What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It’s about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It’s about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It’s about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.

A good cook was like a good educator; his duty was solely to bring out the talent of the chicken and show it to best advantage, as a good teacher brings out the talent inherent in a young man. Granted that the original talent was there in the chicken, too much coaxing, stuffing, imposing, and spicing would merely distract from its simple beauty and virtue.

Cooking is a philosophy, it's not a recipe. Unless it's pastry, then it's chemistry.

Great chefs have three things in common. The first is the understanding that mother nature is the true artist and they are the cook. The second is that everything they do becomes an extension of them as a person. Third, they give you insight into the world they came from, the world that inspired them. They show that off on their plates.

What took me to cooking was that there was something honest about it,” says David Chang. There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway. You either can — or can’t — make an omelet. You either can — or can’t — chop an onion, shake a pan, keep up with the other cooks, replicate again and again, perfectly, the dishes that need to be done. No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts. The kitchen is the last meritocracy — a world of absolutes; one knows without any ambiguity at the end of each day how one did.

If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.

"The perfect meal is about the osmosis between aroma, taste, service, decoration and design, tableware, place and the people that share the moment with you".

You're one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at meal-time. That's fine, there's something to be said for that. But that doesn't make you a cook.

Chefs aren't celebrities: they're chefs.

I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. You're getting into the electric chair tomorrow morning. They're gonna strap you down, turn up the juice and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You've got one meal left. What are you having for dinner? When playing this game with chefs - and we're talking good chefs here- the answers are invariable simple ones.

Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman — not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen — though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying.

Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies — loaf givers.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.