Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that's the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.

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.

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.

I like anchovies, and I don't tell everybody about them. Almost every time, they don't even notice.

Food is much better off the hand than the fork.

Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.