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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mario Batali Quotes

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

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

Are we Darwinists – where we live and let live? Or are we nurturing as a society? There has to be a standard of living that we decide to support.

– Mario Batali

Michigan is my antidote to Manhattan. This is where I come to relax.

– Mario Batali

If you’re going to buy pasta, you should buy dry pasta. If you’re going to make it you can make the real thing, but you shouldn’t buy fresh pasta.

– Mario Batali

Spaghetti is love.

– Mario Batali

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

Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that’s the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

– Mario Batali

All the information you could want is constantly streaming at you like a runaway truck – books, newspaper stories, Web sites, apps, how-to videos, this article you’re reading, even entire magazines devoted to single subjects like charcuterie or wedding cakes or pickles.

– Mario Batali

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

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

– Mario Batali

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

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

Just because you eat doesn’t mean you eat smart. It’s hard to beat a $1.99 wing pack of three at a fast-food restaurant – it’s so cheap – but that wing pack isn’t feeding anyone, it’s just pushing hunger back an hour.

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He’s eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe.

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food’s going to taste good. And that – that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don’t have a bad deli. There’s no mediocrity accepted.

– Mario Batali

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.

– Mario Batali

My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.

– Mario Batali

My family makes these vinegars – out of everything from grapes to peaches and cherries. We go through the whole process with the giant vat and drainer, label them, and give them as Christmas presents.

– Mario Batali

My last meal? The food would be much less significant than the company.

– Mario Batali

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

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.

– Mario Batali

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.

– Mario Batali

Keep in mind that in 1975, when you became a cook, it was because you were between two things: you were between getting out of the military and… going to jail. Anybody could be a cook, just like anybody could mow the lawn.

– Mario Batali

The difference between ‘Molto Italiano’ and ‘The Babbo Cookbook’ is that the ingredient lists in ‘Molto’ are about half or even a third the size. In ‘Babbo,’ they are very long, they are very real. That’s exactly how we make them in the restaurant.

– Mario Batali

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