His pick-up line would read like this: "Can I take you home and cook for you?"

And to sweeten his offer, he promises you heaven and earth by offering to do the grocery-shopping, cooking, and maybe even the odd belly dance if you so request. But the deal clincher has to be his promise to do the washing.

He is 33-year-old Curtis Stone, Australian master chef and host of current reality cooking series, Take Home Chef, which airs every Wednesday on Discovery's Travel and Living Channel.

Curtis was here in Singapore last week as part of the three-week long World Gourmet Summit that ends today (April 26), to promote his latest TV venture.

Introduced to the local media at a cooking demonstration-cum-press conference held at Jones The Grocer in Dempsey Road last Monday, the hunky chef  with the photogenic face looks more at home surfing the waves in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, than in a bustling and crowded kitchen shouting instructions to an army of cooks.

Still, his resume in the kitchen reads impressively enough, having worked with the godfather of modern cooking, Marco Pierre White, at Marco's The Grill Room at Cafe Royal in London. From there he proceeded to the Mirabelle as sous chef and played a large part in creating the "Mirabelle Cookbook".

And Curtis' culinary career has been on an upward climb since. He was made head chef at one of Marco's flagships, the critically acclaimed Quo Vadis, where he was eventually approached by a publisher to be included in "London on a Plate", a book about London's finest chefs.

Not long after that, he was presenting cooking shows such as Dinner in a box and Surfing the Menu in the UK and Australia, as well as another restaurant reality series, My Restaurant Rules.

It's that sort of versatility, coupled with an affable personality, which provides the ingredients for a rising TV celebrity chef in Curtis.

Curtis does not walk out to greet you. He bounds out instead from the cheese room where, he candidly tells you, he was instructed to hide before emerging after formal introductions, and immediately proceeds to strike up a conversation with the audience in general.

Refreshingly open and down-to-earth, Curtis banters easily and is eager to show and tell how he became one of cable TV's more popular cooking stars. And he is not averse to clowning around even, all for your amusement.

Definitely no uptight, temperamental chef here.

And just how did he end up being the Take Home Chef?

"I was getting paid to surf, cook and eat in England, and one day, Jamie Oliver's (another celebrity chef) agent calls to offer me 200 quid to do a new TV show in America, where I go to the supermarket to pick up girls and offer to cook for them'. And I go, 'Yeah, right'', thinking it was one of my mates playing a joke on me," Curtis says.

It was fortunate the agent persisted and he eventually realised that the offer was no joke and took up the offer despite initial worries of personal safety. He says in his defence: "They want me to go to America, pick up girls in grocery stores in a country that's full of firearms!"

And yet, Curtis does like a challenge.

During the cooking demonstration, he asked three volunteers to bring him three secret ingredients, which he used to make a main course and dessert. Watching him trying to figure out what to do with one of the ingredients, a can of chestnut puree, was not only amusing but also an eye-opener to know that even the professionals do get stumped sometimes. So it was definitely an inspiration for an amateur weekend cook like myself to see when he finally figured out what to do with it. See vodcast, Cooking with Curtis.

He says: "This is something I learnt from Take Home chef."

Another challenge when filming the show, he explained, was to cook in someone else's kitchen where the cooking equipment any self-respecting chef is used to having at his disposal is not always available. It is also at this point in time where Curtis takes the opportunity to tell you about the new line of kitchenware he has created to help make cooking easier and more accessible. (It's available at Takashimaya and Robinsons, by the way.)

Take Home Chef - the TV cooking show Curtis picks up women from supermarkets and propositions them with an offer to buy their groceries and cook for them at their homes - has brought him again to the forefront of the public eye since, with his brand of easy-to-cook meals.

The diplomat in him prompts him to reveal there are Americans who are interested in a variety of good food and that it has been interesting to cater to the appetites of the American public.

And if you are like me, one of the questions you may be dying to ask, after seeing previous episodes, is: How does Curtis pick his women?

No surprise there as he reveals that it is the show producers who pick those lucky girls. He explains: "They go and ask the shoppers first and then tie a little ribbon to the trolleys of those who agree to be featured on the show, and I just look for these trolleys with the ribbons.

After all, "you don't want to get sued".

But Curtis makes an interesting enough observation: "They always seem to pick the pretty girls."

That of course, led to the inevitable question for the very eligible bachelor who know how to cook his way to a woman's heart: What is the way to Curtis Stone's heart?

Now, here is the bit where the bubbly chap bumbles.

"If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be single by now!" came his immediate reply, before laughing at his own answer in a most becoming way. Then he recovers sufficiently a little later to add, "I like to cook for others, but people always think it's difficult to cook for a chef. Ah, I would say that good food, cooking and travelling are the keys to my heart."

Girls, it will be useful to jot that information down.

Video: Take Home Chef gaffes

Video: Cooking with Curtis

Take Home Chef airs every Wednesday night on Discovery Travel and Living Channel, Ch 16, at 8.30pm.