Geoffrey Zakarian Quotes

It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.

Chefs are artists, and I couldn't be happy with my art if I was forced to use cheap ingredients.

I enjoy watching talented cooks bringing together ingredients into a fabulous dish.

When you talk about avant-garde cuisine, the surprise factor is really important. For example, I love looking at blogs and the photos, but I'm not that keen on other people taking photos of my dishes.

In a time when it is common for chefs to simply reproduce the innovations of others, the few who speak for themselves through their food become the skilled artists of their time.

There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

I just love food and the art of it. There's such an art to being a good chef and the way you present food and the different ingredients you use. It's like music - you get inspiration from different genres. It's the same with art, too.

As chefs, especially pastry chefs, your creativity plays such an important part in your daily work. We truly do have a blank canvas to work with every time we create a new dish.

The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

It is not necessary to have an extravagant food budget in order to serve things with variety and tastefully cooked. It is not necessary to have expensive food on the plates before they can enter the dining room as things of beauty in colour and texture. Food should be served with real care as to the colour and texture on the plates, as well as with imaginative taste. This is where artistic talent and aesthetic expression and fulfillment come in.

Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter, or the cap of Fortunatus for a conjurer.

Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.

Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

I like doing food as a focal point on my table. It is not like going out and buying flowers or candles, which are expensive.

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

Food can be expressive and therefore food can be art.

I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky.

Our goal was to show people a vision of food they hadn't seen before. So, I had this idea of... let's cut all these things in half, and show a picture of the food in the pan, in the oven.

Obviously, I love Japanese food. My favorite TV show of all time, without exception, is 'Iron Chef.' Not the stupid American version; 'Iron Chef' Japanese; the real one, the one that was on in Japan... my DVR for years was set to record almost every single 'Iron Chef' episode.

I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.

I'm not making art, I'm making sushi.

I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.

I love the alchemy of cooking, the theatre of it. It's creating something.

With food, you're the artist; you put the colour in it, you present it to the table and it has the ability to knock out the senses. It can look fabulous, be beautifully presented and smell great and taste good as well.

Cooking is an art form, a creative thing.