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.
New Orleans is a glorious mutation.
I'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.
You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.
Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.
Without new ideas success can become stale.
I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.
It's that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.
To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.
Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race.
The way you make an omelet reveals your character.
An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.
As a chef I'm not your dietitian or your ethicist, I'm in the pleasure business.
Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.
That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.
There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.
I urge you to travel -- as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.
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.
Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.
Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.
Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.
Todos os dias acordava, ficava um bocadinho na cama, chegava ao trabalho -- onde o serviço já ia a todo o vapor -- e procurava alguém para ser despedido.
The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.
This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.
Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army -- and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.
I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas -- fat, drugged, and completely out of it.
If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people.
The journey is part of the experience -- an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.
No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.
Don't be afraid to just sit and watch.
If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river.
Open your mind. Get up off the couch. Move.
Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
You'd have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I'd probably want to die in San Sebastian.
I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.
One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody's done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.
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.
I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.
I don't snack. I don't generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones.
I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be -- and there has to always be -- room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.
I like the fact that Melbourne always seems to support their chefs and promote them in ways I find really admirable.
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.
Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.
Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.
I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
I'm evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.
I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I'd give up just about everything else for that.
One of life's terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they're doing.
I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.
The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen.
I make friends faster and easier than journalists.
I'm sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain't me.
I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.
When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.
I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.
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.
I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.
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 really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I'm out; I'm asleep for takeoff.