21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?

There's no media training. In cooking school, there's not even manager training. You learn the fundamentals of cooking. Everything else is learning by doing.

If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything.

That's how people make sense of a meeting: they eat something. If they were in a sad moment it would be the same thing, they'd be eating something. It's what makes life fun. We don't need it to be delicious or great or all these things if we're just to survive. But it's one of those things that makes life fun, livable. And the more I submerge myself in it, the more fun I seem to have.

When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.

I only have the restaurant. If I do other things, it's only to do with the restaurant.

I would love to eat a really great burger, but it doesn't exist in our part of the world.