Curtis Stone is chef and owner of three Los Angeles restaurants, and a media star with a massive following. But he’s also a husband and a father of two boys (Emerson and Hudson) who cooks at home for his family. “My wife just got back from Mexico. I made her homemade pasta with slow-cooked lamb shoulder that just sort of fell apart with a little bit of broccoli rabe pesto. As soon as she walked in the house, she was like, ‘Oh my god, what is it? What’s that smell?’ I said, ‘It’s the dish that I cooked for you when you came home from hospital with Emerson.’ It’s emotive. Food can create beautiful memories.”
That might not be an everyday meal for all of us, but with a little planning and advance prep you too can make chef-level meals. “I don’t think you should cook at home the way you cook at a restaurant, because you’re looking for a different feeling,” he says. The recipes he supplied here are adapted and simplified dishes from Maude, one of his two Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence restaurants in Los Angeles, along with Gwen. (He also has a third, Woodend, at a Belmond Hotel on the Riviera Maya.)
Stone serves a big table, with countless TV appearances from food-centric shows like Top Chef Masters to more mainstream places like Oprah, Ellen and Today. He has a line of cookware with HSN and has written six cookbooks. He’s also active in a number of charities, including Chrysalis in Los Angeles and the national Adopt Together. So while his restaurants are fairly small and rarified, reflecting his career background, his broad appeal reflects his upbringing and character and mission to share what he knows and loves.
Stone was born and raised in Melbourne. He traces his love of and curiosity about food to a young age: “I’ve always been really interested in how things taste. As a little kid my mom would joke with me and say, ‘You’re a greedy little guy.’ I’d always want more than my fair share. I’m always looking at the person’s plate next to me and wondering how rude it would be if I put my fork in there just to have a little taste. When you have a passion like that, you’re absolutely obsessed with why things taste the way they do.”
He did not do especially well in school and found the swaggering lifestyle of a friend’s chef father appealing. After graduating he went to a technical college, studying cooking a couple of days a week and working in restaurants the rest. The balance of theory and practical application snapped for him, and he landed at the Savoy Hotel in Melbourne. But still he wanted more. He was enamored of a cookbook by Marco Pierre White, the first British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, so he headed to London.
“Service always excited me,” he recalls. “The fear of wondering whether I’m going to have enough prep and the orders were going to come too fast for me to keep up. I got some sort of joy out of the stress. Marco talked about it in his book, and at his restaurant it sounded ridiculously intense and crazy, and I thought I had to experience that. So I blithely got on a plane for England.”
On arrival Stone found the restaurant and went to the back door to offer his services. He started work that day with no discussion of pay or hours. For the first time, he was surrounded by some of the best chefs working. “When you’re thrown into an environment like that you learn pretty fast,” he says. During his eight years with White, Stone was made head chef at his restaurant Quo Vadis.
He was then invited to co-host an Australian cooking show called Surfing the Menu in which he and another chef would travel to farms and see where ingredients came from and what made them special, which was a revelation. Direct exposure to the source deepened his approach to cooking, started him on his way as a gardener and contributed to his move to Los Angeles.
“I got to LA and sort of fell in love with it for all the wrong reasons,” he says. “Not because of its culture or history or art but because the weather is always nice and the beaches are pretty and it’s a really easy way of life. On top of that were the unbelievable ingredients and growers. I buy carrots out of the high desert and literally an hour away I can get the most unbelievable tomatoes. So I started thinking about opening a restaurant.”
During his early days there he met actor Lindsay Price; they married in 2013 and have two sons. She knew running restaurants would mean long hours, so during the Maude buildout she scratched her name in the wet concrete floor. They recently expanded their holdings to include a farm and vineyard in Malibu.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Maude, which he named after his paternal grandmother, whom he considers his first cooking teacher. He put ingredients first by centering the changing tasting menu on a single ingredient. In its next iteration, he toured wine regions with his team and returned to Los Angeles to build a menu around each, whether Burgundy, Australia’s Margaret River or Spain’s Rioja.
When he was 18 he was dating a woman whose generous father had a considerable cellar. The hook was set. Working in Europe blossomed his education: “With great restaurants come great cellars. The culture of wine is just so fascinating. And the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. When we started doing those trips with the team we got to go to some of the most beautiful wine regions and met winemakers and tasted more. The more you learn, the more fascinating it gets.”
In 2016 he opened Gwen, named after his maternal grandmother, with his brother Luke. (Both restaurants have a Michelin star.) Gwen offers an à la carte menu, much of it cooked over a live fire, and in another case of Stone putting ingredients front and center includes a butcher shop selling specialty meats and charcuterie. Last year he opened Woodend in Mexico, largely because he was seduced again by local ingredients and the boutique quality of the hotel.
Today Stone’s ethic continues to promote both direct, broad appeal and sophistication. Both modes are found in the following recipes. “Some of my favorite dining experiences have been super simple, like an incredible tomato with a brilliant ball of burrata and some good-quality olive oil,” he says. “You don’t need much to make food great when you start with really good ingredients. And then other times you see a chef do something magical, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve got to figure that out, whether it was the technique or the equipment or whatever to transform something.”
