You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.
Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.
I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.
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.
I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.
The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.
What’s the opposite of suck? Un-suck?
Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of ‘medicine.’ That’s something you might remind your New Age friends who’ve gone gaga over ‘holistic medicine’ and ’alternative Chinese cures.
Get up early and go to the local produce markets. In Latin America and Asia, those are usually great places to find delicious food stalls serving cheap, authentic and fresh specialties.
I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don’t see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.
Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.
Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.
I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.
I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.
Without new ideas success can become stale.
Naturally, I’m misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.
You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.
I’m a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It’s all about my daughter – I’m no longer the star of my own movie.
In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I’m on television, and they remind me of that frequently.
I can’t do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I’m okay with hurting myself, like I’ll lift something until it hurts, but I don’t want to pass out or vomit in front of people.