Jean-Georges Vongerichten Quotes

I don't have the talent, the temperament, or the patience to be a great chef. I'd much rather order from someone who can really do it. I love restaurants. They make my life better.

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

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.

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.

Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.

I really feel I have found myself as a chef. It's very clear to me what I want to do - and how it should taste.

For a State Dinner there are many people involved in the menu planning—many cooks in the stew as it were.

I grew up in a house where I was a spectator to the sport of cooking. In that way, I just learned so much about what it really takes to make food.

I love creating new things. It's difficult to be creative once a restaurant's open. People want the same dishes. For me, the creativity is in opening a new place and starting a new menu.

I used to be a chef.

Cooks are an undervalued, awesome profession.

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

I would like to, at some point, do a cookbook.

My parents owned a soul food diner. It inspired me to go to culinary school.

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.

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 enjoy watching talented cooks bringing together ingredients into a fabulous dish.

I loved the cooking; that was what I was passionate about, but getting to watch the guests eat - because you could see everything from the kitchen - just watching people eat and looking at the plates when they came back, just understanding, this is such an amazing job.

I think everybody at some point in time has thought to themselves, 'I have a really great idea for a restaurant.'

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.

I am a chef through and through. Everything I do - whether it is cooking for kids in Harlem or cooking in a fine dining establishment - all my days are consumed by food.

To me, there's no great chef without a great team.

I wanted to learn everything I could about what it takes to be a great chef. It was a turning point for me.

If I wasn't an actress, I'd be a chef. I'd love to open a restaurant.

My plan is to open five restaurants based on the five elements in Chinese philosophy: wood, water, fire, earth and metal.