Mario Batali Quotes

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.

You have to live life to its full chorizo.

You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you’re charging, you’re still giving.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn’t the bum on the street drinking Sterno; it’s the working poor. They don’t look any different, they don’t behave any differently, they’re not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that’s it.

When you taste things in the right order, sometimes they taste so much different than if you taste them out of order. Not that there’s a right order, like by rule, but just like in a thoughtful way that makes sense.

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.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

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.

We need to figure out a ‘harvest system’ to collect the produce that stores don’t put out for customers to buy because it’s not perfect looking. Frankly, the stuff left to rot in the storeroom is more beautiful to me than the perfect carrot. I’m a gnarly carrot kind of guy.

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.

Twelve-piece cookware sets for ninety-nine bucks are routinely hawked on late-night TV – often by friends of mine. But with a mere five pieces, you can do whatever you like – slay the dragon and then cook its tenderloin in the style of the duke of Wellington, if you want to.

To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it’s actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.

There’s a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

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.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

The hardest part of anything is making a dish consistently great – you order it seven years later, if it’s still on the menu, and it’s still as good as what you remember.