We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

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

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.

Michigan is my antidote to Manhattan. This is where I come to relax.

I obsess everyday about everything. Not only about what we do well but what we can do better... In the end, the only reason I am motivated to do what I do is for the hedonistic pleasures of the table.

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.

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.