Mario Batali Quotes

The tradition of Italian cooking is that of the matriarch. This is the cooking of grandma. She didn't waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it.

I didn't speak Italian when I got to Italy. I had taken a couple of lessons and did a year in college, but in six months, I became regionally submersed to the point that I can curse in dialect.

In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking.

My intention is to make sure that we think about it without becoming too intellectual about it. There are pockets of restaurateurs throughout our country right now and in Italy, France, and Spain, who spend all their days figuring out how to confound the customer.

It's more interesting to talk about the whole lily family and say, did you know that lily bulbs are also part of the onion family? It's like the stream-of-consciousness way I think about food when I'm just cooking it.

Kids today want to eat their risotto with curry and shrimp and sour cream, not risotto alla Milanese, like they should, in my opinion.

There's not a speck of fruit by the time March or April rolls around. Citrus is gone, and there's not a berry in sight. You're stuck with passion fruits and pineapples. Which isn't bad, but it's a tough time of the year, and chefs need to know how to work through it.

There are all kinds of myths going on in the Italian culture, and the way they celebrate is through their food. It's the tradition of the table where the Italians celebrate most of their triumphs and successes.

The whole concept of the supremacy of the family unit in the Italian culture... That's all based on the relation of the mom and the children and the bambino.

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.

The objective... is to achieve a comfort level between the cook/artist/performer and the customer/viewer/diner. And if we can achieve that, and the customers are happy and the cooks are happy, then we have a great experience.

The whole thing of the risotto as a side dish with pasta: If no one is ever going to ask for risotto on the side of their spaghetti again, we have won something. We've turned them around.

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti.

I travel around and instead of my showing someone how to cook, I walk in with a completely hands-off approach, and they show me their dishes.

If neither of the two parties are happy, then you have a closed restaurant. And if only one of the two groups is happy, you have one that will close. So, to create an opportunity for both the customers and the staff to have a superior experience is my constant struggle.

Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews.

If you approach cooking as a trade school, then you may not have as many interesting things to think about or do later on in life.

Twenty years ago if you were going to be a cook, it was because you didn't make it in the army. It was the last stop before you were on the street.

The Four Seasons wanted me to become the chef, and I didn't feel that at age 28 I was ready to become the chef.

French and Italian cooking have been elevated to a really high art form.

I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.

The lighting and the buzz and everything in addition to the food have an impact on what the customer feels.

When I go out to a restaurant, I definitely order dishes that I know take either a long time to make or are difficult to source. Unless it's a really special steak, there's no reason for me to go out and eat that.

For two years I would just make that. I would concentrate on making the perfect omelet... It was important to me to be able to make a perfect omelet with nothing in it.

Think of American food. In my generation, growing up in the '60s and '70s, Banquet Fried Chicken and TV dinners were the thing. Now people are back into roasting their own chickens, and TV dinners are a point of kitsch. It will be interesting to see what survives another hundred years.