Curtis Stone

Work hard and keep a clean station. Your success is up to you.

I had read his cookbook, “White Heat”, and knew I’d thrive working for him. I started working at the Grill Room (Café Royal) the same day I met him. It was an intense job – but I loved it, and it changed the course of my career. I worked with Marco for a couple of years, working my way up the ranks until I was Head Chef of Quo Vadis.

It’s active, creative, and rewarding. Getting to host and produce television is just another arm of it that I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in.

At the end of the day, there are many moving pieces that go into working in a restaurant, from sweeping the front to plating the food, and I want to know that my team will support each other, cover each other, and if they see something that needs to get done, that they’ll do it, regardless of their rank in the kitchen, in order to make the restaurant the best it can be.

You must be able to switch gears at the drop of a pin, whether it’s a guest having a dietary restriction or a line cook calling out sick. You need to be able to stay calm, solve the problem, and get the dish out, regardless of what’s happening behind the scenes.

Being a part of that is the greatest motivator. The culinary industry is an endless education, there is never an opportunity when you are not learning something new.

For my restaurant Maude, we are constantly traveling to different regions and trying all the food and wine we can – we captured this process in my series, "Field Trip with Curtis Stone." It’s important for me and my team to not just understand where a dish originates, but to know where the ingredients come from, who the purveyors are, and what story they’re telling. It all comes together and helps us innovate when we’re back in the kitchen.

When I catered the 28th Annual SAG Awards with my team, we cooked everything day of, so it was an intense day. There were several different components to the dishes, and it was critical that we all worked together and in sync to make sure we plated just under 700 dishes and had them ready to go at the same time. I could never have done that on my own!

We turned Gwen into a marketplace for people to pick up groceries and easy meal kits. We temporarily shifted Maude into The Pie Room, where we’d sell sweet and savory pies. Both showed the resilience and adaptability of our teams, and while both restaurants are open for regular business again now, I’m very proud of how we came together to keep as many jobs as possible as well as how we were able to support our local communities.

I surround myself with a good team who I trust and rely on and try to start my day by taking some time for myself. I try to take the boys to school and get to the boxing gym before heading to the restaurants and office.