Quotes About Chefs

A lot of young chefs today get carried away by trends, by influences, by movements.

Most chefs only use and need a handful of knives - even if they own 25, they usually grab the same four or five.

When chefs like Wolfgang Puck became household names, that became a compelling reason for an intelligent young person to go into the cooking profession. There have been no waiters who have turned into household names. The service and hospitality aspects have clearly lagged behind the kitchen.

The youthful vibe Nashville exudes is intoxicating and contagious, especially amongst the culinary scene, which lures so many great young chefs to places like City House and Rolf and Daughters.

As chefs, especially pastry chefs, your creativity plays such an important part in your daily work. We truly do have a blank canvas to work with every time we create a new dish.

I was lucky enough to have great mentors both in the culinary world and in the world of chefs who became celebrities. Bobby Flay is one of my dearest friends and a tremendous mentor for me. Mario Batali is the same way. They began doing TV a little before me and they showed me the way.

The good news about showcasing chefs and the TV shows is they've attracted a lot more smart kids to the profession than 30 years ago. On the downside, though, these young chefs all say they want their own restaurant and their own TV show.

I think cooks that are just interested in molecular gastronomy are cooks that will never be chefs.

I honestly feel the term 'molecular gastronomy' is mostly misunderstood. It is not a style of cooking. Rather, it is a philosophy which encourages chefs to be more creative.

I'm a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It's funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.

All great chefs have two things in common. First, they respect nature as the true artist, and they are just cooks. Second, everything that they do is an extension of them as a person.

In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.

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.

The team wasn't just riders. It was the mechanics, masseurs, chefs, soigneurs, and doctors. But the most important man on the team may have been the chiropractor.

More and more, museums will look at restaurants and chefs differently - as if they are curating art.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was cooking with two guys who became celebrity chefs, if you will. I became their sous chef for awhile. We'd go to all the big names in Hollywood.

The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.

But I love women chefs: they are intelligent, they are fast learners, and they can be tough. As for the effect the have on the boys, its entirely positive. Put a woman in a kitchen and discipline will improve, if anything: the guys have being told off in front of the girls. It's a playground thing - they just find it embarrassing.

I have my idols like Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, and those chefs that really forged the way in Americas understanding of food. Then working with chefs like Craig Anderson at The Charles Hotel and Mark Baker at the Four Seasons.

History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.

Following the devastating India Ocean tsunami of 2004, I founded Chefs for Humanity, modeled after Doctors Without Borders, but comprised of chefs. There wasn't anything out there like it, and there was a definite need for chefs to be able to offer assistance and aid.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.

Blanc and Nandron were chefs in the Burgundian and Lyonnais traditions: founded on broad flavors as seductive as Burgundy wine (which was used in many of the recipes). Blanc was an innovator, but his tastes always had an authentic link to the classically pungent flavors of the region.