I’m sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you’re confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.
If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation’s cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.
Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.
One of my few virtues – I don’t have a lot of them – would be a deep sense of curiosity. I’m interested in how other people live in other places; I’m interested in other cultures.
People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I’m with or without cameras.
I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I’m looking across the full spectrum of genres.
When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.
I’d like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I’m serious. That would be my dream.
I think it’s a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.
If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.
I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.
I listen a lot to how people speak. I’ve read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.
I wouldn’t want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he’s also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.
When I cook, I generally stick with what I know, what I’m comfortable with, and what I feel I’ve paid my dues learning, and am good at.
Just because I like sushi, doesn’t mean I can make sushi. I’ve come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It’s a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.
I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel – hell yeah, I’m going to do that.
I eat strategically. If I know I’m having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I’m not eating a big dinner tonight, and I’m not having breakfast.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you.
We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.
Frightened people become angry people – as history teaches us again and again.