The double life of Curtis Stone

With a brand new Coles contract and award-winning LA restaurants, Australia's most recognisable chef sits at the crossroads of two very different kinds of fame.

I have just finished telling Curtis Stone that I assume his level of fame is lesser in Los Angeles than in Australia when a man sheepishly approaches the table. Stone is fresh off a flight from Melbourne, sitting in a swank LA brunch spot, and I've been wondering if he could so easily eat in peace in Australia, where he has arguably one of the most recognisable faces in the country. "Excuse me," the man says, a small girl clinging to his leg. "Are you the chef at the Beverly Hills restaurant, Maude?"

Despite the celebrity recognition, my point stands: In LA, Stone is known for his restaurants. Not his supermarket endorsement deals, not (necessarily) for his television appearances. He is known for Maude, his tiny restaurant in Beverly Hills, and for Gwen, the sparkling butchery and meat-focused restaurant he opened in Hollywood with his brother, Luke. Each of the restaurants is named for one of Stone's grandmothers, and each has won him numerous accolades.

But when I talk to Australians about Stone, the conversation invariably goes the same way. "He's actually a really good chef," I say. "His restaurants in LA are fantastic."

"Really?" the Australian will say. "I thought he was just the Coles guy."

I assume that this must drive him crazy, but he seems at peace with his Australian fame being tied to a supermarket chain. His recent trip back to Melbourne was in part to sign another two-year contract with Coles, by the end of which he will have represented the company for a decade. Consumers see his ubiquitous smiling face plastered around the store and on television commercials, but behind the scenes his influence goes far deeper.

I didn't want my kids to think I just got lucky and was good-looking enough to get on TV.

Curtis Stone

"I started out as the face of a campaign," Stone says. "And then I did another one. And then I started talking to the CEO at the time, and challenging him on sourcing and a bunch of things." Eventually he was given a role they call Fresh Food Advisor. "In eight years, we've taken the hormones out of their meat products, we've moved all of their poultry to an RSPCA program, we took the sow stalls out of their pork production."

In these ways, as well as the kinds of produce now available thanks to Stone's advocacy, the chef is influencing the way many Australians actually eat every day in a far more profound way than any one restaurant might. In fact, it's hard to imagine a greater impact someone could have on the national diet than through the place so many people shop for food.

Stone's Coles spokesman gig is part of what makes him so recognisable in Australia. But his media presence here began back in 2003 when he appeared on a popular ABC show called Surfing the Menu. At the time, Stone was working in London for Marco Pierre White, coming to Australia for a few weeks at a time to film and then going back to Britain to resume his place behind the stove as head chef at Quo Vadis, which White then owned.

Stone's affability and charisma on Surfing the Menu caught the attention of producers in America, for a show called Take Home Chef on cable channel TLC. "They probably wanted Jamie Oliver but couldn't get him," Stone jokes. Take Home Chef, which began filming in 2006, became an international hit for TLC. It also took Stone to Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since. His television gigs in the US have included regular appearances on the Today Show, and spots on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Iron Chef America, and The Biggest Loser.

He was a judge on Top Chef Masters, hosted the Miss USA pageant in 2010, and in that same year competed on The Celebrity Apprentice, eventually being fired – coming in fourth out of 14 contestants – by someone then known as The Donald and now known as the President of the United States. Despite all of these (and many more) media appearances, Stone has never quite made it to A-list celebrity status in America. It is hard, after all, to become a famous chef when you've never had a restaurant and no one has ever tasted your cooking.

For that reason, as well as many others, Stone decided to open his first business, Maude, in 2014. It would be the first time he had cooked in a restaurant in almost a decade. In 2013 he'd married his girlfriend, actress Lindsay Price, and the couple already had one child and another on the way. Parenthood played a role in his decision to become a working chef-restaurateur – "I didn't want my kids to think I just got lucky and was good-looking enough to get on TV," he told me a few years ago. "I was raised by butchers, and a mum who worked all day then came home and cooked dinner and cleaned the house. I wanted my kids to know the value of hard work and see that I was capable of it."

And work hard he did. Stone's name recognition got him more than one offer from investors, willing to fund glitzy restaurants in Sydney or Las Vegas – the type of place where a chef writes a menu, hires someone to execute it, smiles for the photographers on opening night and then is rarely seen in the building again. Maude was the antithesis of that type of restaurant. With only 24 seats, it was never going to be a cash cow. And the concept Stone came up with – to serve an ingredient-themed 10-course degustation menu that changed every month – insured a level of creative intensity that basically never let up.

It was a concept that was inspired and flawed. On the one hand, it gave customers a reason to return over and over again, to see what each new month held. On the other, the brilliance of the food relied heavily on the ability of the ingredient-of-the-month to hold diners' interest over three hours and around a dozen preparations. The cooking was thoughtful and elegant and technique-driven, but it sometimes strained under the weight of its gimmick. In its finest moments Maude was the best restaurant in Los Angeles (an honour I gave it in 2015 – after eating the utterly brilliant pea menu – when I was restaurant critic at LA Weekly). On off months – avocado was a toughie – it was as much a thought experiment as an exercise in pleasure.

No matter what the ingredient was, Stone was there almost every night, cooking or expediting and delivering food to customers (many of them ecstatic Australian tourists). He spent his days in the separate test kitchen, preparing for upcoming menus.

In 2016 Stone opened Gwen in Hollywood, along with his brother, Luke, who moved to LA with his family in order to run the business. If Maude was conceptually ambitious, it paled in comparison to the vast ambitions of Gwen. The self-funded project is a butcher, a daytime cafe, and a two-storey restaurant. The brothers completely rebuilt the interior of the Art Deco-era building, imbuing it with a grand sense of drama, and adding glassed-in meat storage and curing rooms and an open kitchen built for cooking over fire. In order to serve Australian Blackmore beef, which Stone considers the best beef in the world, he became an importer and distributor; the only way it made sense for Blackmore to sell to him was if he in turn could distribute it along the West Coast. Ahead of Gwen's opening, Stone said that he hoped the restaurant would inspire Michelin to return to Los Angeles (the French culinary guide operated in LA briefly, but pulled out of the city in 2012).

Even more so than Maude, Gwen struggled under the weight of its format. The cooking was undeniably brilliant, but the experience was confusing. Stone served a degustation menu that included none of the beautiful steak that greeted you at the butcher counter by the front door. The only way to have the steak was to add it as an expensive supplement to an already huge amount of food. Eventually, the brothers decided to change format, offering a degustation but also an a la carte menu. "It is the first time in my life I've cooked an a la carte menu at a restaurant," Stone admits. But it's working: These days, it is one of the country's best steak houses, that beautiful Blackmore beef paired with sides that are just modern enough to feel exciting.

And late last year, Stone abandoned his ingredient-of-the-month format at Maude. "We got together for our annual planning meeting, and everyone just seemed bored," he says. Not wanting to repeat ingredients, they had exhausted all of the obvious choices. "And I felt like, if it's getting tiresome for us, it's going to end up feeling that way to the guests as well." Choosing to highlight the strength of his staff – particularly longtime director of operations Ben Aviram and Justin Hilbert, who became Maude's executive chef when Gwen opened – Stone decided to theme the menus around a wine region of the world. The menus now run for three months instead of one, allowing Stone and his team to focus on four different regions annually.

Is he planning to feature an Australian wine region? "I'd love to," he says, although the idea poses some challenges. "It would be ridiculous to try to present Australia as one wine region," he explains. "But doing something like the Margaret River, or whatever, might be too specific for an American audience. And then there's the food … what is the food of the Margaret River, exactly?"

Whatever the answer to that question, I can think of no better chef to try to come up with an edible answer.

If he'd arranged his life differently, if he'd come home after his time in Britain rather than moved to Los Angeles, Stone might have the kind of straightforward fame of other celebrity chefs. But as it is, his life is a strange dichotomy, one in which he is vastly more famous in Australia, where he isn't taken seriously as a chef, than in the US, where his real life's work is being done.

I ask Stone a question I've asked him at least three times before over the years: Would you ever open a restaurant in Australia? And he gives me the same answer he always has: "I would but I'd have to move there to do it. I get offers all the time to do it, but there's no amount of money in the world that would make it worth it to me. Not in my home town." (Stone pauses here to muse that this statement is perhaps a bit hypocritical, given that he has his name on a Princess cruise ship restaurant, but that he thinks he's done a good job with it and it's not like he's going to sail around the world full-time.)

Stone admits to a longing to move back to Australia. His brother Luke has just returned after two years in LA, although he's still heavily involved in the business side of Gwen and travels back and forth constantly. "I told my wife I wanted to move home," Stone says. "She tells the story better, but basically it started out with me saying, 'Let's move to Australia', and by the end of the conversation we'd decided to move to Brentwood." Their new LA neighbourhood is closer to the ocean – and a few kilometres closer to Australia – than where they had been living in Hollywood. "I have no idea what it would be like to move back after all this time," he says.

Does it bother him, I ask, that most of Australia doesn't know that he can actually cook? "No," he says, flashing his trademark gleaming, oh-so-Aussie grin. "Now, opening a shit restaurant in Australia? That's where I'd feel real shame."