Top 30 Tom Colicchio Quotes

I get angry when I think that people are blatantly incorrect on matters of fact.

If I’m doing an event, if it’s a charity event, where it’s a walk-around event, where I gotta put a thousand small plates out in the course of a four-hour event, I gotta make sure I can do something that I know I can produce, that’s going to be consistent and good all night long.

Men with shaved heads are always better. Just ask my wife.

There’s the issue of hunger, and there’s an issue of if you’re going to cut out food programs. We should be focusing on healthy food. Right now, fruits and vegetables are very expensive. So what can we do on the policy side to bring the cost of fruits and vegetables down?

I have very good knife skills. I learned to butcher on my second job – I was 18 years old. Every other day we would break down six legs of veal.

I think steak is the ultimate comfort food, and if you’re going out for one, that isn’t the time to scrimp on calories or quality.

We are not really privy to all that crazy stuff that goes on in the show. I go to work, eat, and talk about food. The wild things happen when we aren’t around. I expected Top Chef to last three or four seasons and we are now shooting season ten.

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

There’s a food revolution going on throughout the country. And it doesn’t matter if you’re down south, up north in Maine, if you’re out west in Portland or Seattle.

I can’t deal with a lot of spice but I have to eat it. I pay the price – I’m on medication for heartburn, so that’s how I deal with it.

Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesn’t 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 you’re cooking.

I want to feed my kid something that is real and not processed. It’s hard to do. People are working and busy. The question is: Is it worth it? Is it worth stopping at the farm stand or supermarket to buy fresh ingredients?

I know from personal experience, if a chef yelled at me in a kitchen, the first thing I’d want to do is hit them with a pot.

You want to be the baddest guy in the kitchen and you want the person next to you to know it.

A steak needs fat to taste great.

You have to know the classics if you want to cook modern food.

I call all chefs ‘cooks.’ They’re all cooks. That’s what we do, we cook. You’re a chef when you’re running a kitchen.

In New York, I’ll walk down the street and someone will say, ‘Nice show,’ and that’s it. If I’m at a food festival, it’s open season.

I think the patterns are set very early when the kids are young. But at the same time, there are some flavors kids just don’t like.

It’s my belief that cooking is a craft. I think that you can push it into the realm of art, but it starts with craft. It starts with an understanding of materials. It starts with an understanding of where foods are grown.

When I was 26, 27 years old I was running a kitchen in New York, and I was a raving lunatic. The older you get, you figure out you don’t need to do that. You realize at a certain point, there’s a certain gravity to what you say and what you do. If that’s not enough, all the yelling in the world is not going to matter.

We’re adults. We’re the ones who should teach the kids what’s good to eat. I don’t think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we’re feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I’d rather feed them better food.

I’d like to see ‘Top Chef: Amateur’. Sometimes we have an amateur chef on the show and they just can’t cut it against the pros but there are some great stories there.

I started cooking 30-something years ago. When I was 14, 15, I was a short-order cook in a snack bar. That was at a place called the Gran Centurions. It was an Italian-American swim club my parents belonged to.

I travel around and hear from so many kids. Their parents say they were always very picky but they watch the show and they want to try stuff. The show is entertainment, but I think it has done so much for the public perception of what food can be.

Buy the best you can find or afford and don’t over manipulate it. If I cook a scallop, the best praise you can give me is that it tastes like a scallop.

In an ideal world for me, school lunch would be free for everybody.

Right now I am kicking around an idea to do a web talk show on a boat. Guests would come on and go fishing with me. I would like to take people who have never fished: You get them out on the water and they really open up.

I don’t have a Facebook page and I don’t think I will but Twitter for me is a way to take control of the message. Kind of wrestle it back. It’s something I’m enjoying.

This is what people don’t understand: obesity is a symptom of poverty. It’s not a lifestyle choice where people are just eating and not exercising. It’s because kids – and this is the problem with school lunch right now – are getting sugar, fat, empty calories – lots of calories – but no nutrition.