I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. 'If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.

All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.

When you become a good cook, you become a good craftsman, first. You repeat and repeat and repeat until your hands know how to move without thinking about it.

The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.

If you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter.

I was born on the eighteenth of December, 1935, in the town Bourg-en-Bresse, about thirty miles northeast of Lyon, the second of three sons of Jeanne and Jean-Victor Pepin. Weighing only two and one half pounds, I nearly died at birth.

Great cooking favors the prepared hands.