I love chicken. But, like a lot of chefs and cooks, I get tired of preparing it the same way.
Pastry school is great for a foundation and introducing you to basic techniques, but it is really up to the chefs to practice, practice, practice and refine their techniques.
The country’s top chefs, designers, media personalities and businesses are part of this dynamic city. We know that Chicagoans are used to the highest standards.
Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.
Tempura chefs are sort of like the Jedi of the cooking world: They must deftly perform with the utmost skill and precision, using extremely dangerous tools, all while maintaining a calm, serene demeanor. It is an elegant technique, from a more civilized time.
To be honest, ‘Ready Steady Cook’ was a great opportunity, but I did compromise myself. I was stood there quizzing chefs on what they were doing when I knew exactly what they were doing and why.
Japanese chefs believe our soul goes into our knives once we start using them. You wouldn’t put your soul in a dishwasher!
Chefs think about what it’s like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.
Pastry chefs are very particular people – we like a controlled environment; we don’t like an audience.
A lot of chefs don’t have a natural sense of economy. I was with one guy the other day, and I had to show him how to peel a turnip, because the way he was peeling turnips, he was throwing half of it in the garbage. It’s not about being cheap. It’s about being proper.
The biggest thing is education for young chefs and how they should focus on one cuisine rather than trying to imitate too many. It’s like art – you can see the cycles from many past artists and new artists being inspired by past artists.
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.
When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.
When I first went to Las Vegas, I thought I would never go to Las Vegas; you can’t get anything. But then I realized that they were trucking in almost everything; you could get a lot of your product, and I think that’s why a lot of chefs actually went there.
They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman’s octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.
People complain that chefs aren’t at their restaurants anymore, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. You see them on TV and you assume they’re not working but they are.
The popularity of the Internet and using it as an available resource has really changed the way chefs kind of gather information and look for inspiration. To me, a food trend is potentially a lot of people following an idea.
My goal is to take the nutrition world globally. You’ve got chefs who do their chef thing, you’ve got fitness trainers who do the fitness stuff but I’m the only one who does both.
Very good cooks who are employed as ‘chefs’ rarely refer to themselves as ‘chefs.’ They refer to themselves as ‘cooks.’
Some chefs go crazy with one restaurant, and if I had 20, I would go nuts.
There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we’d exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.
My grandfather, father, and uncle were chefs, and my other uncle was a butcher.
A cook never knows if the dish he perfected for hours was described properly or if a guest even liked his food. It’s hard to spend hours perfecting a dish only to relinquish control. But chefs need to put aside their egos and trust the people serving the food.
Engineers don’t have that sixth sense where we can just toss in things here and there like many chefs.
Burnout comes easy in the high-pressure world of television, and when the opportunity arose to move to Las Vegas and bring my friends and star chefs to open their restaurants at the Venetian, I made the move here.
I feel like a lot of the pastry chefs and chefs I worked for and worked under were always really, really big on the philosophy of ‘everyone’s in it together in the food world.’
It’s very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I’m not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.
I have real admiration for chefs who can maintain an edge and find new inspiration in their cooking after many years.
My chefs don’t apply for ‘Top Chef’. They all know that there is no way. At the end of the process I look at the resumes of the last 25 options just to make sure they’ve never worked for me before.
It’s wild how chefs have become like rock stars.
Men are more mechanical when we cook. Women are more attached. They cook it with feelings. From personal experience. The feeling a female chef puts in the food places her way ahead of men chefs.
There really is a camaraderie among chefs and a willingness to help out whenever we can.
All chefs have pictures of food in their phones, stuffed pig’s ears and pigs’ heads and the like.
The pressure, the heat, the almost impossibly fast pace at which you need work – this is the reality of working in the culinary industry. This is what professional chefs do night after night.
Chefs love to have that control and power to control the message they want to deliver.
Many of them have accomplished a lot before they ever get to ‘Top Chef’ although they’re not well known. The show just provides them with a platform. There’s just one winner and on some seasons you can get numerous chefs that are really good. Even if they don’t win, they’re all talented.
I became friends with a lot of chefs. I was a judge on ‘Top Chef’ last year. It was a dream come true.
Following the devastating India Ocean tsunami of 2004, I founded Chefs for Humanity, modeled after Doctors Without Borders, but comprised of chefs. There wasn’t anything out there like it, and there was a definite need for chefs to be able to offer assistance and aid.
There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren’t that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.
Ideally, I’d love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as… dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
It is not difficult now to make good food because we have sophisticated equipment and refined ingredients. Being innovative also helps you. It sets you apart from other chefs. But taste is king.
I think that more and more and more really talented restauranteurs and chefs from the fine dining world are going to try their hand at fine casual. They’re going to say, ‘Why not us?’
This kitchen is completely calm. Some of the old-fashioned chefs – they become kings in their kitchen, they’ve got to be called chef. But I don’t care if someone calls me chef or Heston, it really doesn’t bother me.
I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.
I think D.C. has always been very, very vibrant for food. Like Boston in a way. Boston and D.C. were really the two cities that were the most active with their local chefs and their local food scene.
What’s fun about chefs is that they’re big guys, often, and they might not look like the most athletic people, but they’re very powerful people, and they have tremendous stamina… It takes a toll on their body, too.
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