past if you did not know what you were looking for. The only indication that it is indeed an eatery are the words on the opaque glass window in small type, beneath “Maude”, stating that this is a “restaurant by Curtis Stone”.
“That was always my dream,” he says of his first solo venture. “A little 24-seater restaurant where you could put a lot of detail in the food.” That detail has translated into a seasonal set menu that is inspired by wine regions around the world and changes every three months. Western Australia’s Margaret River is the region of choice until the end of March, but when WISH visited last October it was inspired by the northern Italian region of Piedmont. The tasting menu was paired with wines from that area, and some of the many delicious dishes included braised veal ravioli and an orange, persimmon and honeycomb panna cotta (served separately upstairs in a wine room).
Interestingly, while enjoying the last few glasses of wine and chatting to nearby diners, WISH discovered many did not in fact come to Maude because of Stone’s television profile. “It is our wedding anniversary and so we wanted to celebrate it and we heard this place has an amazing degustation menu,” one half of a dining couple says, before handing over a flyer spruiking a television show (she is a struggling actress with her own television web series in a need of a break; he is a lawyer).
“I have always wanted a restaurant where people come for the food,” Stone says after WISH relays this encounter to the chef. “If you wanted to try and ride on the coattails of your name, you would open a big place and try and get as many people in to make money. But for me it has always been around the art, the gastronomy. When we opened, I am sure it was a bunch of fans who came, but since then we have critically found our place and we let the food speak for itself.”