I am happiest when I am with my wife, Susi, and our two boys exploring and loving something for the first time.

The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City.

The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.

I'm pretty confident that the seafood from the Northeastern Atlantic is one of the most delicious and unique in the country, so that we can represent that in a way that the Italians like to represent things.

You sit down at Katz's and you eat the big bowl of pickles and you're eating the pastrami sandwich, and halfway through you say to yourself, I should really wrap this up and save it for tomorrow. But the sandwich is calling you: Remember the taste you just had. So fatty. It's what you want. It's what you are! I've never gotten home from Katz's with a doggie bag in my hand. A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is what's bad and good about food. It's the sacred and the profane.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.