CURTIS Stone looked like he had had a late night and woken up too early in the morning.

Which was exactly what had happened to him: he had obliged 50 winners of the Meet Curtis Stone contest organised by Astro, posing for photos with them after dinner at the Hilton Kuala Lumpur the night before. Then in the early morning before he met us, he had been whisked off to a radio interview.

But the young, tireless chef, whose Take Home Chef series on Discovery Travel & Living (Astro channel 707) has been such a hit this part of the world, was still on his feet, with a cooking demo for the media, having a Press conference, lunch and more interviews.

Curtis loves what he does.

“There’s food, travel, what else would you want in life,” he said. Take Home Chef has garnered 100 million viewers in Asia.

“It’s a pretty bizarre concept. I was in England at that time and got a call about going to a grocery store, sneaking up on someone shopping, tapping her on the shoulder and saying: Are you cooking dinner for your husband or boyfriend? Then I would go back to her place and cook.

“I thought it was a good idea. I told my Dad. He said: ‘Do you know how many guns they have in America?’

“In the early part of the show, we shot in a rich area like Pasadena in Los Angeles, with nice houses and big kitchens. Then I wanted to be more realistic. Now we go to cook in apartments too.”

How much of the Take Home Chef programme is scripted? “We went through many different stages. “We tried the guerilla style at first; then we tried different ways to tell the people in the grocery store that we were shooting there. A lot of them turned me down!” Really?

The Melbourne-born chef was voted one of the Sexiest Men Alive by People magazine in 2006, alongside Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Curtis at first thought it was a joke when he got the call from the magazine. ‘What’s the feature you want to do on me?’ he had asked. “They said I don’t have to cook! I felt a bit strange. We Aussies are quite modest, you know.”

Now to ensure he gets taken home as chef in the programme, “we tell them we’re filming, and if they agree to be approached, they tie a ribbon on their cart.”

His most memorable experience was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 55 firefighters.

“We saw four firefighters shopping in the supermarket the week before Thanksgiving. All women love firefighters. They were buying food to cook in the base for Thanksgiving. A lot of firefighters were killed in 9/11. It was nice to do something for them.

“Something I love is interacting with people. It’s kind of fun when they behave differently. They haven’t had a camera pointed at them before and they get overwhelmed.

Does he do the washing up? “Yes! We leave the place in a better shape than before. You guys are still in the early episodes. Only 26 have been shown so far in Asia.”

Are they going to film Take Home Chef here?

“No, we are filming the whole trip, going behind the scenes, doing demos. The goal is to get some sort of content from this. It’s so rich with food here.”

Curtis calls himself a super relaxed Australian who loves surfing. He co-hosted Surfing the Menu with his mate Ben O’Donohue. “I loved it; it was so much fun. We sailed to different places in Australia and learnt all about their food and ingredients. We went with someone on a mussel boat who told us that there had been little rainfall, and the mussels were smaller. It tells you a lot about the environment.

“I think I have learnt to go through life as a chef, with the ability to foresee what’s coming. I always thought that cooking at home was simple until I did Take Home Chef. It’s a lot harder.”

Curtis, 33, was always interested in food as a child, his favourite being his granny’s roast lamb. But “my mum was a really bad cook. She was good at baking, though, and made nice cakes and cookies. But dinner was always plain food, overcooked.

“I was always eating at my friend’s house. He is Italian, and his father was a chef, and they cooked some great Italian food.”

On leaving school, he did his apprenticeship at The Savoy Hotel in Melbourne. Tired of peeling carrots and potatoes, he decided to do a part-time business course for two years in the afternoon, going back to the kitchen in the evening.

By then he was so in love with cooking that he stopped studying. “I was better working with my hands. The tougher it got, the more I enjoyed it.”

He got to work with a few European chefs who told him that he would not make his mark unless he made his way to Europe. He travelled through Italy, France and Spain before landing in London.

Running out of money he knocked on the door of Marco Pierre White, the youngest chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, and got a job! He worked up to 70 hours a week, found the food fantastic and started reading about it.

He moved on to Mirabelle, also owned by Marco, where he was made sous chef. Then he was in Quo Vadis and made head chef for the first time. He spent four years there, then got approached by a publisher and included in London on a Plate, a book about the city’s finest chefs.

He appeared on TV food shows and went on to film Surfing the Menu. He also hosted an Australian reality series My Restaurant Rules in 2004. But he missed the kitchen and went back to London to work with Terence Conran on re-launching the famous Bluebird Club in Chelsea.

Two years later he was in America, hosting Take Home Chef.

His eye-popping celebrity moment? He was in a restaurant in Los Angeles recently when Pamela Anderson walked in. “She had this little dress on and she bent over...”

“I love to eat crabs,” he said. “I always have crabs on a Sunday with friends. We get the newspapers on the table, and put the wok on it. Eating them makes you relaxed.”

He made a quick dish for the media — fresh tagliatelle with crab. “You guys are so lucky. You get some of the most fantastic crabs and some of the best ingredients in the world. The thing I love about Asia is that you understand fresh seafood.”

As he chopped and cooked, with the help of a thrilled media member, he patiently showed how to use a curved knife with a thumb depression on the handle that he had designed and which comes under his Kitchen Solutions range.

“A lot of that came from Take Home Chef. I have been in people’s homes and got to know the challenges they are facing. I wanted to make life simpler in the kitchen so as to enhance the experience.

“My values are rekindled in the range. Some of the equipment are made from sustainable bamboo. We had to employ carbon costing and testing to make them environment-friendly. We took two years to develop the range.”

It has been launched in Australia, and sales have been fantastic. Next on the list is the US and South Africa, and in Singapore’s Takashimaya in July.

“It’s so easy for chefs to put their name on cooking products,” he said, but it’s not for him.

And his food? All was well and delicious with every course that was served at lunch. Curtis can certainly put his name to it.