The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

I think it's a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.

My tastes in what I eat at home would be very familiar to most people who cook for families. I just organize those things a little bit differently.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There's really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they'll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don't really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.