If you go to Italy and you drive from the airport to the town, there isn't 30 square feet that isn't planted by someone. Even next to the train tracks, they see the joy of the interaction with the planet as integral to the experience. The idea that you can get free arugula just by planting seeds... because it will regrow itself the next year. We've come a long way from foraging to now planting. The next step of that will be continuing that expansion of planting and really owning the crops.

Are we Darwinists - where we live and let live? Or are we nurturing as a society? There has to be a standard of living that we decide to support.

Even though you'll see gnocchi or linguine everywhere in some of the regions of Italy, each of those chefs has their own expression of that which expresses more about the place they were exactly born than it does about trying to be a part of the greater mass. And that's the Italian culture.

I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.

I think in times of bizarre strangeness, what you can and should do is spend time with your family eating lunch or dinner. And if you can do that, you will restore us to the peace.

The hardest part of anything is making a dish consistently great - you order it seven years later, if it's still on the menu, and it's still as good as what you remember.

Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.