Top 752 Chef Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

There are those who say that poets should use her and his art to change the world. I'd agree with that, but I think everybody should do that. I think the chef and the baker and the candlestick maker - I think everybody should be hoping to make it a better world.

Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.

Gastronomy is the French Foreign Legion. You don't need any qualifications. Just walk through the door and keep your head down. Be respectful - "Yes chef!" - and you'll be given a trade. One day you'll be in a position where you can put a roof over your children's heads, you can put food on their table, create security for them.

Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.

It is great to add some glamour to the food industry, like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications, they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

We have a personal chef who helps us stay on track, and we really like to keep things the same all year round. We don't want to change anything up too much if it's working. We eat clean and organic as much as we can, and try not to eat too much of anything.

I'd rather go with someone who wasn't a great speaker, but was a great chef, rather than someone who was a great performer, but maybe not a great cook.

It's very important in a restaurant to really do the right hiring because there's no restaurant that you have one cook and one chef and nobody else in the kitchen. Generally you have five, ten, 15 people with you. So that's really important is to train them right, but first you have to hire the right people.

It's very different doing a food show in America and doing one in Britain. I did a 20-part series for the BBC series called 'Eating With the Enemy.' The budget for all 20 episodes was probably the budget for a single episode of 'Top Chef.' It's the difference between making a home movie in your backyard and going to Hollywood.

Yes, I am a judge on 'MasterChef,' where I taste thousands of dishes, and yes I am a trained chef which has had me commanding some of the biggest brigands a kitchen has ever seen. Yes, I have travelled the world and cooked on television and at food shows up and down the country, but in my heart I am a home cook.

Of all the restaurants I visited in my childhood and adolescence, it was Michel Bras that I remembered most vividly and it was the chef himself to whom, early on in my cooking, I would make the most references. I don't mean that I tried to cook like him. Rather, that I tried to think like him.

I'm a chef, I'm a cook, I was created by this industry, and I like to think I'm giving back. But I'm not giving back because I can make a scallop souffle, I'm giving back because I can make compost.

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.

As a chef, you need to respect your guests and their needs. If they decide that they want to eat certain things and not eat others, if for religious reasons or just decide they don't want to eat certain ingredients, you have to respect that.

I worked on the line, I've been an executive chef, I've worked for the Mets, I've worked for various steakhouses, vegetarian restaurants, a lot of Middle Eastern stuff. I've worked my fair share of a lot of different things. I've worked at festivals and street fairs, you know? I've been through it all.

A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.

As I learned from chapters past, it's important to try and stay in the chapter that you're in, and enjoy it while it's lasting. Not be constantly worrying about where this step will take you - living in the potential future. Like a good meal. Like a good chef's tasting meal. You don't want to wonder what's next while you're eating the foie gras.

In a dream world, I would love to be a master pastry chef, because it combines something I love doing baking with something I'm not good at doing baking. BUT! Practically, if I weren't writing and doing comedy things, I'd like to teach kids to read. I would be good at that in real life.

As a chef, I could not wash my hands - nor clean pots, pans, utensils, meats or produce, nor make soups and sauces - if I did not have clean water. Were this to happen, of course, these would be the least of my concerns. Because water is the linchpin of survival: without it, not much else matters.

We have very professional, amazing chefs that are contestants. Most of them have their own restaurants and are settled, recognized chefs in Mexico. That gives the show [Top Chef] a different level completely; the gastronomic level is very high. It makes it all more interesting and the competition is just harder and harder.

If you want to be a chef or a scientist, you've got to know what the current thinking is, so if you want to write comics or draw comics find out what the very best ones are and look at them all and then you'll know where the bars are because the bars are often very high, if you are going to make a splash and make yourself known, you need to get to that level.

My husband and I have always incorporated things into our life that reduce stress. We're very careful with our health. We go to bed early. In this job, fatigue would be very detrimental! We've always eaten very healthily; now it's really particularly easy because we have a chef.

Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.

The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.'

As his celebrity grew in stature, as he transformed from line cook to chef at Les Halles and further high-grade Manhattan restaurants to charismatic television star, I kept hoping - foolishly, perhaps - that Bourdain might return to his first writing love, to the books he wrote and published when his audience was smaller but still devoted.

I went to a hotel to become a chef and then tried becoming a flight attendant, but no one took me. I then worked in a travel agency and got into advertising and modelling after someone spotted me. So I started doing ads. I did 'Charminar' ad, because of which I got two films.

I became a vegetarian in 1995. I had some fried chicken, and my teeth hit the bone. My mind said, 'Dead bird, dead bird.' It didn't feel right, so I stopped. I kept eating fish until one day, in 1997, the chef brought my ginger-fried snapper with the head still on it.

I wrote a mad, passionate letter to the best restaurant in the UK, Le Gavroche in London, and asked if I could work for them. They gave me a job as a dishwasher (Colin laughs). For me that was a joy because I had a foot in the door of this world class restaurant. Just being around the buzz and the pots and pans and the wonderful food and all this produce that was coming in, that was the start of Paul Rankin the chef.

It is great to add some glamour to the food industry, like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications, they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.'

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."

A friend of mine is a chef in Bali, and another friend said, 'God, he's like Brad Pitt,' and I said, 'Yeah, I think he's more like arm Pitt,' 'cause, you know, 'Brad Pitt' would be a bit of an overstatement.

You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.

I always wanted to be a chef. Flavors and food were always of interest to me, but it was how those things brought friends and family together to celebrate not only the special occasions but everyday life. It has been a blessing that I have been able to pursue a career that creates a product that brings people together.

I remember at The Quilted Giraffe, when I was when working there to try out for the sous-chef position. I really wanted it, and the woman working the line next to me kept messing up and making me look bad. The last day of my kitchen trail, I just said to her very quietly, 'Do me a favor and get out of my way, because I want this job.'

I remember being a kid and wanting to be so many different things. There was even one point that I wanted to be a clarinet player, and I had never even touched a clarinet, in my life. And then, I wanted to be a chef. And then, I wanted to be a vet. It's hard to decide who you're gonna be, as weird as that sounds, because we all do it.

My dream as a passionate cook has been to go to Le Cordon Bleu. Never could my most incredible dream have lived up to the experience. The food, the lesson, the chef, the ingredients - all the best of the best. I see why Le Cordon Bleu is world-renowned.

If there was ever a food that had politics behind it, it is soul food. Soul food became a symbol of the black power movement in the late 1960s. Chef Marcus Samuelsson, with his soul food restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem, is very clear about what soul food represents. It is a food of memory, a food of labor.

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 believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree toad is a chef-d'oeurve for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels!

I'm not just a female chef. I'm a woman in a brand new hotel, and that's why I think it's so perfect to be at the Cromwell, in a corner of one of the busiest intersections of the world, with my name in lights. It's different in all those sorts of ways, and I'm hoping I'll be able to carry that through. Because if I can't, it's a step back for women in general. People will say - men will say - "See, that's why it's mostly men".

Young people want to be famous before they know how to cook, before they know how to treat people, before they know what hospitality means. I stayed in France for seven years and Austria for three, so before I was a chef anywhere I was already cooking for 10 years.

I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.

With more exposure comes more recognition. I can honestly say I wouldn't have gotten a lot of things had no one seen me on "Top Chef", win or not. It cast a very wide net for me. And fortunately in a great way. I love that I have been able to cook side by side with so many of my idols.

You don't go to school to become the best chef in the world right after you graduate. School is always a starting point so what people forget is that you go to school to build a foundation, and you want to build a foundation that's not going to crumble.

When you're a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don't actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I'll do, and especially when I'm in New York, I'll go for a run. And I'll run 10 or 15k on my - and I run to gain my appetite.

When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant - sushi restaurant.

I studied music at school and played the recorder. Later in life music was a great way of supplementing my income because I was paid really badly as a young chef. Luckily an old friend - we did music at school together - and I formed a duo, The Calypso Beat, which later became the Calypso Twins.

My love for cooking began when I was young. Because my parents were in the army, they were both really busy. A lot of times I'd have to cook for the family; I'd rotate with my siblings. It started out as a chore, but as I got older, my mom started to see that I was really good at it. I became her sous chef.

I love Dexter. I love Top Chef. I can't wait for it to come back. I love Friday Night Lights. I think TV is in a great place right now. It's definitely getting better and better. I think there is some of the most complete writing for women and female characters, they're done in television production and not really film production.

You hit a certain age and - especially because of TV - the young cooks coming up say, 'You're a sellout, because you're doing something other than what you should be doing.' 'Top Chef' is a double-edged sword for me: There's a whole group of people who will not come to the restaurants because they assume I'm not in them anymore, all I do is TV.

I love cooking and eating - I'm a total foodie. It started off as a survival thing as a student, when cheese and potato pie was all I could afford to make. My most successful results come from concocting something with leftovers. Any chef will tell you that you should taste as you cook, so I might make it a bit more spicy, yogurty or eggy.

I became a manager very young. My first sous chef job I was, maybe, 25. It was a bit too early for me. But it's on-the-job training. You really just get stuck in there and it's trial and error. You learn by your mistakes, and hopefully you don't keep making them. And if you do, you just keep trying to fix it.

Being a lifetime wife and mother has afforded me the luxury of having multiple careers: I've been a teacher. A chauffeur. A chef. An interior decorator. A landscape architect, as well as a gardener. I’ve been a painter. A personal shopper. An accountant and a banker. I’ve been a beautician. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. A movie reviewer. A nurse. A psychologist. A negotiator. An I have a Ph. D in How to Pretend Like You Don’t Mind.

How do I speak Spanish? Not too well. Paz taught me a few words that, if people weren't nice to me, I could tell them a few things. I got to study with [chef] Thomas Keller, who we all love as a guy and Jim had a relationship with him at [his restaurant] the French Laundry.

I was working for a chef a long time ago who told me to not skip steps or be in a hurry. Success in a kitchen is more like a marathon and less like a sprint. Rising up the ranks too quickly isn't necessarily a good thing. This advice was from a guy who was sorry he had done that and didn't want me to do the same.

One of the great awards from a chef's point of view are Michelin stars. The ultimate is three Michelin stars. For example, Gordon Ramsey has three Michelin stars. Having one Michelin star is a big deal, two is incredible and having three puts you in a bracket of maybe 30 chefs worldwide.

Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.

Because I'm a chef, I eat out frequently, so it's hard for me to control what I consume in terms of calories. But when I'm at home, I eat what my wife cooks for me. She works hard to avoid making foods that are high in calories and cholesterol, so most of the time, she makes vegetarian dishes.