Culinary Identity Quotes

If you come to The Kitchen and get a pork chop with polenta, which is our kind of food - simple - there is only one way it should taste at The Kitchen.

If I'm in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I'd much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That's Rome to me.

Just because something is English does not necessarily mean it is good. We make the best cheddar; we make great pasties. But we can't make very good brie or baguettes - and the French can't make pork pies.

So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.

I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.

If you're a vegan fast food joint in L.A., you just don't speak the same language as the heartland.

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

I'm a purist when it comes to certain foods, and al pastor tacos (known as adobada tacos to us in Tijuana) is one of those foods. I lived off them - literally.

I am from Spain, but my family and I have made America our home. For the last 17 years, I have been cooking Spanish food in Washington, D.C.

I'm really Americanized. The only real Latina thing I do is cook rice and beans with chuletas and tostones. I do the healthier version of what my grandmother would have made: a lot less salt, a lot less fat, a lot more vegetables. Sometimes I serve it with brown rice, which is, like, sacrilegious.

People ask me in Europe, when they do interviews... they ask me, 'Well, how does it feel to be a cook in a country that doesn't know how to eat?' It always touches a nerve, because Europe and the world think that America is no more than bad hot dogs and bad burgers.

I'm not a celebrity chef. I'm a chef that happens to have television shows and a chef that happens to do media.

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

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

There is a bright spot or two for the Spaniards. French toast has become freedom toast on the Air Force One breakfast menu, but the Spanish omelet is still a Spanish omelet.

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

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.

American cooking is one of the unknown cuisines in America.

Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.

Food is culture. Food is an identity, a footprint of who you are.

Essentially, for me, the whole point of being a chef is to have your own restaurant.

I remember the first time I heard a co-worker refer to himself as a foodie. It immediately irritated me. Was he implying that he appreciated food more than other people? That his love of eating was somehow more evolved than mine? Don't all people love the thing we can't live without?

I don't consider myself a food person. I'm no Bobby Flay. I'm no Emeril or Paula Deen, and I'm certainly not Rachael Ray.

I think Spain will always remain inspirational, and I think French cuisine will continue to be very French and yet very relevant with its time and keep evolving. But the last thing you want for it is to become too trendy and confusing. It has too much history.

I'm not a chef: I'm a cook.