A Bit Tasty

The Age

Friday September 26, 2008

Dani Valent

Americans have fallen hard for Curtis Stone, the Melbourne chef-turned-TV hunk, writes Dani Valent.

Curtis Stone is standing in the kitchen of his Hollywood Hills home while food photographers and stylists bustle around him. "Oh, that's it, that's the money," says one excited woman, as the camera clicks and pings. "Mm, yeah, oh, yeah," says a deeply thrilled man. Curtis Stone is 192centimetres of blond hunk but, for once, the focus isn't on him. This money shot is all about a shredded pork sandwich, soon to pop up on AOL's food site, just one more place the suddenly ubiquitous Stone flashes his sharp knives and pearly whites. One more snap and it's a wrap: the pork is off duty and so is Stone.

When the 32-year-old Melbourne chef moved to Los Angeles in early 2006, he had a track record as a chef (running a gun London restaurant) and a decent media CV (Surfing the Menu, My Restaurant Rules) but he wasn't well known in the US. Two-and-a-half years later, Curtis Stone is a star. He was named Sexiest Newcomer in People Magazine in 2006. He's a talk show regular, charming Oprah, getting Martha Stewart so het up that she raised her perfect eyebrows, fawned over on Today because he grates lemon zest like a pro. He's a smash-hit topic on the internet: as well as zillions of "He's soooooooo hot" comments, there are videos of Stone being nice at book-signings, walking into restaurants, washing dishes in nothing but an apron ("Curtis's bare bottom!!!"), and saying a bleeped "fuck" to camera ("I haven't heard f**k said in such an adorable way until now," writes one smitten fan).

Stone has ridden the surge on the back of his daily cooking show, Take Home Chef, which goes like this: he ambushes a pretty lady in a grocery store, pays the bill, and heads home with her to help with dinner. The astonished husband/boyfriend turns up a few hours later, recovers from being cook-olded, and everyone enjoys a lovely meal. The show combines Stone's knockabout charm with fresh, easy recipes and has been a surprise hit. The original 60show slate grew to 140 episodes.

Stone reckons the attention has more to do with the fact that he's Australian than any personal qualities. "It's not me, it's the Aussie accent," he demurs. "I've got a bunch of Aussie mates over here now and they all seem to do extremely well." He thinks Americans also appreciate Australians as easygoing funsters. "We're not super-intense. I think people enjoy that," he says. "And maybe girls like guys that can cook."

We're talking by phone: it's hot in LA, cool in Melbourne, but Stone straddles the distance with easy warmth. He cranks out his story in amiable style, swearing frequently, using my name so often I wonder for a moment if he learnt name-checking in some kind of skills workshop. I banish the thought. No, Curtis just really likes me. Or, at least, that's the feeling he gives you: there's a dead-set sparkle in Stone and you don't even need to be in the room with him to catch a glint.

Stone grew up in East Keilor with his mother, a florist, and older brother Luke. "She was a busy woman, my mum," says Stone. "She was a single mother, she had two demanding boys." But she still found time to keep a close watch on her family's diet. "Mum was really strict. We weren't allowed Coca-Cola, Twisties, all that stuff the other kids got in their lunchboxes." Dinners were healthy versions of traditional meat and three: grilled fish or lamb chops and greens. "She wasn't adventurous on a day-to-day basis," says Stone. "It was more about getting food on the table before Luke and I tore down the house." Stone was a sporty boy who could never get enough. "I was greedy. I had a massive appetite, still do." He particularly enjoyed demolishing his mother's baked offerings. "She'd make great biscuits, cookies, cakes. I loved that smell as you walked into the house."

Stone first cooked with his grandmothers: one specialised in shortbread, the other in fudge. "I was probably a pain in her arse," says Stone of his fudge-making gran. "I was always begging her to make it." He was four when he first grabbed the wooden spoon. "I loved weighing things and how, at the end of it, you'd created something." When he was five, he adapted a Women's Weekly caramel slice recipe to create the exact not-too-sweet, not-too-biscuity treat he wanted. "I changed the quantities, went a bit wild. I got Mum to write it out for me, pasted it in the recipe scrapbook. I was pretty proud of myself."

Summer holidays were spent with his father, an accountant, who specialised in blackening food on the barbecue at an Apollo Bay motel. "He burned everything he put on. Everything," says Stone. The boys got an occasional reprieve at the local pub. "We always had to eat off the kids' menu but on the last night Dad said we could have whatever we wanted. One year, Luke ordered the lobster mornay and Dad nearly had a heart attack."

At school, Stone excelled at football and socialising. He made friends with Shannon Bennett - now owner/chef of Vue de Monde - in their early days at the all-boys Essendon Grammar. "He was bigger than me, a good bloke, one of my protectors," says Bennett, who was targeted by the odd bully. Stone held his own on the footy field alongside future AFL champions Scott West and Dustin Fletcher. "Curtis was a good footballer," says Essendon backman Fletcher. "He had a fair left foot on him and he was a decent size. Sometimes the big fella would lose his temper but he was a very good competitor." Off-field Stone was "very easy to get along with, always joking and laughing," says Fletcher. Stone was far from an A-grade student, but he is proud of some school achievements, most notably that he wangled visits to the girls at Grammar's sister school, Penleigh, by enrolling in a home economics class. Cooking wasn't his motivation. "It was all about talking to the girls," he admits. Fellow home-ec student Shannon Bennett was impressed with Stone's ability to chat with girls as though they were regular people. "Curtis always managed to keep girls as really good friends," says Bennett. "He had a few girlfriends but he wasn't a real ladies' man."

Stone knew he wasn't destined for life at a desk. "I'm not good at sitting still. I always wanted to do something physical: a builder, a gardener, a chef." He enjoyed helping his mum at the florist, fetching, carrying and sweeping (and spending his earnings at a nearby French bakery), but cooking became Stone's number-one career choice after he fell in with the Italian family of a school friend. He was taken with his friend's father, a chef. "He had long hair, he'd sleep in, he'd come home late," says Stone. "I liked that unconventional way of life. It wasn't like everyone else's dad going to work at nine and coming home at six." Stone really got excited when he visited the kitchen of the family's Carlton restaurant. "I saw a few fireworks, some swearing," he says. "We said we'd work for free topping and tailing beans but he told us to get out of the way."

It wasn't until he finished year 12 in 1993 that Stone was able to chop vegetables in a professional kitchen. But his early days as an apprentice chef at the Southern Cross Hotel were far from thrilling. "I thought I'd be cooking, being creative," says Stone. Instead, he'd often spend six hours peeling carrots. "Then you'd say, 'Chef, I'm finished with the carrots,' and he'd say, 'Well, see those three bags of onions, you can peel them.' After six months, I thought, fuck, this is going to do my head in." Stone added Bachelor of Business studies to his dance card, and shifted to the Savoy Park Plaza, a smaller five-star hotel, when the Southern Cross folded. His instructor was Austrian taskmaster Ehrenfried Barth, now a teacher at William Angliss catering college. "I knew he had potential," says Barth. "He'd always be asking me what I was doing. He wanted to try everything." Barth freely admits he pushed Stone hard, teaching him the basics in tough-love style. Stone's personal qualities helped him get along. "He knew how to deal with people," says Barth. "He could talk people into showing him things."

Barth encouraged his protege to travel and, aged 22, Stone headed off with a friend and $10,000 in savings. After scrimping through Europe on $100 a day, the boys got to the Greek islands. "There were girls dancing on the beach in their bikinis and we thought it was the best thing in the world," he says. "We bought the entire beach a drink. We completely blew the budget." Like plenty of Aussie backpackers before him, Stone fetched up broke in London. After a night on a mate's couch, he went job-hunting. "I was a decent cook. I thought I'd find a pub job no problem," he says. But a grim morning of pavement pounding produced no joy and he found himself on Regent Street watching toffs totter from the venerable Cafe Royal, owned at the time by high-octane chef Marco Pierre White. Stone figured he had nothing to lose, so he walked around the back to the kitchen door and asked for a job. Someone had just been sacked (a regular occurrence), so Stone was hauled in. He threw an apron over his T-shirt and was sent to the larder section, told to keep his head down. Somewhere along the way he offered to work for free. "I put in a month, everyone got paid and no envelope came my way," he says. He approached White. "I told him I was sleeping on a mate's sofa, I was on my arse, I didn't need much, but I needed enough to sleep and eat." The next month, he was on the books.

So began six years working for the food world's maddest bastard. "On the stoves, he's brilliant," says Stone. "He's a super-energised individual with a great palate, but he's mad, so intense." It was impossible not to go a little bit crazy too. "You work to 1am, clean your stove, head out for a beer at two. By four, you're sleeping in the change room and at seven, you get up and start cooking. It was ridiculous and it was great." Stone loved the high-end kitchen, where truffles and foie gras were common currency and all the terminology was French. He loved being part of a restaurant that was feted and trumpeted. But he also compares it to sport. "When the orders start coming in at lunch service, it's a similar feeling to running onto the footy field. If someone's in the shit you help them out, if someone's getting screamed at, you'll pull him out of it. I really enjoyed it. Some of my fondest memories are of working like a dog."

This pup was rewarded with fast progression through the ranks of Marco Pierre White's expanding empire. He was second chef at Mirabelle when the restaurant won its first Michelin star and he was put in charge of Soho mainstay Quo Vadis, aged just 25. "It's living your life in fast-forward but that's how it went," he says. On quick trips home, his mum would worry about how skinny and pale he was. "It was true. We'd get into the kitchen when it was dark, we'd leave when it was dark. I was going pretty hard, working like crazy." When he explained what he was up to in London, "I wouldn't be trying to brag, but I felt like I was bullshitting. 'I run a restaurant. We turn over #90,000 a week. We've got a bottle of wine on the wine list that's #30,000.' My dad's an accountant and he'd be looking at me like I was insane but it was all true."

Working for Marco Pierre White brought its own special challenges. "He was an eccentric person, he prided himself on breaking the rules," says Stone, recalling one time he walked into the kitchen to find White wearing underpants, smoking a cigar and carving roast beef. Another time, the boss strode across Mirabelle's newly-laid million-pound floor, straight from a pheasant hunt, with his waders still on and 14 dead pheasants in his hands. White's passion for shooting swept Stone up too, but it also translated into extra work for the young Australian. "It costs #50,000 to shoot somewhere like Highclere Castle for the day so Marco would get his shooting in by offering to cater a wedding for the Duke of Wherever and Lady Such and Such. I'd get a call that I'd be doing this wedding next Saturday. Great, thanks."

White was never very fond of the media and, when Stone was asked to be part of a glossy book about London chefs, White told him, "Chefs that waste their time doing shit like that aren't decent chefs but you do what you fucking want." Stone considered that White's blessing and agreed to do the book. "It was a turning point in my life. Jamie Oliver's agent rang up and wanted to talk about television stuff after that," he says. He did a few bits and pieces on British television, including Dinner in a Box, where he helped viewers solve kitchen conundrums. "I didn't really enjoy it that much, to be honest. I wanted everything to be perfect. I was too proud, trying to make everything restaurant quality." He also struggled with being told what to do. "I was head chef of a restaurant, I had a short temper, I was a boss. Suddenly, I've got a director saying, 'No, that doesn't look any good.' I struggled with it."

He was still at Quo Vadis when he appeared on a breakfast show with West Australian chef Ben O'Donoghue. The pair were spotted by Australian producer Marian Bartsch, who was looking for a dishy Aussie expat cook to front her new show, Surfing the Menu. She saw something in Curtis Stone immediately. "Your initial impression is staring you in the face: he looks fantastic on camera. But it was more than that. It was one of his first TV appearances, but you could see that he would blossom with good direction."

For Surfing the Menu, Stone and O'Donoghue travelled around Australia, cooking and hitting the waves. They filmed three series in three years, drawing nearly a million viewers at the show's height, and authored two tie-in books. Stone felt like he'd burst out of the dungeon and into daylight. "Suddenly, I thought, Christ, I've spent my whole life in a basement. It was so different to the confines of kitchen, the long hours. Suddenly I was meeting interesting, creative people, getting life experience." Between series, Stone worked with UK designer Terence Conran on a restaurant launch in London and hosted Channel Seven reality show My Restaurant Rules. The scripts, teleprompters and live crosses of My Restaurant Rules made it uncomfortably different from throwing on board shorts, chucking prawns on the barbie and chiacking with Ben O'Donoghue. "Suddenly, I'm standing in a suit at an airport doing a scripted piece to camera with 30 people watching," says Stone. "You feel like a dickhead and can't remember the words you're supposed to say." Stone came across as a brawny, talking clothes peg. "I wasn't much good at it and it frustrated me. Everything else I'd done, I'd been half decent at. With this, I wasn't doing much of a job." Not that he ever heard that from anyone around him. "I came from an environment where if you made a sauce a tiny bit wrong, your boss would come running over, throw your pan against the wall and call you a fucking arsehole," he says. "Then I came into television where someone says to you, 'That was perfect, that was great. And we're just going to do it one more time.' It's a lot easier to know where you stand when you're behind the stove." The show rated and, as Seven dragged it out, Stone loosened up.

While he was filming the third series of Surfing the Menu, Stone shot the pilot for Take Home Chef in Los Angeles. As soon as filming began, he had a more-or-less full-time job accosting women in supermarkets. Two years later, Stone is over it. "It does get a bit stale," he says. "You get to the point of walking up to somebody in a grocery store the 121st time and you wonder how you can do it differently." He's also had enough of the hygiene paranoia of the American home cook. "They have sanitising wipes for supermarket trolleys and, one time, somebody put a pair of latex gloves on the chopping board for me." But, in general, he's finding that America's enthusiasm and energy matches his own. He hasn't got any better at sitting still: another TV show is in the works and there's the compulsory line of celeb chef designer products. "We decided to do a range of cookware that makes people's lives easier. Before you know it, we're selling into eight countries," he says, slipping easily into PR-speak.

Shannon Bennett admires his buddy's career path. "I thought he was behind the eight ball, in a way, that he should get his own restaurant, but he had a plan. He enjoys the media and he's always had the cheekiness that makes it work. Curtis turns up an hour late, no-one gives a stuff. I turn up an hour late, everyone is ropeable. He can get away with it." Bennett was mystified when Stone employed a PA two years ago. "I didn't get it but he had the foresight to realise things were going to take off." The assistant, Jodie Gatt, has been friends with Stone since primary school. She says he hasn't changed a bit. "He was always creating excitement, always an instigator," she says. "You can't manufacture that energy and feeling."

Back in his gleaming kitchen, Stone shoves aside the pork sandwich for a bowl of plump cherries. "Mmm, they're so beautiful," he says, and I'm sure there's cherry juice tracking down the stubble on his much admired jaw. "One day you're living in a little place, the next day it's a bit bigger place and then all of a sudden you're in a beautiful house," he says. "It's small steps but I've had an amazing ride." I can feel his smile all the way from LA as he plucks another Californian cherry. "They're so ripe," he says. "I just can't help myself." (m)

Stone statistics

Born Melbourne

Lives Hollywood Hills

Age 32

Career highlights

Stone spent six years working for Marco Pierre White in London, first at Cafe Royal, then as second chef at Michelin-starred Mirabelle, then as head chef at Quo Vadis in Soho, when he was 25.

TV shows

Has his own daily show, Take Home Chef, in the US and is a talk show regular (Oprah, Martha Stewart et al). Previously a host of Surfing the Menu and My Restaurant Rules in Australia.

Awards

Named Sexiest Newcomer by People Magazine, 2006.

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