Curtis Stone had it all as a celebrity chef on a string of television shows and a series of cookbooks. But though he was constantly working with food, he felt unfulfilled as a chef after the adrenalin rush of working in restaurants in his native Melbourne, Australia, and Great Britain. "I guess in a way being out of the restaurant for some years I stopped cooking at that cutting edge of food. I stopped cooking at that really high elevated level," Stone said during a visit to Toronto to promote his sixth cookbook, "Good Food, Good Life" (Appetite by Random House). "Don't get me wrong. I love doing this stuff, but there's something more to my background than making chicken wings with curry paste. I love them and I cook them for my family. It's great. "But to fulfil me as a chef I wanted to be able to dehydrate the lemon grass and then turn it into a liquid gel, just do a bit of a deke and dive on ingredients." He opened a tiny 25-seat restaurant last year in Beverly Hills with a constantly changing prix-fixe tasting menu that keeps him on his innovative toes. The concept seems to be working. Maude - named after his grandmother who opened his eyes to cooking - is earning rave reviews and awards. Reservations open the first of the month for the following month and are sold out within a few hours. "The truth of it is I didn't need to do it from a career perspective," Stone said. "I wasn't like, 'Oh my God, how am I going to feed my family this week?' I had a business. It was doing fine. But I really missed it. I missed being in a restaurant." One ingredient a month is woven into nine courses with wine pairings. His two executive chefs take turns running Maude and developing the next menu with Stone at a nearby test kitchen. Take asparagus, April's feature. "We put it under a microscope. We literally dehydrate it, we grind it, we blend it, we puree it, we turn it into a powder, we turn it into a gel, into a mousse, into an ice, into a snow, into a sorbet, into an ice cream, and we probably get 30-odd components out of the asparagus. Most we know what to do. Some we dream up. What would happen if we did this? So we experiment." Next month almonds are the feature. Earlier this year, pomegranates and parsnips were highlighted. Stone acknowledges he was taking a risk in an extremely competitive market.