Grant Achatz Quotes

A lot of young chefs today get carried away by trends, by influences, by movements.

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

I don't think I hate any food trends.

I don't follow the food trends.

Every era has its own list of ingredients that are considered exotic and then, 15 years later, they're not.

What worries me is that, because of the amount of media coverage of food, Britain seems to have become a foodie nation - but I'm not sure it actually has. I'm not sure there's been a huge change in the pantry at home or what we cook for supper.

The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

When a dish really hits a nerve with the American palate, it can really take off across the entire country, facilitated by food vendors' freedom to copy good ideas.

What you're going to be eating in the next year is decided by chefs. If the consensus is that pot-bellies are in next season, that's what's on your plate. And I think that's a good thing, because we know, obviously, about food.

The thing about innovation is, where do you stop? There are movements across the world where people are asking restaurateurs to bring back the regular plate. So, yes, we are fed up of drinking out of shoes and eating out of hats.

Gastronomy has to catch up to the evolution in technology.

I was reasonably interested in mathematics in school. Typically what happens is... when you start playing chess, it takes up a lot of your attention. But about 10 years ago, I found that the Internet is very good to start learning about a lot of subjects.

With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.

When something works on a huge level, everybody does it.

I have real admiration for chefs who can maintain an edge and find new inspiration in their cooking after many years.

I frequently have scenes that take place in places I've never been or characters who have professions that I know nothing about that I've got to research. But that's what Google is for.

There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.

The new 'Joy' was needed for a number of reasons. Recent developments in nutrition and new ingredients were two of the major reasons for the revision. One of the other big reasons was America's new love for big flavors. Yay!

I'm encouraged because you pick up any food magazine and there's two or three recipes involving Indian spices.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Food trends have been around as long as people have had the ability to choose between different things to eat, but the modern, interconnected media has made food trends a viral phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was just a few newspapers and a few select gourmet magazines that were writing about food. Today, it's every single publication.

What people actually refer to as research nowadays is really just Googling.

In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu.

Frankly, Milan kind of sucks as a restaurant city. It's so fashion-obsessed that people don't pay that much attention to the food.

Chef Thomas Keller was an inspiration to me and many, many young cooks like me. He told us that the role of the new, modern chef is different.