A Quote by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
I found, when I was working in restaurants, that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.
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I have a natural curiosity about things, in general. I'm constantly trying to find out how things work and how I can put them back together again, and why they work that way. The natural world is all around us.
I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.
To work in America or other places is more about curiosity, because I'm dealing with cultures and sensibilities that I don't really know. So I'm having to sort of investigate them, which I'm fascinated in, but it comes from a place of curiosity rather than a real need to get something out of my system.
I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination.
I had an indefatigable curiosity about everything. But why should my fate have depended upon that? Why does the curiosity of a child born into the lowest classes have to overcome everything put in his or her way to mute that curiosity, when a child born to parents with access to the advantages of life will have his meager curiosity kindled and nurtured? The unfairness is horrifying when it is properly understood as an unfairness meted out on children, on infants, on babies.
There is this idea in Hollywood, and I've seen it work for people, where the unspoken rule is 'Do two for them and one for yourself.' And that's kind of considered a fact. I've never really found that to be true for me. I've gotten more opportunities out of working on things I believed in than I ever did on things that weren't special to me.
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
You've always got to work to your highest ability level. When times are great and restaurants are jamming, that's when some restaurants get sloppy and take things for granted. Never take things for granted.
Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their own colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they refuse to correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims were shown, one after another, to be false?
Work begets work. Just work. If you work, people will find out about you and want to work with you if you're good. So work anywhere you can. That's why I've changed my mind about these theatres where people work for free or have to pay money. I think it's kind of terrible that they feel they have to, but you know what? They're working.
The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?
Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef,' I feel, is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant, we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.
There are certain things that make restaurants work and a certain kind of DNA that people who excel in restaurants need. But it's a lot like life, in the sense that you get out of it what you put into it.
That's why they have menus in restaurants, you know. I like steak, somebody else likes spaghetti. That's why they have menus in restaurants. It's a great world.
You can't actually hire and fire people inside of an open source community. Which means that getting people to work together is much more along the lines of making sure that people have the tools they need both to get their work done but also to know what is being done by other people and how to take that to their employer and tell that story to their employer and to show this is why the community is good and this is why we're working on these sort of things because it helps us over here.
In the future, the idea would be to create work for myself, as a way to work up into my 80s if nothing else. But also, I want to cast my friends in things or people I saw who weren't working and I'd be like, 'Why aren't you working, I don't understand - I'll write you a role in something.'
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