Curtis Stone to open restaurant at Waldorf Astoria Sydney in Circular Quay
The Los Angeles-based Australian chef has turned down multiple offers to open a restaurant on his home soil. But he was tempted by a 100-seat harborside restaurant at the newly opened Waldorf Astoria Sydney in Circular Quay.
Globetrotting chef Curtis Stone will open his first restaurant in Australia next year, with the celebrity chef confirming he will open a restaurant and a separate rooftop bar on the upper floors of the new Waldorf Astoria Sydney in Circular Quay.
The Los Angeles-based Australian chef is a seasoned restaurateur and Michelin star holder in his adopted US city, but has rejected dozens of offers to open a restaurant on his home soil over the years. That changed when billionaires Andrew and Nicola Forrest, who own the Sydney Waldorf through their property company Fiveight, and their team came knocking on the door. The Sydney Waldorf Astoria will be the hotel chain’s first outpost in Australia.
Stone was impressed by their desire to create “a heritage project, a gift to Sydney”. The brief for the restaurant was simple: create something “distinctly Australian” and “super special.”
What form this will take is left to Stone. The 100-seat harborside restaurant, whose name the chef cannot reveal until it is trademarked, will be a contemporary Australian restaurant. It will offer a la carte, a lesson in restaurant flexibility that Stone learned when he opened one of his U.S. restaurants with only a tasting menu. It will “cook over a fire” and the menu will be based on Australian ingredients.
“We have some of the best seafood in the world, beautiful fruits and vegetables, probably the best meat in the world, and local ingredients that no one else has,” Stone said.
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Located on the 24th floor (the bar is on the 25th), the dining room is already starting to take shape and the grand brass staircase is ready for its opening in 2027. But the postcard views of Sydney Harbour, the Opera House, the craggy coastline and the Australian bush are the stars of the show.
“You always dream of opening a restaurant in your hometown. I’ve been dreaming about it for 30 years,” Stone said. He was working at the Southern Cross Hotel in his hometown of Melbourne before it was demolished. “Not because of me,” he quipped. The young chef went to London to chase the experience he gained during the meteoric rise under the famous British chef Marco Pierre White.
‘I want people living in Sydney to think of us when there’s someone in town.’
Curtis Stone
Despite his foreign presence, Stone always kept an eye on Australian waters. There was a TV series Navigating the MenuWhere he discovered Australian products. As an ambassador for Coles, Stone is always on our screens thanks to the supermarket’s television adverts. Add to that an events job in Melbourne and Stone is already racking up bags of frequent flyer points bouncing back and forth between business interests on both sides of the Pacific.
Sydneysiders have rightly been a bit skeptical about the longevity of local hotel chef partnerships, given the recent departures of Mitch Orr from 25hours Hotel in Paddington and Beau Clugston from Ace Hotel Sydney after just 12 months. Stone said he signed a “longer-term” deal. It doesn’t say how long it will take. While I’m already back here every six to eight weeks, that will “increase greatly” as the opening gets closer, he said.
News that the famous US brand Waldorf was planning to import US-based Aussie for its restaurant had been rife in hospitality circles for some time. In June last year, Stone’s team denied to Good Food that he and the hotel group had talked about opening a restaurant on the site when asked for comment.
Stone’s experience in the US market, where his restaurant and butcher shop Gwen has a Michelin star, has brought the chef closer to the Waldorf brand and its culinary background. There are no plans to allow the famous Waldorf salad to run in the restaurant, but Stone said it could make its way onto the bar menu or downstairs in the hotel’s lounge bar, Peacock Alley. Eggs Benedict, another Waldorf specialty, is more likely to be so, too, because the hotel restaurant will be open for breakfast.
Stone acknowledges that Australians have traditionally had a more cautious attitude towards hotel restaurants than people in many parts of the world, but he believes this is changing. “After all, hotels are great places to be; hospitality is at the heart of what they do. Some do it well, others don’t.
“I want people who live in Sydney to think of us whenever there is someone in the city,” he said. “I get goosebumps every time I come here.”
