Mario Batali Quotes

The idea of having dinner together every day with your family removes the pressure from trying to explain everything. You tell us the good parts about your day, but you also tell us the bad parts about your day. And at the end of that, because you're in a ritual, you remove the pressure of admitting you had a failure that day. And it also takes the wind out of having a great day. I mean, it makes you a little bit more normal all the time. That moment of therapeutic sharing is something that happens in food, that doesn't necessarily happen when you're watching TV.

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

I don't think fine dining is dying, but I think those rare occasions when you really want the fanciness are diminishing... I think a lot of people are going to find simpler, more casual ways to enjoy an experience.

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.

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 we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we're kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands.

All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck - books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you're reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles.

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.

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.

Recipes are just descriptions of one person’s take on one moment in time. They’re not rules.

You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you're charging, you're still giving.