Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes—or olives—a...
Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.
One in eight Cambodians – as many as 2 million people – were killed during the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate their country’s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled...
Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists...
No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I've worked with ove...
Just believe me when I tell you that the city is beautiful – and not in the oppressive way of, say, Florence, where you’re almost afraid to leave your room because you might break something.
It's as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside they'd like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women, have built themselves the most beautiful of...
In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love...
If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and...
I'd been the culinary equivalent of the Flying Dutchman too long, living a half-life with no future in mind, just oozing from sensation to sensation.
I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical ch...
I can't imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi.
How many'd we do? is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their...
A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim's head or your pan — then thr...
Like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on — but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for abo...
History, as they say, will always be written by the victors.
[When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantag...
You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thiev...
Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.
The fact that she’s a girl requires, I believe, extra effort. Dada may have, at various times in his life, been a pig, but Dada surely does not want to ever look like a pig again. This can’t possibly...
