If you want to have a relationship, at some point you have to let yourself get caught. That's what I did. I got caught.

For me no good food is illuminated without acidity.

My father always said, 'If you love what you do, you won't mind slogging through it for several hours a day.

I used to sleep with the phone right by my pillow but I'm getting better. Now it sits on the table a few feet away.

I bent my head over a stove in my early 20s and picked it up in my 30s.

The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.

I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, 'By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.'