If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people.

It's been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I'm enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

I do the meatball recipe a lot. I think the army stew probably too. It's the most useful dish because it was born out of necessity and poverty and any idiot can make it in 20 minutes on a hot plate. It's cheap and uses readily available commercial ingredients. And it's delicious. It should be the great American dish - perfect late-night stoner dorm food for college kids on a budget.

I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.

The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that's not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.

I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, 'Jesus, I'm glad that's not me.'