Lidia Bastianich Quotes

Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'

If you've attended the Cordon Bleu, you would know that no woman is supposed to be a chef - only men.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.

I am not a chef. I can't claim that title. The difference is a cook doesn't have a degree. A chef has formal education. It has nothing to do with talent or actual preparation - one just can't claim the title if you don't have degree.

So I quit my job and went to the New England Culinary Institute for the full two years and worked in the restaurant industry after that until finally I thought I had a grasp on what I needed to do what I do.

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

Probably a mistake, you know, that people make in America, to think that all great chefs are a male... I'm still the only male in the family who went into that business.

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

I worked in a bunch of really tough kitchens, but when I got yelled at and screamed at, it wasn't really for being a woman. It was just for making a bonehead mistake.

Generally, I cook from the soul and measure by eye, throwing in this and that along the way. But I want to be a certified chef. That's one of my goals.

I took a Chinatown bus to New York to enroll in the International Culinary Center's pastry program.

I like to cook. I would probably go to culinary school in France if I had time.

Lots of men hate women now-a-days. ... It was a man-made world, and now we're asking to go shares in the making.

Women can do anything men can do. Except math, chess, running, jumping, lifting stuff, fixing things, making money, hockey, surfing, driving, making decisions, being tall, taking out the garbage, tipping, fishing, being funny (on purpose), reading a map, listening to good bands, writing, running the country, inventing anything important, or being fun to hang out with.

Get over the feeling that the two words don’t go together - women and power. The fact is, if we don’t put the two together, and don’t understand how power changes complexion in the hands of women, then we’re not going to make it.

The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.

I worked for 20 directors as a production designer, most male. I was on the set to witness firsthand a range of sometimes atrocious emotions - well-documented firings, yellings, fights between directors and actors, hookers, abusive things, budget overages, lack of preparation. A man gets a standing ovation for crying because he's so sensitive, but a woman is shamed.

The pedestal is immobilizing and subtly insulting whether or not some women yet realize it. We must move up from the pedestal.

Women had always been thought of as looking after the family when men go and earn an income and they're the bread earner and so on. So there is a kind of generation of inequality, [and], on top of the fact, women have pregnancies and periods, [and] when the children are very small, there are greater demands on their time. So one way or another women have had a pretty rough deal in the past, and there's no reason why that should continue, and any country that has tried to remedy that has succeeded in doing so.

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and every thing tends to make them so.

I've never run across anybody who suggested that women need to be reprogrammed. I don't think I've even come across anybody who wanted to teach a girl how to throw right. They just accept it is what it is. But honestly, folks, it's always reprogramming men. It's always men who seem to provide or be at the root of all of these cultural problems. And if we could just make men less like men and more like, I guess, women, then we would be rid of all of these problems.

The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher.

If I were a guy, it would be, you know, just a different set of problems I have to carry along.