I was raised cooking my grandmother's food, my mom's recipes.
I think there are a lot of chefs in D.C. who have made D.C. what it is today. I am very respectful to them. I'm very admiring of what they've done.
Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.
Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.
She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.
I don't think there are any footsteps to be walked in. No one else has taken things that you can buy at the grocery store and put them together. I hope that I have a career as long as Julia Child.
My mother cooked her last Christmas standing rib roast in 1987 and died a few weeks afterward.
In my early days, I copied the great French chefs, like most chefs do. Copying is not bad. Copying and not recognizing that you are copying is bad. For me, when I go to a restaurant and am served a dish influenced by something we created at elBulli, if it's well done, it makes me extremely happy.
My grandmother was a chef, and she taught me to cook. One day I want a restaurant, a small Italian grill. That's my aspiration.
My mom was a great cook and great baker all her life.
My mother doesn't cook; my grandmother didn't cook. Her kids were raised by servants. They would joke about Sunday night dinner. It was the only night she would cook, and apparently it was just horrendous, like scrambled eggs and Campbell's soup.
If I go down in for anything in history, I would like to be known as the person who convinced the American people that catfish is one of the finest eating fishes in the world.
Once you make a cookbook, you live with it as your own for the rest of your life, like a yearbook.
I want to be Jacques Pepin. I want to have a nice 50-, 60-year career. I want to be on PBS when I'm 70-something, still kicking it, having a great time, showing up in Aspen to sign cookbooks. I just want to have a nice, big, long career.
El Bulli was created by 2,000 people that passed through it. And we didn't know that something big was happening. It was like a game in a way. You didn't really know how it was going to end up, and people who would leave, they would take a piece of it with them, but they would leave another piece behind.
I'm a fan of the hand-me-down recipes - friends, family, bake sales, community cookbooks - those are the recipes that have withstood the test of time and fed many hungry fans.
