Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The restaurant industry is brutal.
I know every movement of my kitchen.
I can't crack jokes because I don't have any.
I never cooked at home - my father was the chef.
Fine dining is an occasional treat for most people.
People will travel anywhere for good food - it's crazy.
There is no conflict between a better meal and a better world.
I'm a bit of a glutton - I eat too much of all that is good to eat.
My last meal on Earth, I would love it to be a bowl of blueberries with cold cream.
When people are grownups they're grown ups. They make their own decisions you know.
I only have the restaurant. If I do other things, it's only to do with the restaurant.
I would love to eat a really great burger, but it doesn't exist in our part of the world.
When you start at catering college, nobody prepares you for a book tour or public speaking.
I've never had anything but the freedom to do what I wanted just as long as it made me happy.
A gastronomical supermeal didn't necessarily have to involve the things I had brought from other top kitchens.
Close interaction with farmers and scientists can expose the chef to new flavours that can be used to delight diners.
If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate.
Chefs have a new opportunity - and perhaps even an obligation - to inform the public about what is good to eat, and why.
When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.
I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.
I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends.
If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything.
Take a trip to the forest and experience the greatness of getting on your knees and picking your own food and going home... and eating it.
Scandinavian-Danish cuisine was something quite rustic, mostly known for pastries and smorgasbord cuisine, which in itself has become a joke.
There's no media training. In cooking school, there's not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.
Learning about issues such as sustainability and locavorism are things that you need to have as part of you as a chef because it will make you cook more delicious food.
The first book was out and for the first time we were on a book tour. Being the son of an immigrant, I'd never dreamt of being on book tours. Suddenly the attention was huge.
I started my cooking 'career' aged 15, almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week, without time to play football or other sports.
When I turned 15, I left school having failed to make the minimum grade. With little direction I enlisted at the local culinary school. Here the academic demands were less rigorous.
Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.
But when spring and summer happens, it's intuition. Everything is based on intuition. There's not too much time to overthink, over-complicate. Those wild strawberries, they might be there for two days.
Appetite as it relates to the human being, the person. How do you find appetite for what you do? How do you relate to appetite? How do you get appetite, not only for a meal but also to do the work you do?
Fifteen years ago, France was the promised land of cooking. So I looked at a map, found five restaurants and faxed them to ask for a job. Within five minutes, I got a reply from the then three- star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier.
I can tell you one of the most surprising ingredients I've ever found. Perhaps five years ago on a beach I saw this herb that looked exactly like chives. I put it in my mouth and started chewing and, surprise, it tasted exactly like coriander.
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 drive for working comes from everyday moments - the thrill of experiencing a young cook succeeding in what they thought was an impossible job, as well as guests being happy. I also love the unknown - discovering new things and trying to make sense of them.
Summer's the same, autumn is even more extreme. Then winter is when you sort of condense all of your ideas. You process all these things and you try to look for new concepts. In that sense, your intuition is in hibernation. What you fill up is your imagination; you fill up your memories there.
I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something - high gastronomy can be something very, very present and doesnt have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a high gastronomy restaurant.
I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something - high gastronomy can be something very, very present and doesn't have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a high gastronomy restaurant.
In my home I tend to eat a very simple version of what we cook at the restaurant, which is vegetable-oriented, with a little bit of fish and very little meat. For instance, a dish in my home could be steamed spinach with spruce, where I take a spruce branch and put it in the pot and that infuses into the spinach.
I just love this idea of using, especially in terms of food, using that common sense. If you follow that - it's hard to talk about it without sounding like some New Age idiot, which I think is a bit unfair - but, if you do follow that natural cycle, you will inevitably eat better, cheaper, and much, much, much, much healthier.
The traditional roots of Scandinavian cuisine are not that spectacular, to say the least. When we write about the traditions that we are inspired by, it's more techniques like smoking, preserving. Many of them are not made to make food delicious; they're just around so that you can make food last through the winter. There isn't a great deal of tradition to tap into.
That's how people make sense of a meeting: they eat something. If they were in a sad moment it would be the same thing, they'd be eating something. It's what makes life fun. We don't need it to be delicious or great or all these things if we're just to survive. But it's one of those things that makes life fun, livable. And the more I submerge myself in it, the more fun I seem to have.
21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?
You wake up, your life is discipline: there's kids, breakfast, lunch box, go to work, discipline, organization, guests. Imagine the semi-final of Super Bowl. We have that every day: lunch and dinner. We play that game. Then you come home and you really just want to drink a beer. But then you discipline yourself and you have to do this thing, this journal. It was painful but I'm so happy I did it. I have newfound respect for people that write.
I started to change. It was sort of a restaurant mid-life crisis, you could say. I lost a lot of confidence, not so much as a father or as a friend, but as a boss, as a chef that's to make decisions throughout the day all the time. I just slowly started burning out. Once you lose your confidence like that, you start being angry in the kitchen. I couldn't recognize myself anymore. I started writing the journal. It was never meant to be a book, but the editor at Phaidon read parts of it. As editors do, I guess.