Go to the grocery store and buy better things. Buy quality, buy organic, buy natural, go to the farmers market. Immediately that's going to increase the quality of the food you make.

The exposure from 'Iron Chef' has been helpful, but at the end of the day your product and your service determine whether you get customers or not. If people decide to eat out less during a recession, the first restaurants that they will cut out are the ones that don't do a great job.

Never let the pressure get so big that you stop cooking and being who you are. I'm going to win or lose doing my food. Because when the pressure's on, you need to do food that you're very comfortable with.

I make no bones about it. I have no understanding of pastry.

I always tell my employees, the busier it gets, the slower you should cook. When you run around like a crazy person, that's when things go wrong.

My goal in 'Live to Cook' is to make great food more approachable for home cooks.

I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.