Quotes from Mario Batali

Just because you eat doesn't mean you eat smart. It's hard to beat a $1.99 wing pack of three at a fast-food restaurant - it's so cheap - but that wing pack isn't feeding anyone, it's just pushing hunger back an hour.

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant.

When you taste things in the right order, sometimes they taste so much different than if you taste them out of order. Not that there's a right order, like by rule, but just like in a thoughtful way that makes sense.

Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules.

If you're going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you're going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn't buy fresh pasta.

I think in times of bizarre strangeness, what you can and should do is spend time with your family eating lunch or dinner. And if you can do that, you will restore us to the peace.

I like thick or middle (spaghetti). Thin for me is always overcooked by the time I'm eating it.

Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules.

Life is not a recipe. Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules. People think they are. They look as if they are. They say, "Do this, not this. Add this, not that." But, really, recipes are just suggestions that got written down.

There are two activities in life in which we can lovingly and carefully put something inside of someone we love. Cooking is the one we can do three times a day for the rest of our lives, without pills. In both activities, practice makes perfect.

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.

Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.

I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.

I like anchovies, and I don't tell everybody about them. Almost every time, they don't even notice.

I am happiest when I am with my wife, Susi, and our two boys exploring and loving something for the first time.

What will always remain is love, passion and family time.

When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there's something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food's going to taste good. And that - that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti.

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

When you use it in cooked foods, it changes [the Tabasco flavor] a little bit; it loses a little bit of the bright acid that you love on it, but you get that more cooked heat and chile flavor down.