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.

Anyone can make a good roast chicken.

They know what my standards are. They know what I need and how to get it to me, and they know how to communicate with me if for some reason they can't get it.

Vegetables to me are - I don't want to say the most exciting part of cooking, but certainly a very exciting part of cooking, because they continue to change. They come into season and they go through different phases.

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

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

Respect for food is respect for life, for who we are and what we do.