Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has...
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 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.
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 —
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat withou...
When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.
You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.
Only one in four has a chance at making it.... And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be . was going to live. I was the guy.
Line cooks are the heroes.
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,
Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.
Good food and good eating are about risk.
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.
People's choice to become vegan, from people I've spoken to, seems motivated by fear.
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.
Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you've got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it's a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.
I don't have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French chee...
Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.
Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park.
When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim-job cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can't tea...