Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it's the restaurant business.

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

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've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure

A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone else's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent, the victim's head or your pan, then throw that pan right in the trash.