Popularity: 0
Vote:   | A lot of these people I'm traveling around the country and meeting speak Italian at the house. Third- or fourth-generation, and they're still speaking Italian. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As far as TV, I have a new show... It's me traveling around to Italian-American families and enclaves throughout the States and learning about the dishes and ingredients that these people love. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | At this point in my career it's very hard for me to turn down opportunities that I think are auspicious. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Athough it's been said a thousand times, I think that the easier the food is, often enough, the more it tastes like the original song. We didn't try to make dishes easier for the books, they just are easier. We certainly didn't dummy them down. |
Popularity: 9
Vote: | Babbo is my spiritual home. I'm at Otto first in the morning, because it's closest to my house. It's also the only restaurant we have open for breakfast. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Certainly the food is far superior in France and Italy to the rest of Europe. You don't think about good German food like you think about a good pot au feu or lasagna bolognese or bolito misto. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Chefs feel that to be fascinating and fun, they need to bring in new things. And having eaten perfect tortellini in brodo all of their lives, the next thing they do not want to make is another perfect tortellini in brodo. They're looking to challenge their customers. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Cooking can be something as simple as just putting a perfect piece of prosciutto on the plate with a fig. Or it can be like the moment that Salvador Dali first sliced an eyeball on a movie screen. |
Popularity: 14
Vote: | Cooking in France and Italy has a particular high resonance, and it's hard to say how or why it developed other than that they've been smarter and there longer. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | D.C. is a complicated market that I don't understand very well. The restaurant business is a slippery slope, and it gathers speed very quickly when it's going downhill. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | English food in the last 30 years has come to grips with English products, their dairy culture and their cheeses and their creams and their seafood. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Every region has its own specialties, and whether it was Christmas Eve and the seafood dinner and the seven courses, whichever family you were from, it's a visceral part of your life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For two years I would just make that. I would concentrate on making the perfect omelet... It was important to me to be able to make a perfect omelet with nothing in it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | French and Italian cooking have been elevated to a really high art form. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | From a great restaurant to a B-minus player can happen in six weeks. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I didn't speak Italian when I got to Italy. I had taken a couple of lessons and did a year in college, but in six months, I became regionally submersed to the point that I can curse in dialect. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I don't have a problem with change. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I guess the success of selling this kind of food to New Yorkers is that to them it seems new. Serving the head or the tail or the tongue certainly doesn't make me a pioneer in the real world-although maybe, in New York, in a fancy restaurant, I was a bit of one. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I have research assistants, of course. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I just was introduced to the writings of Lucius Beebe, and I'm going to read him. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I like things that are fun, and I look to do them a lot, and that I have the opportunities to do them makes me a lucky guy. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I lived in San Francisco from '84 to '88. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I love the tradition, but I'm also known for pushing it out a little bit to the edge. Generally, the edge that I bring it to isn't globalizing or homogenization. It's more getting into very specifics of regionality. That seems shocking to many people. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I really enjoyed writing the first book. And since then it's been great. I've written every word of all my books. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I started to train in economics, and I hated it. I never really entered that world, and went to a cooking school in London. Since then I've been cooking in great places all over the world: mostly California, Italy, and a little bit of France. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I think Italian food is easier to like and love and less intimidating than most. So people overestimate my contribution, not in a bad way or a good way. It's just that my food is simpler than a lot of other chefs' food, and that makes it more accessible, and possibly easier to eat. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | I think that the rise of a group of people called the slow food movement is doing a lot to try to protect and preserve traditions. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I travel around and instead of my showing someone how to cook, I walk in with a completely hands-off approach, and they show me their dishes. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I went to St. Louis - their Little Italy is called The Hill, and as opposed to being even Bolognese or Tuscan or southerners, these are all people from Lago di Garda. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm developing a vineyard in Maremma, in Southwestern Tuscany, with Joe Bastianich. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm from the Pacific Northwest. The cooking of the Indian tribes of those regions-salmon on the barbecue and corn in the summer and whatever your garden has, just chopped up and sauted with basil in a ratatouille or a caponata-is very much a part of every person in Washington state's culture. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If neither of the two parties are happy, then you have a closed restaurant. And if only one of the two groups is happy, you have one that will close. So, to create an opportunity for both the customers and the staff to have a superior experience is my constant struggle. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If you approach cooking as a trade school, then you may not have as many interesting things to think about or do later on in life. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In New York, a lot of people come into the restaurant and it's not that they don't want what's on the menu, they just want to flex a little bit. They want to control the situation. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In the end, it will be the audience who chooses which restaurants they want to go to. There certainly shouldn't be any rules. I don't really care for a lasagna bolognese taco, but someone might. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In the hearts of all Italians, spaghetti pomodoro or spaghetti aglio peperoncino are dishes that are revered, that will never be messed with. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In the Italian culture for hundreds of years, as long as Parmigiano Reggiano or prosciutto di Parma has been being made, it's been an expression of not only their hunger and of their love for things that taste good, but the artisanship of the products themselves. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It used to be that you would go out to the theater and get a bite or you would go to the game and get a bite or go to the concert and get a bite. At this point in our society, the bite is often the main event. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | It's more interesting to talk about the whole lily family and say, did you know that lily bulbs are also part of the onion family? It's like the stream-of-consciousness way I think about food when I'm just cooking it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's no longer vergogna to be Italian. It's not a shame to have that culture and have that language. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Kids today want to eat their risotto with curry and shrimp and sour cream, not risotto alla Milanese, like they should, in my opinion. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My dad took over the whole state of Washington when he opened his little place called Salumi. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My father stopped speaking Italian because his father so badly wanted to be an American. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My intention is to make sure that we think about it without becoming too intellectual about it. There are pockets of restaurateurs throughout our country right now and in Italy, France, and Spain, who spend all their days figuring out how to confound the customer. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | My other show, Molto Mario, is continuing, me cooking with my buddies, having a good time. I've been doing Molto for nine years, and I'll continue to do it until eternity. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My partner, Joe, spends a lot of his time in Italy and has grown up in an Italian family, but it's more about what we don't put on the plate to make it feel more Italian. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Nothing that would be as artistic as any of the four restaurants I have in the city. If I was to do anything in Las Vegas, for instance, it would have to be... idiot-proof. And I still haven't decided if I'm capable of that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for that matter, the food starts to become a representation of what the culture is. When the food can transcend being just fuel, that's when you start to see these different permutations. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | One of the surprising things to me was when I think of Little Italys, I think of Neapolitans, Sicilians, mostly southerners. When you go to a little Italy, you expect to see polpetti, you expect to see cannelloni, you expect to see all these things. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Parmigiano Reggiano is as well-developed a brand as anything man has made, from Ferrari to Apollo 11. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | People were tired of eating things they could easily make at home. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Produce-vegetables-are the most exciting thing to me. The constant evolution of the greenmarket-chef relationship is something that makes it very exciting to work in a restaurant kitchen and see what comes through. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Puglia and orecchiette and bisteca alla fiorentina aren't going to go away. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Some things are being destroyed, because the Italians are just as tired of their basic food as the Americans and French were 20 years ago. So they're reinventing to avoid palate exhaustion. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The English have been burning everything for so long, and no one paid attention to them. But now there are guys like Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsey. The London restaurant scene is as vibrant as anywhere in the world-London, Paris, New York. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The EU would rather have it all made in a plant owned by Barilla, which is all right, but it's just not going to preserve the individual distinctions of specific products or grains or whatever tradition. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The food at my restaurants is mostly the food of Italy's grandmothers. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The Food Network is getting a little more entertaining than I would have thought a couple years back. They're in 80 million homes now. This is no longer a niche market. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The Four Seasons wanted me to become the chef, and I didn't feel that at age 28 I was ready to become the chef. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The ideas come from classic Italian cooking, or any European culture, for that matter. As far as something like the offal menu, Europeans would definitely not throw anything away, and the use of the head or the liver or the kidneys is part of their quotidian experience. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The lighting and the buzz and everything in addition to the food have an impact on what the customer feels. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The minimum time spent in any one restaurant should be a year, no matter what. You may feel that you're done earlier, but it's truly in a year that you learn the discipline and technical things you need to know about a particular restaurant. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The objective... is to achieve a comfort level between the cook/artist/performer and the customer/viewer/diner. And if we can achieve that, and the customers are happy and the cooks are happy, then we have a great experience. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The proximity to the Mediterranean... it's been a calming influence or just a generally good thing. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The reason that I developed the style of talking about the historical use of these ingredients is because after I've cut an onion 10 times, I can't tell you to cut an onion again. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The tradition of Italian cooking is that of the matriarch. This is the cooking of grandma. She didn't waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The whole concept of the supremacy of the family unit in the Italian culture... That's all based on the relation of the mom and the children and the bambino. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The whole thing of the risotto as a side dish with pasta: If no one is ever going to ask for risotto on the side of their spaghetti again, we have won something. We've turned them around. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | There are all kinds of myths going on in the Italian culture, and the way they celebrate is through their food. It's the tradition of the table where the Italians celebrate most of their triumphs and successes. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There's a big battle going on in France right now among the three-star chefs. There are the traditionalists and there are the radicals. The traditionalists are Bocuse. The radicals are Pierre Garnier. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | There's not a speck of fruit by the time March or April rolls around. Citrus is gone, and there's not a berry in sight. You're stuck with passion fruits and pineapples. Which isn't bad, but it's a tough time of the year, and chefs need to know how to work through it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | They have what's called the cooking school bloc, which is in the afternoon between 1 and 5. It will be interesting to see how my show, which is travel and food tied together, goes across America. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Think of American food. In my generation, growing up in the '60s and '70s, Banquet Fried Chicken and TV dinners were the thing. Now people are back into roasting their own chickens, and TV dinners are a point of kitsch. It will be interesting to see what survives another hundred years. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | This new show... says a lot about the rise of Americans' understanding of food and its value as to more than fuel, and that it's a cultural thing and that we are really starting to understand and relish our various regional differentiations. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | To get to New York, I was actually on my way to Brazil to help someone open a restaurant and stopped in Florida and met an old college buddy of mine who had a restaurant called Rocco. I came up to open that and I've been in New York for 11 years. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | To hit a real home-run, sometimes taste, sight and smell must be augmented with the thought-inducing stimuli of the unfamiliar or the reimagined. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Twenty years ago if you were going to be a cook, it was because you didn't make it in the army. It was the last stop before you were on the street. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day. |
Popularity: -8
Vote: | What I'm doing is taking a lot of the local ingredients we have available here. I'm just using them in different ways than chefs like, say, Tom Colicchio or Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Daniel Boulud are using them. I happen to have chosen a more populist vernacular. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | When I go out to a restaurant, I definitely order dishes that I know take either a long time to make or are difficult to source. Unless it's a really special steak, there's no reason for me to go out and eat that. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When I got to college age, my parents suggested, why don't you go to cooking school instead of going to a traditional college? I said that's not for me. That's ridiculous. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | When I talk about a great dish, I often get goose bumps. I'm like, whoa, I'll never forget that one. The Italians are just like that. It's not all about food. It's part of the memory. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When I was a cook and 24 years old... I read the kinds of books that were the inspiration to understanding the value of simplicity in cooking. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | When Italians think of the great moments of their life or of their growing up, generally they remember it with a gustatory sense-something that smelled like this or something that tasted like that or the way that the tortellini were always served on Christmas or on special holidays. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When they do pappardelle with peas, in Bologna, it's pappardelle and it's peas. That's it. And that's why it's so good, though, because they found the pea in its perfect expression. That's it. It's a pea. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else. |