Curtis Stone to close Maude next month and replace it with Pie Room
It served one of the country’s most ambitious tasting menus, had diners clamoring for reservations each month, and was the first restaurant for one of Los Angeles’ highest profile celebrity chefs — but next month, Maude is closing after a decade in Beverly Hills, and making room for the Pie Room by Curtis Stone.
In a surprise announcement, the chef that former Times critic Jonathan Gold once called “the one food television star whom everybody genuinely likes” said that Maude would close Sept. 28, with a permanent reprisal of his pandemic-era pie shop pop-up taking its place.
Stone said he decided to close Maude to focus on expanding his pie shops and his Hollywood restaurant Gwen.
With a new, 6,000-square-foot offsite bakery to help with demand, the chef expects to reopen the Pie Room by Curtis Stone with a bang this fall.
“It’s a mixture of emotions,” Stone said. “My wife said, ‘How are you feeling?’ and I was crying. She said, ‘Why are you crying?’ I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m happy or I’m sad.’ It’s just really emotional but ultimately a good thing. When I look around in that dining room, every single trinket and every little corner I have a story about.”
The Melbourne-born chef and TV personality, who had worked with legendary London chef Marco Pierre White, came to the U.S. for a food TV show but felt untethered not working in a restaurant. When he became a father, he wanted to raise his children in a house where they would see their dad wake up and go to the same job every day so he began planning his first restaurant.
Maude opened with monthly menus devoted to a single ingredient, conceptualizing a new 10-course tasting menu every 30 days — an ambitious and well-received feat that would spotlight corn or truffles or apples or asparagus or almonds, depending on the month you finally managed to land a reservation.
“It was a challenge, especially a restaurant that required the menu to change every month,” he said. “The cadence of it is: You’d launch the new menu within the first week and start to get it all settled down and everyone on the stations knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and in Week 2, you’d have it really dialed in. And if you ever made it to Week 3 without doing work on the next menu, you’re screwed.”
The excitement of every new menu, the accolades, the limited number of seats and the buzzy nature of the concept made Maude one of the most coveted reservations in town for years. (It took Gold roughly 50 attempts to land a reservation until he was aided by friends and acquaintances.)
Knowing it was not a sustainable model, Stone reworked the concept to focus on wine regions in 2017, with each menu tripping through the produce, spices and iconic dishes of a given locality — paired, of course, with wine. More recently, Stone said his menus at Maude have simply focused on detail, consistency and seasonality.
In 2020, indoor dining bans nearly shuttered Maude forever. The pandemic would have been a good stopping point for the Beverly Hills restaurant, Stone said, but he needed an immediate pivot to keep some of his staff working and make use of the space. In early 2021 he turned to the familiar flavors of his Australian upbringing and opened the casual, takeout-only Pie Room by Gwen for sweet and savory pies, cookies, sausage rolls and other baked goods.
But Maude was never designed to be a bakery. After Pie Room by Gwen closed and the space reverted to Maude, the pies went into hibernation.
But Pie Room fans still inquire of the pie shop.
Clocking its popularity, Stone signed a lease that would add an outpost adjacent to Topanga Social food hall in Canoga Park, but its opening has been delayed.
He also signed a lease on the 6,000-square-foot bakery, which now serves as the commissary for making the pies, pastries and pantry goods found at Gwen and local farmers markets with the aid of head baker Luis Flores and executive pastry chef Mitzi Reyes.
Curtis Stone is set to reopen his Beverly Hills restaurant Maude as a casual pie shop and specialty foods store called Pie Room by Gwen.
He’d considered maintaining Maude while expanding Pie Room, but realized there were not enough hours in the day. Maude, with its technique-heavy execution and meticulous wine pairings, needs a lot of attention, with roughly 20 employees cooking and serving only 20 seats in the dining room. “It requires an incredible amount of energy and focus and effort and creativity,” he said.
After Maude’s September closure, the team expects a quick transition. The space will offer casual seating, including banquettes and a limited patio, plus pie display cases as well as fridges for jarred goods like chutneys and other condiments. The chef expects to offer wine, cheese and cured meats from Gwen, in addition to everything produced in the bakery.
When the Pie Room by Curtis Stone reopens in October, the offsite bakery will serve as the home base for much of its pies and desserts, though Stone also expects to bake onsite. He envisions new varieties of pies and many more of them, and thanks to a designated chocolate room in the new bakery, Reyes “has all sorts of fun things coming down the pipe, ready for Beverly Hills.”
For the last few months at Gwen, some of the Pie Room’s signature items began making their way under little glass cloches and onto pastry racks. Sandwiches also have made their way back to Gwen after years away, with the new menu focused on braises such as duck leg, chicken with leeks, and beef cheek, plus a grinder on pillowy house-made sandwich rolls, crisp-crusted stecca and fluffy loaves studded with seeds.
Expect all of these and more in Beverly Hills in October, and eventually in Canoga Park’s Pie Room as well.
Maude is a narrow shoe box of a restaurant hidden amid the chain steakhouses and salad parlors of South Beverly Drive.
Gwen, his live-fire, Michelin-starred Hollywood fine dining restaurant, will serve as Stone’s sole fine dining anchor, with some of Maude’s flourishes poured into that menu.
At 10 years, Stone said he would rather close Maude’s doors to a successful run rather than attempt to one day pivot it again, or lose focus or quality trying to balance all three of his concepts.
“I would never want Maude to lose its favor,” Stone said. “It’s always been a popular, beautiful restaurant and I want it to go out that way.”
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