Alain Ducasse 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.

The type of cuisine I do, especially after being on 'Iron Chef' for several years, is a lot of global cuisine. My strength has always been Mediterranean cuisine across the board from Morocco, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, but I think now I'm doing a lot of very different cuisines all the time.

In Paris we have bistros, then we have fine dining. In London, you have a very contemporary scene with mixed influences.

You know, this is really a way of cooking. It's not my way. I'm deeply influenced by the Mediterranean way of being. I've spent a lot of time there. And I've sort of translated it; I've tried to make it available to people in this country to whom it might not be familiar.

I especially love French, Italian and Japanese cuisines.

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.

In Tokyo, we have more three-star Michelin restaurants than Paris.

I enjoy eating Italian and Japanese cuisine, and abroad, I love Zuma, Nobu, and Cipriani.

Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food.

England understands good Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine; in France, we just get French.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

I cook. I did the Escoffier course in Paris when I was 21 in one of those periods when it was like a pause. I can cook anything Italian, Chinese.

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now.

New York gives us a wide colour palette to cook from. We have cuisines from around the world, and that lets us pick and choose.

One of my great teachers was the late Jean-Claude Vrinat of Taillevent in Paris.

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.

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

Fifteen years ago, France was the promised land of cooking. So I looked at a map, found five restaurants and faxed them to ask for a job. Within five minutes, I got a reply from the then three- star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier.

In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.

I actually don't think there is any difference between French and American cuisine. French cuisine was always about discipline, about ingredient, about creativity, but also about simple. I see America as very similar in these rights.

I'm more comfortable weaving Indian flavors into American classics.

Ultimately, I want to prepare food that will be recognized equally in Tokyo, London, and Paris. I am after that universality, that transcendence.

London is the most important city in the world for restaurants.

When I am up in Paris then the restaurant which has remained my favourite for the past decade is Guy Savoy. The menu is huge, sophisticated and very creative but I keep to simple choices.