Haute Cuisine Quotes

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.

When I was at the Cordon Bleu things took hours and hours and hours to make. And they were beautiful dishes - and I know how to cook that way - but I was like, 'no one is cooking like this.'

I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something - high gastronomy can be something very, very present and doesn't have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a high gastronomy restaurant.

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 came from the old world of gastronomy. Many years ago I walked into the kitchens of the Hotel St George and I feel very fortunate that I worked for chefs that were behind their stoves. I saw that world of gastronomy. I can sit here today and say that I saw the golden age of gastronomy. It's gone, it's gone. It's never going to have that anymore, once the accountants get involved the romance fades. That's the reality.

Roberto Donna is a great Italian chef.

If my last supper was ever going to be cooked by a chef, it would have to be Thomas Keller.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

I love good food and I love to eat in nice restaurants. I love Japanese food. I love Gordon Ramsay in London; he is pretty amazing.

Fancy Restaurant: one that serves cold soup on purpose.

My dream as a passionate cook has been to go to Le Cordon Bleu. Never could my most incredible dream have lived up to the experience. The food, the lesson, the chef, the ingredients - all the best of the best. I see why Le Cordon Bleu is world-renowned.

A gourmet meal without a glass of wine just seems tragic to me somehow.

All the great chefs I know - Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten - they are technicians first.

These $40 burgers with foie gras and truffles and all of that flies in the face of one of the most proletarian foods around. It's overpriced, overdone and just not worth it.

I don't understand people who travel purely gastronomically, who book a Michelin-starred restaurant three months in advance and suddenly find themselves in Copenhagen or Barcelona with a zeitgeist plate of snail porridge.

When I first started writing cookbooks, I remember thinking to myself, what makes me think I can write a cookbook? There are these great chefs who are really trained. And, as I started, I realized, actually, what is my lack is actually exactly right, because I can connect with - cooking's hard for me. I never worked on... And that's why my recipes are really simple, because I want to be able to do them.

I've been thanked a lot in Wendy's, Applebee's, and Marriot hotels, I've never been thanked in Le Cirque, for some reason. I try to spend as little time as possible in Le Cirque; that's not because the food isn't good... I'm not the kind of guy who likes to find his food under his parsley.

Reservations and cloth napkins are really minor pinnacles in the high sierra of the New York lunch. The zenith, the Mount Whitney of lunches, the noon meal at which all local lines of force converge [is] the Bar Room of the Four Seasons.

When I am up in Paris then the restaurant which has remained my favourite for the past decade is Guy Savoy. The menu is huge, sophisticated and very creative but I keep to simple choices.

Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.

You don't want to eat haute cuisine all the time; it's not healthy.

I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.

Paris is a beautiful city.

Mulberry Garden, now the only place of refreshment about the town for persons of the best quality to be exceeding cheated at.