Culinary Industry Quotes

Chefs today choose to step onto that treadmill where they have to be seen. Every day they have to go to this party, they have to go to that party. But then you think "Who is doing the cooking?".

If my daughter wants to get into this business, I would support that decision. She's going to have a hard time not being in it. She loves food and she's around it all the time.

When I was in India, I felt like being a full-time chef was a very unique career path. It was quite the contrast from the traditional fields like engineering and medicine and not necessarily considered a full time profession.

Cooking today is far greater than it ever was, and more importantly, a chef's role today has changed dramatically over the last decade.

There has been no great surprise, no sudden revelation. I knew pretty much what I was getting into. What I've learned is that a restaurant can be as much of an art as you want it to be, but it has to be a successful business first.

As chefs, a lot of the times we lose sight of the fact that we are in the food business and that it needs to make money to survive.

I discovered that the world of the finest restaurants was something akin to the world of the Mafia.

As a chef and someone who's been in the restaurant business for almost thirty years now, if there's one thing I learned early on: Never eat at a buffet. I don't want to eat yesterday's food and whatever they're trying to get rid of from their cooler for my lunch, dinner, or breakfast, thank you very much.

My father was a chef but hadn't owned his own business. I didn't like that. In my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to be in business.

21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?

It's tough, you know: I'm a chef first, and a restaurant owner, way before I was ever on Food Network, and it's a tough business.

I want to go as far as it will take me. I would love to go pro, but if that doesn't happen, I am a gourmet chef and would like to open my own restaurant.

I think Antony Worrall Thompson is dreadful, just repulsive.

We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they'll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don't really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

I like cooking, but I don't think I could be a chef. Everyone from the ground up does terrible hours, whether you've just walked in off the street and you've got no experience, to whether you're the head chef. You can work 14 or 15-hour days. It's really, really intense.

You know, in 1975 I couldn't get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American.

I'm in a place where I feel comfortable not being a chef anymore. That's taboo in our industry. 'Chef' is supposed to be the ultimate end of the road.

You see fewer and fewer chefs who are really big - most stay in shape.

At 15, I had to choose a vocational school, and I was delighted, of course, to go to culinary school. But learning the basics was not as exciting as being the chef I am today.

There's the common misconception that restaurants make a lot of money. It's not true. If you look at maybe the top chef in the world, or at least monetarily, it's like Wolfgang Puck, but he makes as much money as an average crappy investment banker.

I'm a chef, I'm a cook, I was created by this industry, and I like to think I'm giving back. But I'm not giving back because I can make a scallop souffle, I'm giving back because I can make compost.

When you look at a kitchen, you tend to see that the people who are doing really well are those who have worked with the same chef or stayed in one restaurant for a significant amount of time.

As people of color, it took a whole generation in many ways to get us out of the kitchen, and it's gonna take us the same whole generation to get us back into the kitchen and have ownership of restaurants, hotels and stuff like that.

Any time you do anything different in this life, it's risky. But I've only done things differently, and it's gotten me quite far. If you want to make a splash, you've got to step out on that ledge and jump. And I could land flat on my face and it would be the biggest nightmare of my life. I'm willing to risk it. I want to help change the way male chefs see females. I want to show them that, yes, we're emotional and, yes, sometimes we make irrational decisions, but we're passionate about what we do, and that passion will propel us to the next level.

The pressure, the heat, the almost impossibly fast pace at which you need work - this is the reality of working in the culinary industry. This is what professional chefs do night after night.