It’s 7.30am on a brisk winter’s morning when I meet celebrity chef, cookbook author Curtis Stone at the Auction Rooms cafe in North Melbourne – an inner-city neighbourhood that Time Out listed as being among the coolest in the world last year.

Stone is only in Australia for a week and is loading his digital diary with work and family commitments. Carving out some time to sit with him at length has been weeks in the making. He travels to Australia every six weeks from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, actor Lindsay Price, and their two sons.

He’s gearing up to open his first Australian restaurant – at Sydney’s Circular Quay, in 2027 – when the country’s first Waldorf Astoria hotel opens there. On his latest visit home, he also went off-grid to meet turmeric and ginger farmers in Queensland, in his food-advisory role for Coles supermarkets.

A few days before we meet, Stone was celebrating his dad Bryan’s 80th birthday with his whole family at the Lake House in Daylesford, while sneaking in a slow-fermented sourdough masterclass from the regional dining icon’s creator, chef Alla Wolf-Tasker herself. He even took home a doughy starter to unpack the secret while making soup with his mum. Says Stone, smiling: “Alla looked at me and said, ‘Curtis, why are you doing the class?’ I said, ‘I want to see how you make it.’ She thought it was odd but I was curious.”

Afterwards, Price and their elder son, Hudson, 14, returned to LA, but Stone is here longer with his younger son, Emerson, 12 – who loves AFL and making food videos with his dad in their spare time.

Wearing a black polo-knitted jumper and grey woollen scarf, Stone is easily noticeable as he walks into the cafe; his tousled mop of thick, blond hair has kinks in all the right places. He’s less surfer-dude about his hairstyle these days than when he was posing as one in the TV lifestyle series Surfing the Menu with co-host Ben O’Donoghue. The show ran from 2003 to 2006 and clocked up more than 32 episodes. When he said yes to it, Stone also said he could surf, when he couldn’t – not really.

As part of that series, Stone cooked meals on beaches in Byron Bay and travelled to the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, kickstarting his TV career. His Aussie accent is still as true-blue as ever, even though he hasn’t called Australia home for more than 25 years.

On this trip, he’s staying in his mother’s inner-west townhouse in suburban Strathmore. His brother and business partner, Luke, is in nearby Essendon, their families as close-knit as they can be. His father lives near Woodend, an hour north-west of Melbourne, and Stone’s stepsister on his dad’s side, Felicity, is also in Melbourne.

‘I’ve always said “yes” in life … That’s the advice I give to my sons – to do what you love and give it a go – but always do your best.’Curtis Stone

Despite the glare of celebrity, Stone hasn’t forgotten his working roots as an apprentice chef in Melbourne in the 1990s. But it was while travelling through Europe with friends in 1996 that he decided to stay in London, and was forced to pivot when cash got tight. He walked into chef Marco Pierre White’s esteemed restaurant, the Grill Room at the Café Royal, and took on a basement kitchen job that saw him arrive and leave in darkness every day. He then took on positions at Mirabelle and Quo Vadis, other White establishments.

“I went travelling with my mate Tommy and his cousin Robbie; a summer trip we had planned and saved for. They’re great guys; I went to school with Tommy,” says Stone. “I budgeted $100 a day and left Australia with $10,000; I even sold my car. I was around 20 years old and knew if you wanted to be someone, you had to go work in Europe – that’s what everyone did at that time.”

His mother Lorraine, who worked as a florist, kept every postcard her son sent her from London, where he was based for six years. “Before I left Melbourne, Mum said, ‘Curtis, always send a postcard,’ ” he recalls. “I said the same thing in every one of them: ‘I’m alive. Love you, Curtis.’ ”

In London, he couch-surfed, lived with a friend who ran a pub, and at one stage, shared a bedroom with another friend, Alicia, who’s still a mate. “It was £60 a week for half the room,” Stone says. “I was never around because I was always at work.

“Imagine splitting a single room with two single beds on either side of the room nowadays? It’s what you did to make it work. I also used to sneak on the train in the morning to avoid buying a ticket. I’d come up at Piccadilly Circus and if the ticket guards were there, I’d turn around and go back down and go to the next stop to get off.”

Stone was soon far from that universe, breaking into the mainstream as a chef on TV shows, first in Australia and then in the US. He recalls his first gig on MTV, cooking a dish and feeling so nervous he couldn’t look the interviewer in the eye. (The footage on YouTube still gives him goosebumps.)

What was supposed to be a short-term US adventure became his new trajectory after he met his wife there and stayed. Appearing on US TV programs such as Take Home Chef, Today, Top Chef Masters and Oprah Winfrey’s daytime show from 2006 to 2011 – then launching his cookware line on the nation’s Home Shopping Network in 2012 – his face became a staple in American living rooms, and he was soon calling Los Angeles home.

However, that exposure also became an unlikely motivator for a professional shift. More than a decade ago, he began feeling ill at ease about his standing in the industry, after reading a newspaper article.

“The headline said, ‘TV chef does another show’,” he explains. “I was like, ‘Am I known as a TV chef?’ It didn’t sit well, and then it said something about me not really being a restaurant guy: ‘He’s a TV guy.’ I remember thinking that sucked, and it wasn’t right. I thought, ‘What will my boy think of me one day?’ He’ll just think I was some stupid, funny guy on TV. It inspired me to finally work on opening my own place.”

That place was to be an intimate 25-seater in Beverly Hills named for his grandmother, Maude. Making his own footprint in 2014 was the realisation of a dream. “We were the busiest in town, won all these awards and everybody loved it,” he says. “We poured ourselves into it. I spent a ridiculous amount of time there. My wife nearly left me, but it felt like what I needed to do.”

He put in $US4 million (about $4.5-4.9 million at the time) to launch the restaurant – which was awarded a Michelin star in 2019 – and maintained a heady pace running it for 10 years before it closed in 2024. This year also marks another 10-year anniversary: it’s a decade since he opened his iconic LA restaurant, Gwen, another Michelin-star spot, on West Sunset Boulevard he owns with his brother, Luke. It’s a world (and a lifetime) away from dodging London train inspectors.

Stone has taught the staff at Gwen to keep celebrity dining stories to themselves – and out of the media – but the restaurant is known to be an upscale dining destination for the who’s who. It’s where a “water menu” compiled by a “water sommelier” sits alongside a wine list, and where singer Adele dines when she’s in town. It’s also where pop star Demi Lovato pulls up a bench seat, asking Stone if he’d teach her and her husband how to make pasta.

While he looks more boy-next-door than Anthony Bourdain badass, there’s an undercurrent to Stone that still screams rebel. Behind those deer-in-headlights eyes, he’s a measured risk-taker. Committing to his first Sydney restaurant was all about timing, he says: it never felt quite right to Stone until Andrew and Nicola Forrest – owners of the Sydney Waldorf Astoria development – showed an interest. The Australian mining billionaires are now funding the restaurant.

The anticipation over that venture is high, but Stone seems more amped by his older son Hudson’s first try at forging his own singing and acting career at 14 – signing an exclusive record deal with Disney’s Hollywood Records and as a lead in the TV series Camp Rock 3.

“I heard his song Overthinker on the radio for the first time and got all teary in the car,” says Stone. “I don’t know where Hudson gets his sense of maturity from, because Lindsay and I are very juvenile.”

Seeing his son take flight so young has also left Stone pondering his own trajectory from suburban chef to celebrity star and restaurateur. “I’ve always said ‘yes’ in life, for the most part,” he says. “That’s the advice I give to my sons – to do what you love and give it a go – but always do your best. Sure, I want to protect [Hudson] from Hollywood. I also understand that it’s his dream to play guitar and do what he’s doing.”

Stone’s 13-year marriage to Lindsay – whom he met on a blind date – is testament to a love built on mutual respect and support for each other’s careers (with help from personal assistants, of course, who align their calendars to make sure family time and together time are a priority).

“Lindsay and I are so different in many ways, but we really admire and appreciate each other,” Stone says. “She’s super creative and has a giant sticky heart. At the moment, she’s at Camp Rock 3 rehearsals with Hudson and texting me saying, ‘Honey, I’m in a hallway with 10 stage mums and I want to blow my brains out,’ ” he says, laughing. “She’s always been the talent, and now she’s at the bottom of a call sheet as stage mum. But she’s got to do it for the boy. I’m like, ‘Honey, I wish I could be in that hallway for you, I really do.’ ”

Stone’s next challenge is the Sydney restaurant. The name is still undisclosed. Big address. Bigger expectations. It will mean even more travel for him and more time away from home.

“Did I have to do it?” he asks now. “Lindsay did ask me why was I doing it. My response was, ‘I don’t want to die wondering.’ ”

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