Heat in the kitchen: at home with Justin and Eli
Star chef Justin James and small business guru Eli Moulton recently welcomed a new baby into their family. Before their daughter was born, the couple sat down with SALIFE for a chat about blending a young family, opening a restaurant and how they wouldn’t have it any other way.
If you follow the lives of acclaimed chef Justin James and fashion entrepreneur Eli Moulton on social media, you’ll see regular updates of their wonderful chaos. Eli’s baby bump grows with each post, her three-year-old son Teddy’s cheeky toddler face pops up, Justin dances in the background while Eli shares her latest chic outfit.
As the door opens to their foothills home early on a Monday morning, it reveals the same scene, right off the screen and into real life. There’s nothing but authenticity in this buzzing household. On this particular morning, Teddy is offering me his Easter chocolate while also trying to sneak some for himself, Justin is cleaning up after their old English sheepdog, Sake, and Eli is calling from upstairs: “Justin, help me find my shoe!”.
The little family is stepping in front of the camera for a photoshoot with SALIFE, before Teddy happily watches Moana 2, while Justin and Eli sit down for a chat at the dining table that has been the foundation for so many wonderful moments in their lives.
You’ll often find it laden with colourful crockery, draped with tablecloths and decorated with beautiful flowers for the couple’s “family dinners”. The dinners are a chance for Justin and Eli to seat their friends at the one table, stitching together their lives.
Early on in their relationship, the couple consciously made it a priority to create a community to bring their worlds together, which they did around food. The pair met last year at Goodwood Road bar Good Gilbert, where Justin was doing a pop-up residence. They kept in touch, Eli dining at Restaurant Botanic after their first meeting, and their first real date was Eli taking Justin to North Adelaide for his first tasting of the loaded fries dish known as an AB.
While Justin may have been focusing on fine dining at work, at home, it was all about comfort food. The first meals he cooked for Eli were roast chicken, meat loaf and chilli con carne.
“We have friends over for dinner but nobody ever wants to have us over for dinner because they don’t want to cook for Justin,” Eli says with a laugh. “But he’s so chill – give him a burger, he loves simple home cooking.”
Justin has been a chef since he was 16, working his way through some of the world’s best restaurants, including New York’s Eleven Madison Park, Copenhagen’s Noma and Melbourne’s Vue de Monde.
The US-born chef moved to Australia in 2014 and six years later, while the world was in the throes of a pandemic, he quietly began transforming the dated restaurant at the Adelaide Botanic Garden into a fine dining experience, opening Restaurant Botanic the following year.
It garnered praise and awards, including being named the 2023 Restaurant of the Year by Gourmet Traveller, among other accolades.
Eli’s career journey started much where she is now – with a pregnant belly. Back when Eli was pregnant with Teddy, she was attending glamorous events, but refused to be limited by what she saw as traditional frumpy maternity clothing.
“I was sourcing clothes that were still cool,” Eli says. “I didn’t feel that pregnancy was a time when you had to dress really poorly, but also, you don’t want to invest in something you’re probably not going to wear again. I had a lot of girlfriends who were pregnant at the same time asking to borrow things and it got my brain going.”
So, she founded a dress hire business for pregnant woman. What began with 10 dresses in her spare bedroom at home has since grown to a dress hire business – pregnant or not – called Plus One, on King William Road.
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Now, coming full circle, Eli and Justin’s little girl is due July. Eli had been on quite the fertility journey after giving birth to Teddy, in the hopes of giving him a sibling. She’d undergone up to 10 rounds of IVF without luck. Then when Eli met Justin, they discussed what she’d been through and IVF wasn’t an avenue she wanted to explore again.
“I’d definitely come to terms with that and we felt really grateful to have two children between us, and that was that,” Eli explains. “If we were ever fortunate enough for it to happen, it would be amazing, but let’s just park it.”
Then, Eli began feeling nauseous right before she and Justin were preparing for a trip to New York, where Justin was set to return to Eleven Madison Park for a guest cooking spot. Eli was being treated for early menopause and put it down to the medication she was on, but Justin thought it could be a pregnancy.
“Nobody else had suggested it, so I just let it go,” Eli says. Then, a few weeks before we were leaving for New York, I was conscious of being ill while we were away.”
Expecting a negative result, Eli took a pregnancy test before work one day: “It was negative and I left it out and went to work”. But she hadn’t waited long enough for the results.
When Justin arrived home, he saw a positive on the test, and then messaged Eli with, “I guess we’ve got something to celebrate”, not realising Eli believed it was a negative result.
“I was like, ‘That is so rude. If we were ever lucky enough to be pregnant, it would be a miracle’. Then he told me it was positive and I didn’t believe it. The doctors told me to go away and enjoy it because it was the first time my fertility wasn’t this pressured situation.
“We got back from our trip; Teddy met us at the airport and we went for a scan and we were nine weeks along.”
Family has always been what binds Justin and Eli together – Justin has a nine-year-old son from his previous marriage.
“You think people are going to think of you differently if you’re a young mother and you’ve got baggage,” Eli says.
“That wasn’t a deterrent for Justin. I remember one conversation where he spoke very highly of his ex-wife, the mother of his son, and their relationship is something that I really admire. That was a quality that really shone through for me and I respect that so much.”
Oscar lives in Melbourne and comes to visit once a month and the couple says it feels complete when he’s here.
“Oscar is one of the most patient nine-year-olds I’ve ever met – especially with Teddy,” Eli says. “He’s just a delight to have around and he’s the apple of Teddy’s eye.”
From early on, Justin and Eli were conscious of all the relationship dynamics of blending the families together and now, it’s about to get even more dynamic. When Oscar was born, Justin was executive chef at Vue de Monde, working an extensive number of hours. They were hard hours and long days back-to-back, which leaves Justin’s memory of looking after a newborn and a toddler a little blurry.
“It’s been pushed to the back of my brain and with Teddy, I’m just being reminded what those early stages are like,” Justin says. “With a blended family it was, and still is, just trying to find your feet. Where does everyone stand and with the bubba coming, how do we discipline?”
Eli says their parenting styles are different – she was always more lenient – and as a single mum, there are things she would have done differently had she had a partner.
“It’s not in a negative way, but I did what made sense at the time and made it easier for me to do it all,” she says.
And now, added into the mix is a new restaurant: Justin’s latest venture since leaving Restaurant Botanic last year. Called Aptos, and set for opening in the coming weeks, the establishment will take over a converted old church in Stirling, with only 14 place settings, offering a 16-course seasonal tasting menu.
But, with the restaurant set to open, a toddler and a nine-year old already in the mix, and a baby imminent, life is about to ramp up.
“It’s going to be pretty wild, but it’s just about taking it day by day,” Justin says.
Eli mirrors the sentiment: “You never want to overprepare,” she says. “You don’t want to anticipate something it’s not.”
Eli’s efforts are centred around helping the boys navigate the coming months.
“I’m focusing my energy on making sure everyone knows they’ve got a place in this family, that they’re loved, and it’s all going to be okay. Our worries are really good worries; they’re exciting and positive. These are pretty incredible things going on in our lives.
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“You throw it together and it’s a cocktail of stress, but individually, they’re all so great. This is a big year for us and we’ve just got to ride the wave.”
When Justin left Restaurant Botanic in 2024 after four years – three years in the kitchen and one planning its redevelopment – it rocked Adelaide’s hospitality world and left everyone wondering what was next for the chef. After achieving so much there, the urge to realise his long-time dream of opening his very own restaurant became stronger.
“You start to ask, ‘What’s next, how am I going to go further with this?’” Justin says.
“This is it, I’m at the right age, I’m wise and I understand a lot – I don’t know everything, but if not now, when?”
Then, the phone started ringing and the offers were coming in fast. “I was flown to Melbourne, I was flown to Sydney.”
“We almost moved to Sydney – of course, family came into it,” he explains. “There were investment firms that wanted us to open boutique hotels.”
Justin brushed off the attempts at interstate headhunting and instead stayed closer to home, and is set to open Aptos in Stirling in early winter. The restaurant was very nearly going to be in a space Justin found just outside of the CBD. That is, until he pulled up to the 156-year-old former church in Stirling.
“I hadn’t even been inside and that was it,” Justin says. “I walked in and it was my idea on steroids.”
The building housed the popular Aptos Cruz Galleries for more than 35 years and Justin not only borrowed the name, but he also bought 30 pieces from the gallery to house in the restaurant, which will honour its surroundings.
“You want to keep the integrity of the building. The crack in the wall – you leave it. In today’s world, it gets a bit cookie cutter. A lot of restaurants are the same and there’s no personality.”
Justin is a fan of Scandinavian and Japanese design, so we can expect the restaurant to be minimalistic, with pops of nature, and every single piece of cutlery, crockery, glassware and furniture has been selected with scrutiny from the chef.
“There are things from Aptos (Cruz) that are from the 18th century. It’s about respecting what was there beforehand and great design – you can’t find those pieces just anywhere so it’s creating a one-of-a-kind experience. It’s like you’re creating a home; nothing is bulk buy.
“I’ve used somebody local to make some plates, someone from NSW for others, some from Sweden and the UK and Tennessee.”
To prepare for what’s coming, Eli has been re-watching The Bear, a fictional, award-winning television series that follows the opening of a fine dining restaurant by a perfectionist chef, depicting the intensity of the hospitality world.
“It’s very accurate,” Justin laughs.
He points out the phrase “sense of urgency” tattooed on his arm. The chef in The Bear has “SOU” (sense of urgency) on his fingers.
Having very different, separate careers works well for the couple’s relationship – they’re able to discuss things on a business level, but they agree it’s healthy not to be involved heavily in each other’s work lives.
“I love seeing the progress of the restaurant and how it’s all coming together,” Eli says. “But mostly, I love seeing how much it fills his cup.”
Justin is thoroughly methodical in his planning of Aptos. “It’s all about efficiency,” Justin notes. “You have to think about how everything works. Not just your kitchens, but everything – your space is your biggest tool. If you design something poorly, over a year, you spend a lot more on labour.
“Even a simple turn. Think about it, every day, 15 staff take 10 extra minutes because they have to do this turn. One hundred and fifty minutes, that’s two and a half hours. Two and a half hours times five times a week. That turn has cost you tens of thousands of dollars in labour.”
Then there’s the number of spoons and knives and forks and plates. Storage design has been carefully considered. Minimalism, too, is important to Justin. “It’s been designed with less in mind; I think a lot of kitchens have a lot of things they don’t necessarily need.
“The way I look at a kitchen is that in a restaurant, your menu changes, so when your menu changes, your equipment changes, so why not make a kitchen that’s a little more transformable where you can plug and play, rather than having them built in? It’s different for every restaurant, but I like it a little more interchangeable.”
As for the menu, Justin’s a long-time fan of the flavours of Australia – Vue de Monde was his foot in the door for many native ingredients, which he explored more at Botanic.
“It really just is about someone who’s moved to this country with an outside view of what I think Australian cuisine is,” he says. “It’s not about just putting these ingredients on a plate – it’s about the ideas you have and how it tastes and how it comes together. I can’t wait to show everyone.”
This article first appeared in the June 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.
