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.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

Italy itself has 21 different micro-regions. You go within each of those regions, there's even super-micro-regions; and the beauty is that when you go from place to place, although there's a common thread of pasta and joie de vivre - in the way that they approach their meals and the simplicity of cooking, celebrating more the product than the chef - there's still so much variety that as you go, it's always an exciting moment.

The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other.

I think the more prominent the actual product in its raw nature is to its final consumer, the more sympathy and likelihood they'll consume it they'll have. Some friends of mine are trying to do these rooftop farms in Brooklyn, and I love that idea. As long as they're using clean water and real soil and creating delicious things by the sun, then brilliant.

Twelve-piece cookware sets for ninety-nine bucks are routinely hawked on late-night TV - often by friends of mine. But with a mere five pieces, you can do whatever you like - slay the dragon and then cook its tenderloin in the style of the duke of Wellington, if you want to.

Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all.