Top 845 Pastry Chef Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol.

21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?

My job the same as carpenter. What kind of house you want to build? What kind of food you want to make? You think your ingredients, your structure. Simple. [Other] Japanese restaurants … mix in some other style of food and call it influence, right? I don't like that. … In Japanese sushi restaurants, a lot of sushi chefs talk too much. 'This fish from there,' 'This very expensive.' Same thing, start singing. And a lot have that fish case in front of them, cannot see what chef do. I'm not going to hide anything, right?

The first thing Julian wanted to do in life, well, before he wanted to be an artist and then a musician, was to be a chef. He'd come home and say 'Why don't you bake cakes like my friends' mothers?' I'd say, 'Oh, Julian, go out and buy a Mary Baker cake mix and do it yourself!' That started him off! By the time he was 13, he'd disappear into the kitchen whenever we had visitors and emerge with beautiful canapes. Now he thinks nothing of cooking for ten or 15 people, and he does it so calmly.

Wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon is not journalism. It is entertainment. But the key to success in media has always been a broad mix of serious reporting and entertainment. The New York Times does not make its money on reports about Iraq and Syria. It makes money on its gardening section, food and, yes, stories about cats. "The Today Show" is a very successful program because it is a mix of the celebrity chef and the crazy pet who does the rolls and serious news and interviews.