Culinary Background Quotes

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

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.

When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food... but I also grew up with a Greek family; when other kids were eating fried okra, we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.

When I was a teenager, I worked in New Orleans for a chef named Paul Prudhomme. That was a very important time in my life as a chef. I developed my palate and learned a lot. And here I am now. I specialize in modern Mexican and contemporary Latin cuisines.

I can eat a lot of pizza. And I can cook. I'm from New Orleans, so it's just in my blood.

I have no formal culinary training, right.

Mum doesn't like it when I mention that Dad's a better cook than her. He was born in Spain and spent eight years in Portugal and is exceptional at lots of cuisines.

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

I come from a musical family as well as a culinary family.

Growing up as a young kid, I was in a restaurant. So, you know, I always had a very good understanding of the nuances. And in a way, that was a bad thing. Because it kind of programmed me to believe that if you're going have a restaurant, this is what you need to do, and this is the way it's going to be run.

My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.

I was raised in restaurants. My parents opened their first restaurant, Buonavia, in Queens when I was just 3. This business has always been my way of life. As a kid, home was reserved only for sleeping. After school, you could find my sister and I helping out at the family restaurant.

I grew up a vegetarian. Then, because I grew up in the states, I started slowly eating meat. First it was bologna sandwiches, or pepperoni on pizza.

I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.

Chicago is a lot of my background as a chef.

I love to eat. I'm from New Orleans. I eat like nobody's business. So to find a workout that I actually look forward to is a lifesaver.

I got into cooking just by watching my mom and my aunts and my great-aunts and actually one of my cousins who has her own catering business in Atlanta, Georgia. So everybody around me really cooked and it was just all these different styles and backgrounds and cuisines of cooking that I found so interesting.

I don't have a long family history of good cooks in my family.