I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.
When you use it in cooked foods, it changes [the Tabasco flavor] a little bit; it loses a little bit of the bright acid that you love on it, but you get that more cooked heat and chile flavor down.
I don't put cream in any pasta noodles ever. I would use a little butter, but I don't ever use cream.
When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.
I think Tabasco brings me pure heat and Southern kind of familiarity, along with the vinegar and the barrel-aged spices.
I'm a big fan of featuring all of the local shellfish and seafood provided.
When we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we're kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands.
I'm pretty confident that the seafood from the Northeastern Atlantic is one of the most delicious and unique in the country, so that we can represent that in a way that the Italians like to represent things.
[If] we can celebrate that in a way that celebrates our love for New England as well as our love for the Italian culture as well as the American culture, then we've done something that's really good and supporting these fishermen who are doing the right thing in sustainability . . . paying attention to make sure we don't overfish our world.
If you could learn how to make a perfect lemon tart then you got a story. If you don't feel like that, make a perfect chocolate chip cookie, but have five go-to dishes like that and you can move them around, change them up just a little bit, and always have something in the can.
I like anchovies, and I don't tell everybody about them. Almost every time, they don't even notice.
I like thick or middle (spaghetti). Thin for me is always overcooked by the time I'm eating it.
There's a pretty equitable distribution in the restaurant industry of how money gets paid, except for in the kitchen. The kitchen is the lowest-paid group of people.
What will always remain is love, passion and family time.
