The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

I don't do my mother's cooking. Because I am a professional and she isn't. Even if she is a better cook.

You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking.

My idol was Johann Cruyff (a Dutch soccer player) and I wanted to be like him. But when I realized that I would never be, I decided to do something else. I met the kitchen by chance and quickly became completely enamoured by it.

I cant live without activity; I cant be sedentary.

You need an entire life just to know about tomatoes.

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.