Mario Batali

Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available – logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.

I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, ‘How’d you like to be on TV?’ Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a ‘Ready, Set, Cook’ with Emeril Lagasse, I believe.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I’m looking for something different. A lot of chefs’ cookbooks are food as it’s done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food’s going to taste good. And that – that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.

When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there’s something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it’s just as fast.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn’t the bum on the street drinking Sterno it’s the working poor. They don’t look any different, they don’t behave any differently, they’re not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that’s it.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.