My favorite thing is always a nice, inexpensive draft beer, but if someone wants something a little more complicated than that, then I'd like a Michelada, which is where I take beer and a little bit of either a spicy or not-so-spicy Bloody Mary, mix it like six to one [ratio], so it's kind of a red beer.

Food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty.

Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it.

My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.

What I like to do when I go out is enjoy my friends and the food around it. If we have to stop and give five minutes to the chef, then I'm down with that. But if the chef has to interrupt every course to tell us how important this new revolution that's happening is, then I'm not so much interested in that.

When you taste things in the right order, sometimes they taste so much different than if you taste them out of order. Not that there's a right order, like by rule, but just like in a thoughtful way that makes sense.

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.