Once you have your basics down, you can start breaking the rules.

Too often, chefs just want to experiment - they want to use liquid nitrogen before they know how to use heat.

A lot of professions happen to be male-dominated because women drop out at a certain point. It's unfortunate.

One of the first jobs I ever had was opening clams in a seafood restaurant, so I'm pretty quick at it.

Im not a fan of grilling meat, since that tends to dry it out, and I find grill marks leave a bitter taste. A good steak house will offer different options for preparation, and I would ask them to broil or pan-roast the steak and finish it with butter. It ends up a dark chocolate color and stays very juicy.

Asian food is very easy to like because it hits your mouth very differently than European food does. In European food, there may be two things to hit - maybe sweet and salty, maybe salty-savory, … but Asian kind of works around, plus you have that distinct flavor that’s usually working in Asian food.

Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesnt mean you can cook. It means you can make that dish. When you can cook is when you can go to a farmers market, buy a bunch of stuff, then go home and make something without looking at a recipe. Now youre cooking.