Mario Batali Quotes

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

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.

If you want your kids to listen to you, don't yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.

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.

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that's the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

One of the most important leadership lessons is realizing you're not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times.

Recipes are just descriptions of one person’s take on one moment in time. They’re not rules.

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti.

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

Passion is what adds so much value to life. And if you think about the things that you do, there's so much juice potential for them if you do it.

To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.

The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other.

Food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty.

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.

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.

I don't put cream in any pasta noodles ever. I would use a little butter, but I don't ever use cream.

I'm a big fan of featuring all of the local shellfish and seafood provided.

The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City.

Any simple but delicious dish that celebrates the season and locality is what I want to be known for.

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.

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.

Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.

Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good.

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.

The American Dream is ownership … a house, a car, a vacation home and, even better, your own business

Michigan is my antidote to Manhattan. This is where I come to relax.

In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking.

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.

When you use it in cooked foods, it changes [the Tabasco flavor] a little bit; it loses a little bit of the bright acid that you love on it, but you get that more cooked heat and chile flavor down.

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.

You have to live life to its full chorizo.

I put hibiscus flower in every cup of tea I have. It's sweet, sexy, and cleansing.

Reading is a key feature in the life of every single successful person I have ever met.

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.

I like cast iron coated with enamel for longevity and forgiveness if I happen to take my eyes off the prize while pouring Chianti.

I like thick or middle (spaghetti). Thin for me is always overcooked by the time I'm eating it.

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.

When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.

You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you're charging, you're still giving.

If I hear something's not quite going right, then I'm there quicker than if I hear something's going wrong.

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.

In case you're wondering why Guy Fieri is here, he won a contest.

Food is much better off the hand than the fork.

When you use Tabasco in the marinade, it kind of infuses everything.