Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.

I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can't teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is.

I think that there is philanthropy and there is publicity. If you can marry the two to do something good, then I think it's great. Some of the other guys go around and slag people as a profession. That's not so interesting to me, because it's easy to take down, it's harder to build.

There's a pretty equitable distribution in the restaurant industry of how money gets paid, except for in the kitchen. The kitchen is the lowest-paid group of people.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

The pendulum of cookery techniques became more significant than the actual experience. And when that happens, the customer's satisfaction becomes secondary to the chef's satisfaction. And in that case, you have an upside-down equation. Because the customer is the basis of our restaurant, first of all, and if the chef becomes the most important person at the table - even more so than the guests - then suddenly you're left with something that doesn't really work.