Best 188 quotes in «chef quotes» category

The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so - and I realised that, my God... I've been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!

The two of you can’t really be thinking about… not at a time like this.“ Poppy had to laugh. “Is there a better time?

This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.

To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.

We can't all be bakers or chefs. Many of us have modest ambitions. But we can all buy a piece of the pie.

Travelling the whole world, working where other people spend their vacations — that sounds like a dream...

Wait, what's the chef's name?" she asked. "I think I read about him in ELLE." "Ooooh, ELLE," Elliott mocked. "He must be a big deal, then." "He is a big deal!" Emerald said, slapping him with the menu. "Or at least he's cute!" I wanted to yell Enough. I wanted to redo the whole night- the outfit from Emerald, seeing Kyle, my orders off the menu. "His name is Pascal Fox," I said quietly, way too quietly for normal conversation, and unintelligible in this loud restaurant. The open kitchen's steam and smoke masked Pascal a bit, but I still caught a glimpse. Even though he was getting a lot of media attention, he didn't look like a man who cared about photo shoots and celebrity. He looked like a serious chef with a lot on the line. He sprinted sideways through the narrow galley, threw something out. His chef's jacket was rolled to his elbows, revealing a mural of indecipherable tattoos.

Well then, those folks are judgmental assholes,” Liv spat. “You’re more than a fucking label, Z. You’re an amazing chef, a mediocre bassist, and you’ve got this dorky way of scratching the back of your head whenever you talk about anything personal, which isn’t often, but holy hell is it cute. I know you way better than any of those folks casting stones do, and I adore everything you are, Zane Parata.

What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

Who's cooking your food anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and grim pride. They're probably not even American.

While Nicole drove off in search of recipes for fish hash, clam fritters, and salmon quiche, Charlotte settled in the Chowder House with Dorey Jewett, who, well beyond the assortment of chowders she always brought to Bailey's Brunch, would be as important a figure in the book as any. They sat in the kitchen, though Dorey did little actual sitting. Looking her chef-self in T-shirt, shorts, and apron, if she wasn't dicing veggies, she was clarifying butter or supervising a young boy who was shucking clams dug from the flats hours before. Even this early, the kitchen smelled of chowder bubbling in huge steel pots. Much as Anna Cabot had done for the island in general, Dorey gave a history of restaurants on Quinnipeague, from the first fish stand at the pier, to a primitive burger hut on the bluff, to a short-lived diner on Main Street, to the current Grill and Cafe. Naturally, she spoke at greatest length about the evolution of the Chowder House, whose success she credited to her father, though the man had been dead for nearly twenty years. Everyone knew Dorey was the one who had brought the place into the twenty-first century, but her family loyalty was endearing.

Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer.

Will was now all man. And all cowboy.

You can never focus without a goal and never achieve your goal without focus...

You want to be hands-on and on the other side, you need to be a great delegator...

You have only failed if you have completely given up on your goal.

A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.

A chef who doesn't wash his hands is like a cop who steals. It's a cry for help.

A great chef is an artist that I truly respect.

A lot of chefs are traditional and do it very well. But the ones who are the most successful are the ones who change things. That is why someone like Heston Blumenthal is a genius.

A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.

A good apprentice cook must be as polite with the dishwasher as with the chef.

All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.

A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.

A lot of young chefs today get carried away by trends, by influences, by movements.

As chefs, we cook to please people, to nourish people.

At 15, I had to choose a vocational school, and I was delighted, of course, to go to culinary school. But learning the basics was not as exciting as being the chef I am today.

Before any exposure on TV, I'm a real chef.

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

As a chef, if I can taste something, I can basically figure out whats in it.

Chefs, as a whole, say yes to any project, fundraiser, or tasting because they have such a generous spirit.

Being a chef never seems like a job, it becomes a true passion.

Both my parents are chefs I grew up in a restaurant and was always surrounded by cooks. I love food.

Chefs have a new opportunity - and perhaps even an obligation - to inform the public about what is good to eat, and why.

By the time I was 30, nobody would work with me. I was friendless, I was hopeless, I was suicidal, lost my family - I mean, it was bad. Bottomed out, didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef - go to work in a kitchen someplace.

Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

Chef: Any cook who swears in French.

Chicago is a lot of my background as a chef.

Chef' doesn't mean that you're the best cook, it simply means 'boss.

Chefs become attracted to being able to get product and then clientele - those are the two things that attract you as a chef.

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.

Chefs hate desserts. The smartest thing a chef can do is hire a great pastry chef. Cooking savory food is all about feel - you season something, you taste it, you go back in and adjust, more butter, more olive oil, more acid, whatever you want to get it to taste the way you want. Pastries are like a science project. To me, the greatest chefs are the ones who have the greatest feel for food, while the greatest pastry chefs have to be people that are extremely precise.

Chefs work with food, artists with oil paint, programmers with code.

Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

Eh! Je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre. (Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them.)

Even growing up, I was always the helper-outer, the sous-chef to my parents.

Everybody these days wants to be a star, including myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm a chef but you want to market yourself and your projects.

Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

Every chef should have an understanding of pastries or desserts.