I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

What you're going to be eating in the next year is decided by chefs. If the consensus is that pot-bellies are in next season, that's what's on your plate. And I think that's a good thing, because we know, obviously, about food.

Without new ideas success can become stale

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

I didn't want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.