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.

I was lucky enough to have great mentors both in the culinary world and in the world of chefs who became celebrities. Bobby Flay is one of my dearest friends and a tremendous mentor for me. Mario Batali is the same way. They began doing TV a little before me and they showed me the way.

I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.

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.

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.

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?

Some of the greatest chefs in the world aren't classically trained. Thomas Keller - probably the greatest American chef ever to walk the earth - never went to culinary school. You know?