Daniel Boulud Quotes

Here's the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well.

There's so much that can be learned from French cooking, especially really traditional, more modest meals.

There's no way I'm going to stand up for bad ingredients. We love seasonal ingredients. It's a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.

France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.

I am classically trained in French pastry, but I am American and have a natural curiosity and playfulness that comes through in my cooking. I like to present flavors that people are familiar with in unique combinations and forms that may surprise them.

One of the biggest problems with young chefs is too much addition to the plate. You put cilantro and then tarragon and then olive oil and then walnut oil or whatever. It's too much.

In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I'm more classic, because that's what customers like. In Monaco, it's classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it's a contemporary French restaurant that I've developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how.

I went to L'Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I think French cooking is the basis for a lot of classical cuisine, a foundation of a lot of other cuisines. That said, it's not the only way to approach a cooking career.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.

Sauce is certainly ancestral to French cooking. The technique is very tricky, but it's also very fundamental.

Le Cirque at first was one of those general French restaurants in town, which were cooking more or less the same food. At Le Cirque, I wanted to do something different while respecting the foundation of the restaurant. I did that through the menu.

It's a funny thing, but it's often overlooked that I'm a huge devout lover of French cooking. I have the utmost respect for them, though they have lost their respect for me because they think the way I cook is nutty.

Since truffle oil and caviar aren't always in the budget, learning to tweak and enhance just a few ingredients and flavor combinations can help you transform those ordinary ingredients into the extraordinary!

Once you know the fundamentals of cooking, then you don't need to follow a recipe - you just know what herbs go well or what meats, or what combination of what goes together, and then you can just branch out from there. But if there's something specific that I want to make, I work on the recipe and tweak it to my own.

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking.

I love inventive food, but I want the classic dishes to taste like how I remember them. I get a little bummed out when there is too much fancy stuff going on and it doesn't resemble the original dish at all.

Classical cooking and molecular gastronomy should remain separate. You can mix two styles and get fusion; any more, and you just get confusion.

When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.

Those Frenchies may know their pastry, but you can't beat a bit of British cheese.

There was an extensive collection of cookbooks in the well-stocked library, and he took to pouring over these in the evenings.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking... doesn't mean it has to be fancy cooking, although it can be as elaborate as you wish.

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen

I think if you can take one or two things from a cookbook, it's successful.

Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.