Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's only one cook in the kitchen, only one chef. I let the soloists do their thing - you've gotta let a man do a solo the way he wants - but as far as picking the tunes and working on the arrangements, I take full responsibility for it.
As a chef, I had started working with groups like Share Our Strength and various local food banks in New York, raising money for hunger-related issues. And not only me, but the entire restaurant industry has been very focused on this issue.
As a chef, you need to respect your guests and their needs. If they decide that they want to eat certain things and not eat others, if for religious reasons or just decide they don't want to eat certain ingredients, you have to respect that.
The biggest challenge of being a pastry chef is that, unlike other types of chefs, you can't throw things together at a farmer's market. When you're working with baking powder and a formula, you have to be exact. If not, things can go wrong.
Let's face it: if you and I have the same capabilities, the same energy, the same staff, if the only thing that's different between you and me is the products we can get, and I can get a better product than you, I'm going to be a better chef.
The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'
I'm the joke of the family with cooking because I've never done it - primarily because I've been surrounded by people who are so good at it. Mum's brilliant. Boyfriends have always been good at it. I'm waiting for my inner chef to be released.
Sometimes, early in their careers, chefs make the mistake of adding one too many things to a plate to get attention. If a chef is just coming up with wiz-bang gimmicks on their plate, that has nothing to do with bringing real pleasure to people.
In 10 years, I don't really know what I'll be, and I like not having any idea. I like the idea of being so passionate about everything I do and the fact that I might wake up tomorrow and say 'I want to be a chef,' and just pour myself into that.
We are not really privy to all that crazy stuff that goes on in the show. I go to work, eat, and talk about food. The wild things happen when we aren't around. I expected Top Chef to last three or four seasons and we are now shooting season ten.
A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.
What I want to do is produce really delicious food. I want it to look nice, because when you see food you should want to eat it. You shouldn't be saying, 'Oh my goodness, isn't the chef clever, he can weave the Eiffel Tower out of carrot sticks.'
The 'Maverick Chef' is one concept that I would really want to do again because I am traveling from country to country taking from what is in that country that is iconic, special, funky, weird and doing it my way. That is something I really enjoy.
I wanted to be a vet, a nurse, a chef - I mean, anything but the music industry. But once I hit high school, the bug really bit me. You can't deny where you come from and what's in your genes, and music definitely was. I haven't looked back since.
Just because I am a chef doesn't mean I don't rely on fast recipes. Indeed, we all have moments when, pressed for time, we'll use a can of tuna and a tomato for a first course. It's a question of choosing the right recipes for the rest of the menu.
I've been a model for 15 years, and I've been on 'Top Chef' for eight seasons, and before that I had other cooking shows, so I've learned a thing or two about how to camouflage certain areas and how to draw the eye to a preferable area of the body.
When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant - sushi restaurant.
There's the common misconception that restaurants make a lot of money. It's not true. If you look at maybe the top chef in the world, or at least monetarily, it's like Wolfgang Puck, but he makes as much money as an average crappy investment banker.
I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.
TV is great and can open up doors, but if you aren't there to cook because you love it, don't go. Don't go to "Top Chef" just to be "famous." It's annoying to our profession and what we all love to do. You want to compete against like-minded people.
If you were to go to a restaurant and disagree with Daniel Boulud, he'd probably throw something at you. Restaurant chefs have a problem with caterers because we accommodate special requests, but great service is about getting exactly what you want.
When I look at someone's face, there's something in my brain that just clicks - that breaks down their face into the elements that go into a caricature. It might be like the way a chef tastes a dish and can break down into elements what went into it.
You can't really class all reality shows together. For instance, 'Top Chef' is about talent and competition. 'Big Brother' is more like what happens when you get all those narcissistic personalities crammed in together... and there are limits to that.
At a very young age, I fell in love with the idea of being in a restaurant and being surrounded with people around me. I don't think at the time I thought about becoming a chef. I have a bachelor's degree in economics. I never went to a cooking school.
You don't go to school to become the best chef in the world right after you graduate. School is always a starting point so what people forget is that you go to school to build a foundation, and you want to build a foundation that's not going to crumble.
My dream as a passionate cook has been to go to Le Cordon Bleu. Never could my most incredible dream have lived up to the experience. The food, the lesson, the chef, the ingredients - all the best of the best. I see why Le Cordon Bleu is world-renowned.
My Mum was the main reason why I became a chef. She influenced all of my family to feel free in the kitchen - it was the centre of our home and I have wonderful memories of helping Mum cook and experiencing the love and patience that went into the food.
I know my way around the kitchen. I like to cook, so I can fry an egg. I guess I could be a fry cook at Bob's Big Boy or something, or maybe a sous chef somewhere a little nicer. I would like to do that. I think I can probably pick that up pretty quickly.
I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword - two jackets, one that's driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.
When I was a teenager, I worked in New Orleans for a chef named Paul Prudhomme. That was a very important time in my life as a chef. I developed my palate and learned a lot. And here I am now. I specialize in modern Mexican and contemporary Latin cuisines.
We have a personal chef who helps us stay on track, and we really like to keep things the same all year round. We don't want to change anything up too much if it's working. We eat clean and organic as much as we can, and try not to eat too much of anything.
My mother, Betty, was an entertainer - she opened up for James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner - and I had an uncle who would work as a chef in a restaurant, 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4. I was young, so he could have been shorter, but in my mind, that's how tall he was.
All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef.
The painter, sculptor, writer, and musician are protected by law. So are inventors. But the chef has absolutely no redress for plagiarism on his work; on the contrary, the more the latter is liked and appreciated, the more will people clamour for his recipes.
Every chef has his treats. By that, I mean bits and pieces from things you're working on - crusty little cake trimmings, ends from a brisket, collars from a salmon, scraps. But they're snacks to me, and I eat them right off the cutting board - maybe too much.
I've been experimenting more and more with LN2, liquid nitrogen. I've used it in battle on 'Iron Chef America,' but have also made some great ice creams at home for my family. Since it freezes basically on contact, you can have ice cream ready in mere minutes.
I make it happen. Who bought Alex Haley's book 'Roots' for TV? Me. I hired the director, hired the writer. I put them all together. I'm like the chef. If I mix all the ingredients right, it's going to taste terrific. If I don't, it's not going to come out good.
People have no idea how much work it is for a man to produce an ejaculation. You have this seminal vesicle churning out this fluid, the prostate gland producing an alkaline solution. It's like having five iron chefs in your crotch working to cook up this stuff.
You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
I am a terrible chef; I'm not a good cook. I don't have the talent, the patience, the desire even to cook the way these great artists that I meet around the world cook, and I'm very, very happy to support them. I invest in restaurants because I love them so much.
If I hadn't become a chef I would have loved to be a top tennis player, although I was never good enough so it wasn't really an option. But that has never dimmed my love of the game, which started in childhood when I was lucky enough to be a ball boy at Wimbledon.
As a boss, as a CEO, as a creative director, as a chef, I've learned that failure will always come. I've learned to give it a big squeeze, smile at it, humble myself to it and then use it as a springboard to send me on my way to strength, success, and fulfillment.
Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.
It's been a long road. A humble Dearborn beginning. Secretary mom, dad teaching handicapped children. Working for what they had. Eventually, I moved to L.A. but, not good for me, I felt rejected. So I stopped acting and, needing to feel good inside, became a chef.
I enjoy what I do because it keeps evolving - when I was a cook, I wanted to be a chef de partie; when I was a chef de partie, I wanted to be a chef; when I was a chef, I wanted to be a restaurateur, and now I am a chef entrepreneur. I am still fulfilling my dream.
My husband cooks fancier food for himself than I've ever cooked on-air. I call him from the road, and he's making champagne-vanilla salmon or black-cherry pork chop. Half of me is feeling unworthy. Not only am I not a chef, I'm not a better cook than my own husband!
For 'Around the World in 80 Plates' we got to travel all over, having what was like a cross between a culinary competition and races. And in each country we had a chef Ambassador. We went to London, Barcelona, Bologna, Hong Kong, Thailand, Morocco... It was amazing.
By the time I was 30, nobody would work with me. I was friendless, I was hopeless, I was suicidal, lost my family - I mean, it was bad. Bottomed out, didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef - go to work in a kitchen someplace.
I haven't fully moved over to the iPad. At any given time, I have about four DVDs in my pocket. I'm constantly screening 'Top Chef,' 'Housewives,' and all the other shows we have in development, racing to meet a deadline. So I pretty much bring my laptop everywhere.
I was hired as a sous-chef at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. The chef liked to drink - some mornings we would find him sleeping. Two weeks after its opening, I became the chef. I was 20 years old, and way over my head. I had to hire the cooks and do the menus.