Culinary Diversity Quotes

Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.

My learning from my travels is that taste is objective. If a thing is tasty, it's universally tasty. Or, just not.

Cooking is all about people. Food is maybe the only universal thing that really has the power to bring everyone together. No matter what culture, everywhere around the world, people get together to eat.

If you ask what people say what American cuisine is, they cannot really do it. I don't know what it is.

At least when it comes to food, there's no snobbery in Singapore.

I grew up going to bakeries in Tel Aviv; that's where we got our birthday cakes, they were always European baking and butter creams. We have such good baking in Israel, and we have the Diaspora of Jews from all over, and we learned early on to adapt and absorb flavors from all over.

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

I think that people are getting really excited about different ethnic food, and almost even micro-ethnic food. So it's not just, 'I love Asian,' it's Szechuan or Hunan, this one style from China.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

England understands good Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine; in France, we just get French.

I love American food, but I also love Latin food.

I think of [street food] as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.

Everybody has their role in the food world and what they choose to appreciate. I'm not a fine dining chef. I appreciate it. I think Thomas Keller is amazing. But I really like where I'm at; I like what I do. I like how it makes people feel.

You don't want roast beef and Yorkshire every night and twice on Sunday.

Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

Miami, which has already aired, has this wonderful blend of Caribbean culture and Latin American culture and Southern American culture (talking about fried chicken). All those combine to make for a very very interesting array of ingredients, restaurants, and the chefs that come there. It also has great seafood, not to mention the glorious citrus that's there. And all those things inform what you do - and they should.

The food and culture of any place go hand in hand.

There is no right way to go on an edible journey. You can never tell what is going to be great, so you have to try everything. If you become doctrinaire about sticking to lowbrow foods or epicurean delights, your just being an extremist, and it won't do you any good.

There will never be a universal way of cooking, but information will always be universally useful.

I've been lucky enough in 20 years in the media to have a nice soap box that put me in a position to describe to an American viewership that Tuscany is different from Umbria, and it's different from Emilia-Romagna and, not that that was news, but it was never presented to them in a way that was, "Hey, look. This is a different plate from that different place." And although we all think of "spaghetti, lasagna, ciao," as what Italy is all about, there's all of this great stuff... I was merely an interpreter. I wasn't the developer of the content.

The food in Sydney is an Asian Pacific cuisine. It's eclectic but above all it's fresh, inventive and creative and that's what I love about it.

One of the things I love about New York is that it's one of the only places where you could have an entire restaurant dedicated to macaroni and cheese.

What I've learned, traveling the country and doing book signings, Mama's biscuits - you know, somebody in Montana's got their version of Mama's biscuits, somebody in California's got their version - so it made me realize that we're not as regionalized as we think we are.

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.