The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.
There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that's always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in...
I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. You're getting into the electric chair tomorrow morning. They're gonna st...
I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.
I have since found that almost everybody in the meat business is funny —just as almost everyone in the fish business is not.
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ri...
In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination--unt...
I remember it well, because it was such a slap in the face. It was a wake-up call that food could be important, a challenge to my natural belligerence. By being denied, a door opened.
So you want to be a chef? You really, really, really want to be a chef? If you've been working in another line of business, have been accustomed to working eight-to-nine-hour days, weekends and evenin...
It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewe...
He could tell when the bullying, the relentless sarcasm, the constant, all-encompassing vigilance had become too exhausting. When one of his people was fed up with staying awake at night anticipating...
Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime...Please, treat your garlic with respect...Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see ro...
For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best —
You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.
Is there something fundamentally, ethically … wrong about a meal so Pantagruelian in its ambition and proportions? Other than the people are starving in Africa argument, and the 250,000 people lost th...
I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on,
I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.
Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.
Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it - not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.