John Lanchester Quotes

The type of cuisine I do, especially after being on 'Iron Chef' for several years, is a lot of global cuisine. My strength has always been Mediterranean cuisine across the board from Morocco, Spain, Italy, Greece, France, but I think now I'm doing a lot of very different cuisines all the time.

I'm a firm believer that the world should be your oyster when you're cooking. People should open themselves to other cuisines - there are a lot of hidden secrets all over the world.

In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.

My recipes aren't classic recipes; they're all fusion recipes inspired by all the places I've been to.

I like to add something unusual to a dish.

No one could have prepared for me BBQ on pizza. I mean, both are great. But together? It was incredible.

Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you're a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

The 'Maverick Chef' is one concept that I would really want to do again because I am traveling from country to country taking from what is in that country that is iconic, special, funky, weird and doing it my way. That is something I really enjoy.

In London, you can eat your way around the world - Lebanese one night, Indian the next.

I have a restaurant in Sri Lanka, and I feel keen to open up something here in Mumbai and bring Sri Lankan food here in India. I feel we have so much in common, but we have a different cuisine, and I am sure people will enjoy here.

I just couldn't live without other cultures' cuisines.

For 'Around the World in 80 Plates' we got to travel all over, having what was like a cross between a culinary competition and races. And in each country we had a chef Ambassador. We went to London, Barcelona, Bologna, Hong Kong, Thailand, Morocco... It was amazing.

Fusion food as a concept is kind of trying to quite consciously fuse things that are sometimes quite contradictory, sometimes quite far apart, to see if they'd work.

New York gives us a wide colour palette to cook from. We have cuisines from around the world, and that lets us pick and choose.

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.

I always had a lot of fun in America, with much more freedom than if I had tried to cook in France. I wouldn't have the same motivation or inspiration, and I wouldn't have cooked for the same kind of people in France, so it wouldn't have given me this edge I had in America.

Being an Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef, there's nothing traditional about my Thanksgiving spread.

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

I think that people are getting really excited about different ethnic food, and almost even micro-ethnic food. So it's not just, 'I love Asian,' it's Szechuan or Hunan, this one style from China.

One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody's done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.

You just feel a little odd when you don't get your kind of food. Fortunately, there are Indian restaurants all over the world.

We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn't want anything to do with it.

I'm very inspired by other cultures and very often use what I perceive to be exotic ingredients.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

Don't be afraid to adapt new ingredients into your own techniques, and traditional ingredients into new recipes.