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Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

Mario Batali

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Mario Batali
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 19
Chef
Cook
Media Personality
Restaurateur
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Mario Francesco Batali
Hate
Cookbook
Become
Chefs
Done
Predictable
Different
Chef
Something
Restaurants
Dumb
Food
Looking
Baroque

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I really want to be a rock star.
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We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.
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Passion is what adds so much value to life. And if you think about the things that you do, there's so much juice potential for them if you do it.
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If I hear something's not quite going right, then I'm there quicker than if I hear something's going wrong.
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Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.
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Food is everyday-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all.
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The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City.
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I might use milk if I was using a touch of milk to make like a lasagna or a baked pasta. But cream? That is totally not the way they do it in Italy, and it's not a very good thing. It's kind of a blanket for flavor.
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If you want your kids to listen to you, don't yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.
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My kids and I make pasta three days a week now. It's not even so much about the eating of it they just like the process. Benno is the stuffer, and Leo is the catcher. They've got their jobs down.
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Every Super Bowl, I do different food each quarter from each of the hometowns of the teams competing. So I’m always hoping for cities with a gastronomic soul—not so much Indianapolis or Denver, right? For halftime we have New York hot dogs from Papaya Dog. And at the end of the game I’ve chosen a dessert based on who I think is going to win.
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In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking.
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There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.
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I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.
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You have to live life to its full chorizo.
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The very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there's so much noise that you really can't even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.
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Any simple but delicious dish that celebrates the season and locality is what I want to be known for.
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My favorite thing is always a nice, inexpensive draft beer, but if someone wants something a little more complicated than that, then I'd like a Michelada, which is where I take beer and a little bit of either a spicy or not-so-spicy Bloody Mary, mix it like six to one [ratio], so it's kind of a red beer.
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Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.
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When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
Mario Batali