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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.

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
Everyday
Pleasure
Ends
Hedonistic
Reason
Obsess
Better
Pleasures
Wells
Motivated
Everything
Table
Well
Tables

More quotes by Mario Batali

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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.
Mario Batali
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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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Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good.
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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.
Mario Batali
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What I like to do when I go out is enjoy my friends and the food around it. If we have to stop and give five minutes to the chef, then I'm down with that. But if the chef has to interrupt every course to tell us how important this new revolution that's happening is, then I'm not so much interested in that.
Mario Batali
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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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My last meal? The food would be much less significant than the company.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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Michigan is my antidote to Manhattan. This is where I come to relax.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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The American Dream is ownership … a house, a car, a vacation home and, even better, your own business
Mario Batali
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Even though you'll see gnocchi or linguine everywhere in some of the regions of Italy, each of those chefs has their own expression of that which expresses more about the place they were exactly born than it does about trying to be a part of the greater mass. And that's the Italian culture.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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I really want to be a rock star.
Mario Batali
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Protein has been intensely over-represented on the plate. Now, the garden should be the main drag for main courses.
Mario Batali
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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