Do you really want to make risotto to order when you have eight guests sitting there? No. It won't work. Most cookbooks won't tell you that. They will say make it and it will come out perfectly. They should tell you you're probably going to screw it up the first 10 times you make it.

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off...By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. A self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse.

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

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

My wife was easy because she trains [jiu-jitsu] all the time. She's pretty much on a completely different diet. I always just threw meat at her and she's happy on a 100 percent protein diet, so we seldom ate together.

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

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.