Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it.
I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can’t teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is.
I think in times of bizarre strangeness, what you can and should do is spend time with your family eating lunch or dinner. And if you can do that, you will restore us to the peace.
My kids and I make pasta three days a week now. It’s not even so much about the eating of it; they just like the process. Benno is the stuffer, and Leo is the catcher. They’ve got their jobs down.
When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there’s something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.
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.
Reading is a key feature in the life of every single successful person I have ever met.
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.
When we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we’re kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands.
Food is much better off the hand than the fork.
Food is “everyday”-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all.
I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.
The difference between ‘Molto Italiano’ and ‘The Babbo Cookbook’ is that the ingredient lists in ‘Molto’ are about half or even a third the size. In ‘Babbo,’ they are very long, they are very real. That’s exactly how we make them in the restaurant.
Just because you eat doesn’t mean you eat smart. It’s hard to beat a $1.99 wing pack of three at a fast-food restaurant – it’s so cheap – but that wing pack isn’t feeding anyone, it’s just pushing hunger back an hour.
Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He’s eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.
I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, ‘How’d you like to be on TV?’ Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a ‘Ready, Set, Cook’ with Emeril Lagasse, I believe.
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 very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there’s so much noise that you really can’t even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.