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. |
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. |
At this point in my career it's very hard for me to turn down opportunities that I think are auspicious. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
French and Italian cooking have been elevated to a really high art form. |
From a great restaurant to a B-minus player can happen in six weeks. |
I can chill without having to watch my Ps and Qs. |
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. |
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. |
I have research assistants, of course. |
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. |