Quotes About Chefs

I like that talented chefs are able to keep coming up with new ways of preparing food - it really is an art form.

It's really an honor to be included in such an incredible lineup of chefs. The team Borgata has assembled is by far one of the best on the East Coast.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

I love cookbooks for completely different reasons. I love 'The Harry's Bar Cookbook' and Marco-Pierre White's 'White Heat' for their feel. For pure learning, Gray Kunz wrote a great cookbook, 'The Elements of Taste', published in 2001. The first time I read Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago chef's first cookbook, I was blown away.

It is not difficult now to make good food because we have sophisticated equipment and refined ingredients. Being innovative also helps you. It sets you apart from other chefs. But taste is king.

I know pastry chefs who are overwhelmed by the idea of tasting, rather than measuring, their way to a balanced vinaigrette.

In recent years women have been moving into the realm of professional cooking in significant numbers, but at its highest levels the world of great cookery is probably more staunchly masculine than the armed forces.

Commentary by J.-P. Quélin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.)

I think the trouble with artists or chefs who whine about criticism is that if you love the good reviews, you have to at least read the bad ones.

The problem is that there is many great chefs and many great cookbooks, but none of them work at home.

You get a lot of young chefs who have a lot of savoir-faire, a lot of technical knowledge. What's important is to convey to them a cuisine that is made from the heart.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

That said, there are certainly still cooks out there who make fantastic historical cornbreads, though the old recipes have often been changed to include modern techniques and ingredients.

Pastry school is great for a foundation and introducing you to basic techniques, but it is really up to the chefs to practice, practice, practice and refine their techniques.

I've always hoped 'Chopped' would telegraph our enormous affection and love and admiration for chefs and food, but at the same time, we are inflicting extraordinary cruelty on them.

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

I think that more and more and more really talented restauranteurs and chefs from the fine dining world are going to try their hand at fine casual. They're going to say, 'Why not us?'

The restaurant chefs in Spain are breaking ground, but in terms of the everyday cooking in Spain I still hear people coming back and saying they were disappointed. I think it's because they're expecting the chef stuff.

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.

Chefs don't eat at normal hours, so the only time you feel like you really need a meal is after service, when you're exhausted and just crave something to help you wind down.

One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I'm in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant's chefs.

Pastry is different from cooking because you have to consider the chemistry, beauty and flavor. It's not just sugar and eggs thrown together. I tell my pastry chefs to be in tune for all of this. You have to be challenged by using secret or unusual ingredients.

Sometimes these challenges naturally select more chefs that can think on their feet very quickly. There are chefs I know who won't put things on the menu unless they've tried it four or five times. So you just naturally select a certain kind of chef, people who maybe don't win a bunch of challenges but they hang around.

I go to the fanciest restaurants in the world and try them out. I like to see these chefs that are wizards do their thing. I like two types of food: cheap fast food - In-N-Out Burger, Taco Bell, stuff like that - or expensive food. Anything in between just bothers me.