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

More quotes by Mario Batali

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What will always remain is love, passion and family time.
Mario Batali
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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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I really want to be a rock star.
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Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good.
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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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The objective.. is to achieve a comfort level between the cook/artist/performer and the customer/viewer/diner. And if we can achieve that, and the customers are happy and the cooks are happy, then we have a great experience.
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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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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Food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty.
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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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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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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Any simple but delicious dish that celebrates the season and locality is what I want to be known for.
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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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.
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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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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The American Dream is ownership … a house, a car, a vacation home and, even better, your own business
Mario Batali
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The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.
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