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.
That was one thing my mama instilled in me: to be well trained in the kitchen. Growing up, I was always in the kitchen with her. You name it, I make it: red beans and rice, lasagna, chicken, pork. I am the queen of cooking.
Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.
Food has always been at the frontier of creativity.
At culinary school, none of the things we use to define ourselves outside that world - actor, producer, student - none of that matters. It's a magical art form.
I think baking is an incredible thing; cooking in general is an incredible thing.
All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.
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.
I love food, and I love drawing it, particularly.
I spent time at my grandfather Dino's gourmet store where he brought in chefs from Naples to cook. I thought of them as rock stars.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would look people in the face and be like, 'Your snake cake's not good.'
I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.
I can cook a little bit. I can cook a few Spanish dishes. But, in movies, it looks like I cook much better than I cook.
Cuisine Nouvelle was just a concept, and one which, crucially, the English managed to get wrong. I mean, if you run a restaurant, you've got to feed people, not make pretty little pictures on plates to make up for your lack of ability.
I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky.
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.
Ferran Adria making hamburgers... some thought it was crazy. But getting them perfect was a challenge. Plus I'm fascinated by all aspects of food.
Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.
We can create any sort of flavor on a printed image that we set our minds to.
The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'
I can cook really complicated recipes, but it takes a real talent to do the perfect egg.
One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody's done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.
Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.
Chefs are artists, and I couldn't be happy with my art if I was forced to use cheap ingredients.
Food is a passion. Food is love.
