Why Chef Curtis Stone Brings Back In-House Butcher Shop

Lochley Robbins here for Young Hollywood with one of our dear friends, one of my dear friends, Curtis Stone.

How you doing?

How are you? So good to see you. Another restaurant.

I know. Tell me about it. It's like having a child. Just when you forget how painful it was the first time, you decide to do it again and here we are.

So we hung out with you at Maud. You made me eat brain, lots of things I can't even think about right now. Only because I'm here. I'm going to try some brain. To dive in. And now you opened another one named after another family member.

Another granny. Um, this one was named after Gwen. Uh, my brother actually moved his whole family over from Australia to do this one with me. So he's on the floor and I'm in the kitchen and we have a butcher shop in the front and a big meat centric um fine dining restaurant in the back and we have a lot of fun. So we're standing in the middle of the dining room right now, but up here is the entrance, which is where you come in of course and along is the the meat case. So we're a retail store. People in Hollywood, we're a neighborhood butcher shop. We have beautiful Wagy beef, and grass-fed lamb, and incredible veal and rabbits and game. So there's it's really a specialty butcher store that has everything you can think of.

Yeah. Now, butcher shops are old school. My mom's dad had one in Brooklyn. You don't see them very often. Right. Here we are in Hollywood.

And truthfully like that's what I miss about beautiful butcher shops. It's a bit of a dying craft and I wanted to bring it back. We make all our own charcuterie, we do all of our own, um, dry curing, so we're making prosudos and peculars and salamis and of course Terrence and all that sort of stuff as well. So, um, you know, we've got some fantastic butchers at work here that have a real eye for craft and sourcing great products. Here we are. So there's still a butcher. Let's go meet him. So here the boys are working hard on the butcher's blocks. This is Alex and Danny. And we're going to have a peek in your fridge, guys, if that's okay. So you see we dry age the ducks up to 21 days, the beef up to 90 days. We do stuff specific for our customers, as they like it, we present it. So there's that room and then the next room along is maybe even a bit more fun. Come on in.

Go in. Now, I know you're not a ham eater.

Thank you for remembering. But check this out. Oh, look, Randy, what are you doing in the fridge? Randy's in here playing with his sausages. Um, What fun. So this is our charcuterie room. So all of this stuff we make and cure ourselves. Um, how many pounds in here Randy at the moment? I don't know, a couple thousand. Couple of thousand pounds of salami. Yeah, so we get through it.

Ever find yourself in a rocky moment, you know, in the freezer? Punching the meat. No. No. Well, you've hosted more TV shows than I can name in this one segment. Cookbook author. Yeah, you're everywhere. So now is it just restaurants or you're still going to dabble in everything else?

It's been so long and you know, I'm very privileged to still be on Young Hollywood. You better doing old Hollywood and I you know, maybe I'll get a shot over there. Um, my focus is certainly in the restaurants. You know, I'm not saying I'll never do another TV show because I enjoy that too, but there's nothing I love more than standing over my grill and being the master of ceremony when it comes to the food.