Steve Ells Quotes

Meat and poultry is safe. It's safer than it's probably ever been.

I think the biggest thing is clean as you go. Wash all your knives, cutting boards, dishes, when you are done cooking, not look at a sink full of dishes after you are done. Cleaning as you go helps keep away cross contamination and you avoid having food borne bacteria.

Being in compliance with industry standards is less than 5 percent of what companies need to do to make food safe. Company after company finds that out after they have events.

Gonzo narrows his eyes. 'How often do you clean that thing?' 'Every night,' the waitress answers. Her smile is strained. 'That's it? Do you know how long it takes for Listeria to grow under those hot lamps, even with ice?' Here we go. 'It can happen in just five hours. Five hours and you've got the salad bar of death!' The waitress looks confused. 'From Listerine?

You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody's going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there's also so many other people who contribute to a great meal.

The food business is very tough, but there's also a lot of love and very giving.

If it doesn't taste good it doesn't go on the menu.

One of the jobs I had was cutting out the blood clots on a side of beef.

I think there should be very strict limits on the pathogens that can be sold in your meat. There should be limits on disease-causing pathogens. Tests should determine whether the meat is contaminated or not, and you shouldn't be allowed to sell contaminated meat.

We'll serve, on a good Saturday night six or seven thousand people in all the restaurants, and it's like, the percentages are that maybe one person's not going to like what they get. And I can't be there to fix it. I hate that. We're in this business to make things that please people.

Individual companies now have the voluntary responsibility of recalling their own products. While many companies have acted properly and swiftly to recall contaminated goods, the delay between the identification of tainted foods and the company's decision to recall those foods leads to the needless sickness of too many Americans.

When I leave the country, I'm very, very cautious about what I eat and drink. No vegetables, no fruit.

I can make things, but I don't cook them, exactly. Like salmon, I can stick that in a pan. Or the other day I made noodles, but they were hard. It never occurred to me to check them; I just stopped cooking them when I felt they were ready. Really, I'm too absentminded.

I'm just angry at the sort of things that are winding up in ground beef. I'm angry that other people - mainly children - are going to be sickened by eating a hamburger.

As a restaurateur, my job is to basically control the chaos and the drama. There's always going to be chaos in the restaurant business.

We're going to do everything possible to make sure that food safety is always paramount, and that we work with the industry as aggressively as we can to make sure that we're paying attention to the food-safety issues.

At the restaurant, we strive to create an excellent experience for our guests, and in the kitchen, we could not do this without having access to the best ingredients, equipment and tools, including Victorinox Cutlery.

If I'm doing an event, if it's a charity event, where it's a walk-around event, where I gotta put a thousand small plates out in the course of a four-hour event, I gotta make sure I can do something that I know I can produce, that's going to be consistent and good all night long.

The FDA serves a real purpose: To protect public health.

I feel very passionate about maintaining the same level of standard and respect for the food as an Iron Chef myself.

People think it's so easy to make hamburgers. That consistent quality in so many restaurants, in that many parts of the world, is not an easy thing to do.

When I started on the very first day with just one restaurant, we used to pick oregano off the stems and chop them. We still do that.

It is impossible to insure that there is a zero percent chance of any kind of foodborne illness anytime anyone eats anywhere.