Celebrity chef Curtis Stone is going caveman

Curtis Stone’s new LA restaurant celebrates meat in all forms. — TNS

If you've spent a lot of time at Curtis Stone’s Beverly Hills restaurant Maude – which structures its menu around a particular ingredient each month, usually a meticulously-sourced vegetable or fruit – you might be surprised at the focus of his new project, Gwen. Because although the restaurant, which the Australian chef just opened with his brother Luke, is also structured around intricate prix fixe menus, it is first and foremost a butcher shop.

“Luke’s and my first jobs were in butcher shops,” Stone said recently, as he walked around the location on Sunset Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood. The butcher shop opened in early July; the restaurant will open later in the month. The complex takes over a 1928 building, with 650sqm that encompasses the butcher shop, an open kitchen and dining room downstairs, a mezzanine wine room and a state-of-the-art test kitchen on the second floor.