Every era has its own list of ingredients that are considered exotic and then, 15 years later, they're not.
The thing about innovation is, where do you stop? There are movements across the world where people are asking restaurateurs to bring back the regular plate. So, yes, we are fed up of drinking out of shoes and eating out of hats.
What worries me is that, because of the amount of media coverage of food, Britain seems to have become a foodie nation - but I'm not sure it actually has. I'm not sure there's been a huge change in the pantry at home or what we cook for supper.
There's a lot more future in hamburgers than in baseball.
I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.
People are getting famous now for serving food out of a truck, or for, well, pork buns. I don't know if I'm really pleased to be a part of that. I'm somewhat terrified of what the future holds, especially in America.
Modern cookbooks are marketing tools for chefs. They're in the bestseller lists but no one cooks from them.
Shows like 'Top Chef,' 'Hell's Kitchen' have helped bring attention to the culinary world on a whole, but you have to be cautious it doesn't get out of hand.
Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth.
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.
Pasta isn't just for Italian food anymore. Now there are tasty pasta recipes found in Asian cuisine, and it's emerging as a newfound love for vegans.
I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky.
I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.
I don't think I hate any food trends.
Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did."
Food is ever-changing and ever moving forward and getting more and more complex.
In more day-to-day restaurants, things have undergone a seismic change towards informality and sharing, which has been years in the making. Nowadays, people don't want just one dish; they want to order lots of things and they want to do it in fun places, places that give them an experience. The experience that a restaurant needs to offer is no longer just based around the food.
What you're going to be eating in the next year is decided by chefs. If the consensus is that pot-bellies are in next season, that's what's on your plate. And I think that's a good thing, because we know, obviously, about food.
The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again.
The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.
When a dish really hits a nerve with the American palate, it can really take off across the entire country, facilitated by food vendors' freedom to copy good ideas.
That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard - you could make interesting mustard - but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends.
Taste is changing, style is changing, and players' abilities are changing.
I've discovered the burger is a crazy thing in Vegas, but I was one of the early chefs to do a lot of burgers.
The cool thing is that now that people have made this evolution where cooking is cool, people are doing it on weekends, they're doing their own challenges. It's back to cooking. And it's real cooking.
