The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.
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.
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.
For me, food is about memories, feelings, emotions, and so is Le Bernardin, and that's why it's not just a restaurant.
Well, cooking starts with shopping. If the ingredients are not good, you don't do it. Just change your mind and do something else.
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.
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.
You don't become a chef to become famous.
I love garlic, and I use it often.
In a professional kitchen, the idea is to have your cooks not moving much while theyre cooking. You want them to stay in the same spot.
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.
I don't like it when I go to a restaurant and I'm lectured from the menu.
My New Year's resolution is to cut my diet sodas down to two cans a day!
I had a passion for cooking, and I was a very bad student.
The fish is the star of the plate.
America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.
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.
Money is not necessarily, although it helps a lot for happiness, it’s not necessarily the best way to be happy, to be rich, you know.
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.
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.
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.
If I go to a nightclub, even if the music is good, if the sound system is not, I don't stay.
I don't follow the food trends.
Obviously California is fantastic in terms of produce, vegetables.
I come from a family of farmers on both sides of my family.
