Good food and good eating are about risk.

Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.

It's that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.

Drugs didn't work out too well for me.