'Top Chef' is always entertaining - it's hard to stop watching, like a good hockey fight, but no one gets hurt. It's great that the format is so inherently dramatic and can make cooking so entertaining to people who might not ordinarily be interested in a cooking show. Good for the industry all round.
We have fried things in cubes, historically. We tried bars of Hollandaise, we tried different shapes, but it ultimately seemed like the cube was the right shape.
My job has changed over the years, 22 years roughly I've been cooking professionally. When I was younger, I aspired to be the star player. Now, it's more I like to sit in the dugout and make sure the team wins the game.
The East Village is where I cut my teeth as a kid. I ran around here on a skateboard.
I have strong feelings about cookbooks because I am a lover of them and student of them and devourer of them and collect them. I find them to be a great source of inspiration. When I was a cook and not making much money, I always used to spend most of what I had on cookbooks.
Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible.
I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.
I don't think of eggs as being fundamental to the flavor of mayonnaise, but they are to Hollandaise.
It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.
I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way.
When ramps are in season, we pickle a bunch of ramps and fold that into soup. Pickled pearl onions are great chopped up or pureed.
Every dish doesn't have to be showy, and every dish doesn't have to slap you in the face with technique.
I think it's important for anyone who is artistic to look back on their body of work and be critical. Maybe the Beatles can look back and say everything was perfect, but we've come up with hundreds and hundreds of dishes, and anyone who is honest with themselves has to realize that every single one wasn't an absolute, unequivocal home run.
