‘Dreaming about it for 30 years’: Curtis Stone to open first Australian restaurant

Globe-trotting chef Curtis Stone will open his first restaurant in Australia next year, with the celebrity chef confirming he will launch a restaurant and separate rooftop bar on the upper floors of the incoming Waldorf Astoria Sydney at Circular Quay.

The Los Angeles-based Australian chef is an experienced restaurateur and Michelin-star recipient in his adopted US city, but has declined tens of offers over the years to open a restaurant on home soil. That changed when billionaires Andrew and Nicola Forrest, who own the Sydney Waldorf through their property company Fiveight, and their team came knocking. The Sydney Waldorf Astoria will be the first Australian outpost for the hotel chain.

Stone was impressed by their desire to create a “legacy project, a gift back to Sydney”. The restaurant brief was simple: create something “distinctly Australian” and “super special”.

What form that takes has been left to Stone. The 100-seat harbourside restaurant, the name of which the chef won’t reveal until it is trademarked, will be contemporary Australian. It will offer a la carte, a lesson in diner flexibility Stone learnt when he opened with a tasting-only menu at one of his US restaurants. He’ll “cook over fire”, and the menu will be rooted in Australian ingredients.

“We’ve got some of the best seafood in the world, beautiful fruit and vegetables, probably the best meat in the world, and stuff no one else has in our native ingredients,” Stone said.

Located on the 24th floor (the bar is a level up on the 25th), the dining room is already starting to take shape, with a grand brass staircase in place in readiness for its launch in 2027. But the postcard views of Sydney Harbour, the Opera House, jagged shoreline and patches of Australian bush are the stars of the show.

“You always dream of doing a restaurant back home. I’ve been dreaming about it for 30 years,” Stone said. He worked at the Southern Cross Hotel in his hometown of Melbourne, before it was torn down. “Not because of me,” he quipped. The young chef headed to London chasing experience, which he found during a meteoric rise under celebrated British chef Marco Pierre White.

‘I want people who live in Sydney to think of us when they have someone in town.’

Despite his expat existence, Stone has always kept a toe in Australian waters. There was the TV series Surfing the Menu, in which he explored Australian produce. As ambassador for Coles, Stone is perennially on our screens courtesy of the supermarket’s television commercials. Couple that with an event business in Melbourne, and Stone is already accumulating bags of frequent-flyer points shuffling between business interests on both sides of the Pacific.

Sydneysiders have rightfully become a little sceptical of the longevity of local hotel chef partnerships given the recent departures of Mitch Orr at 25hours Hotel in Paddington and Beau Clugston at the Ace Hotel Sydney after just 12 months. Stone said he had inked a “longer term” deal. Just how long, he isn’t saying. Already back here every six to eight weeks, he said that’ll “pick up massively” as the opening approaches.

Word that the famed US Waldorf brand planned to import the US-based Aussie for its restaurant has been rife for some time in hospitality circles. In June last year, Stone’s team denied to Good Food that he and the hotel group were talking about opening a restaurant at the site when asked for comment.

Stone’s experience in the US market, where his restaurant and butcher shop Gwen has held a Michelin star, brought the chef into close proximity with the Waldorf brand and its culinary lineage. There are no plans to give the famed Waldorf salad air time at the restaurant, but Stone said it could find its way onto the bar menu or downstairs in the hotel’s lounge bar Peacock Alley. Another Waldorf specialty – eggs Benedict – more likely will because the hotel restaurant will open for breakfast.

Stone agrees that Australians have traditionally had a more cautious attitude to hotel restaurants than people from many parts of the world, but he believes that is changing. “Ultimately hotels are beautiful places to come; hospitality is at the centre of what they do. Some do it well, some maybe not.

“I want people who live in Sydney to think of us when they have someone in town,” he said. “I get goosebumps every time I walk up here.”