Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.

A gastronomical supermeal didn't necessarily have to involve the things I had brought from other top kitchens.

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.

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.

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?

Chefs have a new opportunity - and perhaps even an obligation - to inform the public about what is good to eat, and why.

Learning about issues such as sustainability and locavorism are things that you need to have as part of you as a chef because it will make you cook more delicious food.