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

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It's a gift.

Venezuela is another place I'd like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I'd like to, very much.

It's not normal, what I do. Just being on television isn't.

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."

The way you make an omelet reveals your character.

I think of [street food] as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.