Best 102 quotes of Mario Batali on MyQuotes

All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck - books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you're reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles.

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.

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

Are we Darwinists - where we live and let live? Or are we nurturing as a society? There has to be a standard of living that we decide to support.

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food's going to taste good. And that - that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

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

Breakfast is the best time for me to figure out what my kids are doing. Right after you wake them up at breakfast, you pepper them with questions. You can get in there because they're not protecting what they thought was cool: "What happened yesterday?" "Oh, Matthew stole my book and ran away and it was really annoying..." That wouldn't happen after lunch, because their defenses are up. In the morning, if you lull them into a comfortable place, you get more honesty, and that's without being a detective.

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.

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.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

Day-old bread? Sadly, in America a lot of day-old bread just becomes nasty. Italian day-old bread, not having any preservatives in it, just becomes harder and it doesn't taste old. What I would warn people about is getting bread that's loaded with other things in it, because it starts to taste old.

Even though you'll see gnocchi or linguine everywhere in some of the regions of Italy, each of those chefs has their own expression of that which expresses more about the place they were exactly born than it does about trying to be a part of the greater mass. And that's the Italian culture.

Every Super Bowl, I do different food each quarter from each of the hometowns of the teams competing. So I’m always hoping for cities with a gastronomic soul—not so much Indianapolis or Denver, right? For halftime we have New York hot dogs from Papaya Dog. And at the end of the game I’ve chosen a dessert based on who I think is going to win.

Find something you love, because if you love what you do, you'll never spend a day at work.

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.

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.

Food is much better off the hand than the fork.

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

I am happiest when I am with my wife, Susi, and our two boys exploring and loving something for the first time.

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 can tell in two minutes if I should hire someone in the kitchen. Two minutes. It's his desire. It's that open-eyed, attentive expression. If he doesn't have it ... I mean, I can teach a chimp how to cook dinner. But I cannot teach a chimp how to love it.

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.

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

I don't think fine dining is dying, but I think those rare occasions when you really want the fanciness are diminishing... I think a lot of people are going to find simpler, more casual ways to enjoy an experience.

[If] we can celebrate that in a way that celebrates our love for New England as well as our love for the Italian culture as well as the American culture, then we've done something that's really good and supporting these fishermen who are doing the right thing in sustainability . . . paying attention to make sure we don't overfish our world.

If you could learn how to make a perfect lemon tart then you got a story. If you don't feel like that, make a perfect chocolate chip cookie, but have five go-to dishes like that and you can move them around, change them up just a little bit, and always have something in the can.

If you're going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you're going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn't buy fresh pasta.

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

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.

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.

I love simple food. I like to serve the entire animal, not only because it somehow provokes a customer to think about it, but also because to honor of the animal that has been killed for us to eat, you have to eat the whole thing. It would be silly to just eat the chops and throw everything else away.

I might use milk if I was using a touch of milk to make like a lasagna or a baked pasta. But cream? That is totally not the way they do it in Italy, and it's not a very good thing. It's kind of a blanket for flavor.

I'm pretty confident that the seafood from the Northeastern Atlantic is one of the most delicious and unique in the country, so that we can represent that in a way that the Italians like to represent things.

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.

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

I obsess everyday about everything. Not only about what we do well but what we can do better... In the end, the only reason I am motivated to do what I do is for the hedonistic pleasures of the table.

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

Italy itself has 21 different micro-regions. You go within each of those regions, there's even super-micro-regions; and the beauty is that when you go from place to place, although there's a common thread of pasta and joie de vivre - in the way that they approach their meals and the simplicity of cooking, celebrating more the product than the chef - there's still so much variety that as you go, it's always an exciting moment.

I think any way of getting people into the field by lowering the threshold of the cost to get them to play, is great. That said, there's all these restaurants around that are very popular that have one menu. And they don't even have tables, and they don't even have backs on their chairs. It's not really the experience I'm after, but I'm happy they exist.

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.

I think Tabasco brings me pure heat and Southern kind of familiarity, along with the vinegar and the barrel-aged spices.

I think that there is philanthropy and there is publicity. If you can marry the two to do something good, then I think it's great. Some of the other guys go around and slag people as a profession. That's not so interesting to me, because it's easy to take down, it's harder to build.

I think the more prominent the actual product in its raw nature is to its final consumer, the more sympathy and likelihood they'll consume it they'll have. Some friends of mine are trying to do these rooftop farms in Brooklyn, and I love that idea. As long as they're using clean water and real soil and creating delicious things by the sun, then brilliant.

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

I've been lucky enough in 20 years in the media to have a nice soap box that put me in a position to describe to an American viewership that Tuscany is different from Umbria, and it's different from Emilia-Romagna and, not that that was news, but it was never presented to them in a way that was, "Hey, look. This is a different plate from that different place." And although we all think of "spaghetti, lasagna, ciao," as what Italy is all about, there's all of this great stuff... I was merely an interpreter. I wasn't the developer of the content.

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.

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.

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.