Good food is a good trend.

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

I drank more wine when I wasn't working as much, to be honest.

This is the great challenge: to maintain passion for the everyday routine and the endlessly repeated act, to derive deep gratification from the mundane.

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.

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.

Some of the recipes in the book have evolved for us. Many haven't.