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. |
The food at my restaurants is mostly the food of Italy's grandmothers. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
The lighting and the buzz and everything in addition to the food have an impact on what the customer feels. |
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. |
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. |
The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it. |
The proximity to the Mediterranean... it's been a calming influence or just a generally good thing. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |