Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.
I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.
My brain and body and nervous system, they see a plane ride, a long plane trip, as an opportunity to sleep with nothing coming in, nothing to do. I just go offline the minute I'm on the plane.
I'm not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I'm not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I'm not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I'm out there trying to tell stories the best I can.
The ingredients of a hamburger seldom vary. It's a percentage of fat to lean meat, add salt and prepare and that's it. It shouldn't need a recipe.
I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.
I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.
To be treated well in places where you don't expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, that can't be a bad thing.
There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.
I'm a decent cook; I'm a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.
I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.
Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.
Let's at least acknowledge who is working in America right now and what our needs are, as well as the moral question of somebody who's been here 20 years, paying taxes to which they probably do not receive a refund, and not committing any crimes, working hard, and supporting an industry. Shouldn't there be some middle ground here? Shouldn't there be a way for them to be welcome in this country?
Luck is not a business model.
If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something.
I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.
I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Good food and good eating are about risk.
To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things - and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.
I eat strategically. If I know I'm having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I'm not eating a big dinner tonight, and I'm not having breakfast.
I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.
You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas.
I can't do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I'm okay with hurting myself, like I'll lift something until it hurts, but I don't want to pass out or vomit in front of people.
Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.
You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.
I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I'd give up just about everything else for that.
I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.
I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I've managed to gracefully avoid that. It's hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.
I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.
My love of soft, runny cheese - it's impossible to resist.
If you go to chefs all across America and ask them, 'What's your biggest problem right now?,' It is finding people to cook in their restaurants. They're having an enormous, countrywide problem here staffing their operations.
You realize after you travel enough that there's some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it's edited, there's no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there's no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice.
I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.
To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.
I think as a moral question, restaurant workers should get paid more.
The older I get, and the more I travel in particular, the less I care about what exactly is in the dish than who's cooking it and why.
I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.
I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."
I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.
Having been a chef for some many years, I understand what it's like to work really, really hard to get good at something, only to have someone piss all over it.
I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone's ever had in the history of television.
When you have a child you're no longer the star of the movie.
When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.
The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that's not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.
Only Texans and Jews understand brisket
Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine's not so great.
If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.
Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.
I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.
Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.
If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people.
We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.
I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.
I'm evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.
Drugs didn't work out too well for me.
Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.
I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
An employer of mine back in the '80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It's a basic tell of character.
