Chef Quotes

I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.

People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I'm with or without cameras.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.

The Congo was the most difficult shoot of my life but was also maybe the greatest adventure of my life.

In that sense, what a great way to live, if you could always do things that interest you, and do them with people who interest you.

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

I'm very proud of the Rome episode of 'No Reservations' because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You're never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.

Jiro Ono serves Edo-style traditional sushi, the same 20 or 30 pieces he's been making his whole life, and he's still unsatisfied with the quality and every day wakes up and trains to make the best. And that is as close to a religious experience in food as one is likely to get.

I'm not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I'm going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I'm not a foreign correspondent.

[When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.

When I cook, I generally stick with what I know, what I'm comfortable with, and what I feel I've paid my dues learning, and am good at.

Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it.

I've been very careful about what I say yes to and what I say no to. And I think seriously always about... this may be a good idea right now or it may be a lot of money right now, but will it be good for me five years from now? Will it be fun? Will it make me hate myself? I think about all of those things.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else.

I don't snack. I don't generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones.

An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.

It's very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

What's the opposite of suck? Un-suck?

It's that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.

I do the meatball recipe a lot. I think the army stew probably too. It's the most useful dish because it was born out of necessity and poverty and any idiot can make it in 20 minutes on a hot plate. It's cheap and uses readily available commercial ingredients. And it's delicious. It should be the great American dish - perfect late-night stoner dorm food for college kids on a budget.

Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain

As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

I don't have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what's appropriate or attractive.

Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.

I could eat bloody Elvis - if you put enough vinegar on him.

If I'm training I'm cutting weight for a competition. I'm hard. I'm pretty much eating animal protein and that's it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

I have the best job in the world.

I'm married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it's one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I'd love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can't play bass, so I don't think that's going to happen.

'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

My family is very far from normal.

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

I'm not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that's impressive.

Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I'm not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy... That's just the nature of my demons.

Thinking that your story is so interesting that other people will want to listen to it or read it or pay to hear it, that's - what kind of person thinks that? A monster of self-regard. It's not normal thinking.

If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.

My daughter always behaved in restaurants. And if she didn't, she's going out. I mean, one of the parents is going to take her outside. Immediately.

A burger is something anyone can do, just follow the rules.

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.