People come up to me all the time and say, 'Oh, I love to watch Food Network,' and I ask them what they cook, and they say, 'I don't really cook.' They're afraid, they're intimidated, they know all about food from eating out and watching TV, but they don't know where to start in their own kitchen.

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'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'm a firm believer that all this packaged stuff that Americans are buying up in gobs is making them fatter.

Things are going to go wrong. The great chefs are the ones that don't let it fluster them. They just move through it.

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.

People complain that chefs aren't at their restaurants anymore, but I don't think that's the case at all. You see them on TV and you assume they're not working but they are.