I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends.

Summer's the same, autumn is even more extreme. Then winter is when you sort of condense all of your ideas. You process all these things and you try to look for new concepts. In that sense, your intuition is in hibernation. What you fill up is your imagination; you fill up your memories there.

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.

I started to change. It was sort of a restaurant mid-life crisis, you could say. I lost a lot of confidence, not so much as a father or as a friend, but as a boss, as a chef that's to make decisions throughout the day all the time. I just slowly started burning out. Once you lose your confidence like that, you start being angry in the kitchen. I couldn't recognize myself anymore. I started writing the journal. It was never meant to be a book, but the editor at Phaidon read parts of it. As editors do, I guess.

The first book was out and for the first time we were on a book tour. Being the son of an immigrant, I'd never dreamt of being on book tours. Suddenly the attention was huge.

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.

I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends.