I would frankly be shocked if Donald Trump even knows how to use chopsticks or is even able to manipulate them with those tiny little fingers.

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There's a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

My family is very far from normal.

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

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.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.