Any job worth doing is worth doing well. But to be able to do that, you have to do it over and over again.

I wanted to write about what we were doing at the French Laundry, the recipes and the stories.

When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.

A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.

Hopefully, imparting what's important to me, respect for the food and that information about the purveyors, people will realize that for a restaurant to be good, so many pieces have to come together.

A kaiseki meal is like that, very small courses over a long period of time.

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference.