Culinary Change Quotes

America has undergone a total food and wine revolution.

Kogi changed what a generation eats, introducing people to fermentation and different vegetables and flavors.

My daughter Alexandra once told me, "Mother, you're a pioneer. Now, hardly anybody cooks, but you were one of the first to stop." After 20 years of cooking, I started to appreciate the value of other people's work. So I would, say, go get a duck in Chinatown. I always had the salad and set the table, but I didn't have to clean the pots.

The only projects that excite me have to be tied to some aspect of social change. No matter how beautiful, a coffee book doesn't exactly move you to change the way you cook or eat.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

When I first started to cook, I would cook these elaborate meals, but I rarely cook at home now.

Vegetables to me are - I don't want to say the most exciting part of cooking, but certainly a very exciting part of cooking, because they continue to change. They come into season and they go through different phases.

Protein has been intensely over-represented on the plate. Now, the garden should be the main drag for main courses.

Salt is the only product that changes cuisine. There's a big difference between food that has salt and food without it. If you don't believe that, ask people who can't eat salt.

I want to reshape fast food in America.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

Food is never static; culture is never static.

I think food culture is always evolving, and there will constantly be people looking both forward and back. That's what makes it exciting.

The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.

In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.

'J'eet jet?' is still the standard way for a Pittsburgher to ask if you're ready for a meal, but the meal itself is no longer limited to chipped ham and an Iron City beer.

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.

My husband is a vegetarian. So it has really pushed me as a chef. Just thinking about the food that I really relied on as my hunny-hunting foods, that looks different with a vegetarian.

After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.

I found that when I went from Albany to Savannah, that I needed to put that white rice away, and I needed to turn that into Savannah red rice because they were big into that sausage, tomato-y, bell pepper-y rice mixture.

Le Cirque at first was one of those general French restaurants in town, which were cooking more or less the same food. At Le Cirque, I wanted to do something different while respecting the foundation of the restaurant. I did that through the menu.

I want to make sure the cooking industry becomes more and more diverse.

Drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

My brother is working to change the perception of Chinese food in America.

I wanted to work in a restaurant. Le Cirque was looking for a chef and they approached me. I was excited to be able to be part of this restaurant with an amazing reputation, but not a good one for food at the time. I made it clear that if I was coming to Le Cirque it was going to change.