Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am not a picture guy. I like to live in the present and keep the image of the past vivid in my mind. I don't need the precision of the picture.
When I am about to have a difficult project, I dream I am climbing a mountain. When everything is going fine, I dream I am going down the mountain.
When I started to work in Paris in fine dining, the passion really kicked in, and I knew that I would not, for the rest of my life, do anything else.
If you can't think like an onion or a carrot or a tomato, you may be a technician, but you won't understand what you're doing, and your dish will be flat.
When I realized, "Hm, I'm not that good at all. It will take me weeks, maybe months, to master the 32 yolks." When I did, it was a turning point in my career.
California is lucky, the East Coast is lucky because we get great seafood and a lot of produce from Florida, locally in good weather, but in the winter we have to buy it.
At 15, I had to choose a vocational school, and I was delighted, of course, to go to culinary school. But learning the basics was not as exciting as being the chef I am today.
I have more eating memories than cooking memories and many memories of being in the kitchen - I was always attracted to the kitchen - but nobody ever wanted me to touch anything.
Everybody wants to support his own region and economy and farming. If we can preserve the land and if we can preserve the ocean, we all know, deep inside that we're doing the right thing.
The nature of human beings is to eat meat and fruits and vegetables, and therefore we have to kill animals. I don't have a problem with that. But it's a sacred moment. It's a gift of life.
I am an audiophile. It's almost like a virus. I'm completely crazy about the quality of sound. It's interesting and painful at the same time; you have to really spend a lot of money on the equipment.
Just walking in the kitchen (and we have three kitchens at Le Bernardin), I exercise quite a lot. I also walk in Central Park for 50 minutes from my house to Le Bernardin every day, rain, shine, snow.
When I was twelve, I decided to become a chef. I stole a book from the library about the greatest restaurants in France. I'd flip the pages and dream. I should return that book to the library some day.
The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream. Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.
It's a very naive idea to think that the chef is cooking everything, and, on top of it, is irreplaceable. That would mean that basically he is the only genius, and there are idiots all around him, which doesn't make sense.
When you serve lobster, you've taken a being's life away. Therefore if you create a recipe, you have to be very dedicated to elevate the lobster, to make it good and tasty of course, but at the end of the day it's a matter of paying homage.
We lived in St. Tropez when I was young, and there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees in France at the time, after the war. My mother had many Vietnamese friends who entertained a lot, and she was taught how to make that spring roll. She would make them all the time.
A lot of foreign people say, when asking about eating habits, 'What is your guilty pleasure?' I have no guilt. Whatever I do, I enjoy and it's the point. I think if you start to feel guilty about it, that's a problem. So, no guilty pleasures. I have pleasure and no guilt at all.
Fast food is both evil and genius. Because of it we can feed a large number of people fairly decently at an affordable price. However, all the artificial flavors and artificial ingredients in some of their products are unacceptable. And it's designed so you can eat fast so you get back to work more quickly. Not good.
Cooking is a holistic process of planning, preparing, dining and sharing food. I place food at the center of our humanity, as it nourishes not only our physical bodies but also our emotional and spiritual lives. Food is truly a cultural phenomenon that informs our traditions and our relationship with the earth. I genuinely believe that food connects us all.
I have very vivid memories of being a young child. My mother would create dinner as for us, and when she would bake, she would leave some dough for me. I would roll the dough into little sticks while she was cooking the apple tart of whatever. I was looking through the window of the oven and flipping the light, and then my bread would come out, and it was inedible, of course.
It was my first day working at Tour d'Argent, a famous restaurant in Paris, in 1982, and they were celebrating their 400th anniversary. I am in the fish station and after many mistakes, including cutting myself after 30 seconds in that kitchen, the chef said, "Make a Hollandaise sauce with 32 yolks." It takes me forever to separate the yolks from the whites, and I put them in a bowl and try to go close to the stove, but the stove is way too hot for me.