Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I’m looking for something different. A lot of chefs’ cookbooks are food as it’s done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
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
I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, ‘How’d you like to be on TV?’ Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a ‘Ready, Set, Cook’ with Emeril Lagasse, I believe. – Mario Batali
The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on. – Mario Batali
I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can’t teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is. – Mario Batali
The Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible. – Mario Batali
Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it’s just as fast. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
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
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. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
Passion is what adds so much value to life. And if you think about the things that you do, there’s so much juice potential for them if you do it. – Mario Batali
There’s a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat. – Mario Batali
The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it. – Mario Batali
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. – Mario Batali
