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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.

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
Would
Cooks
Time
Mom
Spent
Italy
Challenge
Operate
Learned
Restaurant
Challenges
Cook
American
Regardless
Real
Restaurants

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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 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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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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I think that there is philanthropy and there is publicity. If you can marry the two to do something good, then I think it's great. Some of the other guys go around and slag people as a profession. That's not so interesting to me, because it's easy to take down, it's harder to build.
Mario Batali
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I really want to be a rock star.
Mario Batali
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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.
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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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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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.
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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Find something you love, because if you love what you do, you'll never spend a day at work.
Mario Batali
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The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.
Mario Batali
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I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.
Mario Batali
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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.
Mario Batali
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The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City.
Mario Batali
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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.
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