Quotes from Tom Douglas

Sometimes managers are a little shy to criticize another manager or another operation.

I'm just sick of food going in the garbage.

Coho or silver salmon are very common and easy to get for a good price.

The simplest way to prepare Dungeness crabs is to boil them in the shell and set them in front of your guests with crab crackers or crab hammers, cocktail forks, and plenty of napkins.

After being cooked, ling cod tends to bleed out some moisture, so, before serving, let it rest a few moments on a plate. Once the moisture has been released, you can carefully pick up the fillet with a slotted spatula and transfer it to another plate for saucing. This way, you won't sog out your beautiful sauce.

I know Jeff Bezos because I cater at his home.

I can't stand it when restaurants don't have a sense of place in a city. When I'm in London, I want to know I'm in London. When you're sitting in my joint, you know you're sitting in Seattle.

In some cities, McDonald's rules, but Seattle is ruled by teriyaki joints.

To shuck oysters, you'll need an oyster knife, a handy tool with a sturdy handle and a short, rigid blade which you can pick up for about ten bucks in a kitchenware shop or fish market. A quick trip online will yield any number of videos and slide shows with step-by-step instructions on how to shuck an oyster.

Alaska Airlines and I have a lot in common, so coming together to delight travelers with savory, high quality food from the Pacific Northwest made sense.

The best meal I was served was ribollita, an Italian bread soup at the Castello di Ama winery in Tuscany. I usually hate ribollita, and the people I was traveling with thought I was crazy for ordering it.

Sustainability includes how you run your business, and my bottom line includes how you treat your people. Sustainability starts with your staff.

Sweet, delicious Dungeness crab is always a treat.

Every chef has his treats. By that, I mean bits and pieces from things you're working on - crusty little cake trimmings, ends from a brisket, collars from a salmon, scraps. But they're snacks to me, and I eat them right off the cutting board - maybe too much.

I crave my mom's Sloppy Joes.

Mastering one recipe is better than mastering too many. Learn something and own it, and you'll feel so much better about it. You'll have more confidence if you've made it five times, and that confidence adds so much fun to cooking.

If you're going to start a fire, why cook just one chicken?

Salsa verde is delicious with trout or most any fish.

Disappointing cakes have often been sitting out too long. They should last just long enough to have the last pieces the next morning with coffee - who doesn't love cake with coffee?

I have a good flavor memory.

There's natural mentoring that goes on in my life every day.

One-pot meals make a lot of sense... because so much of what people hate about cooking is really the cleanup, the mess, the grease.

In my 'Big Dinners' cookbook, I recreated my mother's recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing.

A chunk of seared albacore tuna, salted and peppered, then seared rare in a little oil in a hot skillet for just a minute or so per side, is the perfect addition to a savory plate of fried rice. Just slice the tuna across the grain and fan those mild, meaty slices over the top of the rice.