You've always got to work to your highest ability level. When times are great and restaurants are jamming, that's when some restaurants get sloppy and take things for granted. Never take things for granted.

In Cleveland, I'm so fortunate that we're surrounded by farms with an endless variety of beautiful vegetables. For me, I always eat very tightly with the season, even if the season is only six weeks.

Sometimes a minute is really the difference between success and failure. There are times when you finish with ten seconds left, and one extra minute could've meant everything. You almost have to think of it as a sporting-event type of atmosphere: A football game is sixty minutes long. Think of how many games could be won or lost if the team had one more minute?

I think that's what being a chef is all about: camaraderie and teamwork. I never feel that it should be so cutthroat that you can't help the other chefs.

With all the hybrid stuff and things like that, I think that's a fabulous direction to go with cars in that sense. As someone who grew up around muscle cars, I'll never not be able to not love a muscle car. Not that I don't care about the environment, that's not it. But I adore muscle cars.

On 'Chopped,' the time goes down a bit and there are several ingredients, usually one that makes no sense whatsoever with the rest of the ingredients. So it gets you out of your culinary comfort zone a little bit. Like we had octopus and cheese paired up with each other.

When I met my wife 20 plus years ago, she was a vegetarian, so I was the closest thing to the devil that she had ever met.