Eric Ripert Quotes

I know my way around the kitchen. I like to cook, so I can fry an egg. I guess I could be a fry cook at Bob's Big Boy or something, or maybe a sous chef somewhere a little nicer. I would like to do that. I think I can probably pick that up pretty quickly.

I'm sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain't me.

One of my great teachers was the late Jean-Claude Vrinat of Taillevent in Paris.

Fine dining teaches you how to cook many different things, and it gives you the basic fundamentals, but these specialty restaurants, they're not teaching you the broad foundation you need to become a well-rounded cook.

Fifteen years ago, France was the promised land of cooking. So I looked at a map, found five restaurants and faxed them to ask for a job. Within five minutes, I got a reply from the then three- star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier.

I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.

I hope the cooks who are working for me now are getting that kind of experience so they can use what they're learning now as a foundation for a great career.

I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient, I could be qualifying for, like, the lunch food job at my daughter's school.

When you look at a kitchen, you tend to see that the people who are doing really well are those who have worked with the same chef or stayed in one restaurant for a significant amount of time.

I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.

I call all chefs 'cooks.' They're all cooks. That's what we do, we cook. You're a chef when you're running a kitchen.

I was a hostess, a waitress, a cafe manager, and a prep chef. For one job, I had to wear a hat shaped like a head of garlic.

Way back in the day, I used to cook for Thomas Keller at Rakel in New York City. Keller is a down to earth, kind, supportive person. I wish people could see that.

I worked as a breakfast cook in a lot of different restaurants.

I was in culinary school for a little while, but it was just too hard to cut weight and cook at the same time.

When I graduated from cooking school, I went to work at Stars, which was one of my favorite restaurants in the country at the time, and that's where I really learned to cook and to taste food in a discerning way.

I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was cooking with two guys who became celebrity chefs, if you will. I became their sous chef for awhile. We'd go to all the big names in Hollywood.

I think it's really important for every young person to work in a kitchen because you learn a life skill.

After attending The Dalton School and then Vassar College, I began cooking in New York City restaurants helmed by Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal and Thomas Keller.

I used to be a chef.

I like to cook. I would probably go to culinary school in France if I had time.

Chef: Any cook who swears in French.

I grew up watching my mom in the kitchen, that's how I know anything about cooking. I've always wanted to go to a culinary class actually.

When I started to work in Paris in fine dining, the passion really kicked in, and I knew that I would not, for the rest of my life, do anything else.