The simpler the food, the harder it is to prepare it well. You want to truly taste what it is you're eating. So that goes back to the trend of fine ingredients. It's very Japanese: Preparing good ingredients very simply, without distractions from the flavor of the ingredient itself.
Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way - that's the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.
I'm obviously very hippie-like, and I'm always in a different city and town and country, and I thought, 'Why is it that the big food chains are always so promoted? I want the whole ingredients. I don't want preservatives. I want what this town and these farmers produce and see how their chefs create.'
As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food's going to taste good. And that - that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.
Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.
I love how Jamie Oliver makes seasonal, local foods in a rustic way, without a lot of fuss.
I concentrate in my work on preserving and displaying the original flavor from each ingredient in a dish.
We want to make the old fast food model irrelevant. We want to make great ingredients and classic cooking techniques accessible to everybody.
When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there's something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.
I'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.
The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.
