Mario Batali Quotes

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand.

I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking.

I wanted to learn everything I could about what it takes to be a great chef. It was a turning point for me.

As a matter of fact, I've been to Italy many times before I met my husband, which he can't even imagine that I could possibly know anything about Italian food. But, you know, Italian food's really basic, and there's so many different variations on it that what my husband did is he broke it down for me.

I am driven by ingredients. My Italian heritage and French training inevitably poke through as well, guiding my techniques.

Italians' relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.

You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.

I grew up watching my mom in the kitchen, that's how I know anything about cooking. I've always wanted to go to a culinary class actually.

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti.

The French don't know how to cook breakfast.

I do not cook. However, if I did, I'd cook all Italian food, all the time.

Italians allow anything in their cooking.

If you stop for lunch elsewhere in the world, you tend to eat a sandwich, and a bad one. Italy is unique for the style of life. I think everyone envies it a bit.

My grandfather was a great chef.

I would like to know more about how to cook Japanese food. I love it, but don't know much about it.

It came to me that the one thing I could do was cook. And I figured I couldn't do any worse than the people running these places around town.

It's kind of crazy what I can do and what I can't do. It's simple things like rice and quinoa or salads, honestly, that I'm not great at. But I can make an osso buco that takes six hours.

God, Americans know how to cook.

I grew up cooking. I was always in my grandma's cooking, and I never thought of it as a career.

I grew up watching my mom cook.

I started cooking around 9 years old. I would make crepes at home for my parents. By 15 years old, I had started my apprenticeship at a bakery.

I've cooked my whole life, and I grew up in a household of cooks.

You can't be a chef and appear on television all the time. It's impossible. At least when I earned my stars, I was always behind my stove.

Part of being a really good chef or cook is being able to fix disasters.