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The tradition of Italian cooking is that of the matriarch. This is the cooking of grandma. She didn't waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it.

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
Waste
Food
Matriarchs
Didn
Celery
Best
Grandma
Much
Dealt
Time
Italian
Thinking
Cooking
Tradition

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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 obsess everyday about everything. Not only about what we do well but what we can do better... In the end, the only reason I am motivated to do what I do is for the hedonistic pleasures of the table.
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There are two activities in life in which we can lovingly and carefully put something inside of someone we love. Cooking is the one we can do three times a day for the rest of our lives, without pills. In both activities, practice makes perfect.
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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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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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When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.
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When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there's something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
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I can tell in two minutes if I should hire someone in the kitchen. Two minutes. It's his desire. It's that open-eyed, attentive expression. If he doesn't have it ... I mean, I can teach a chimp how to cook dinner. But I cannot teach a chimp how to love it.
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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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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.
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My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.
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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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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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I like cast iron coated with enamel for longevity and forgiveness if I happen to take my eyes off the prize while pouring Chianti.
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You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else.
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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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One of the most important leadership lessons is realizing you're not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times.
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Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for that matter, the food starts to become a representation of what the culture is. When the food can transcend being just fuel, that's when you start to see these different permutations.
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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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