Mario Batali Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on. — Mario Batali

I don't think fine dining is dying, but I think those rare occasions when you really want the fanciness are diminishing ... I think a lot of people are going to find simpler, more casual ways to enjoy an experience. — Mario Batali

I think in times of bizarre strangeness, what you can and should do is spend time with your family eating lunch or dinner. And if you can do that, you will restore us to the peace. — Mario Batali

Reading is a key feature in the life of every single successful person I have ever met. — 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

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

I love simple food. I like to serve the entire animal, not only because it somehow provokes a customer to think about it, but also because to honor of the animal that has been killed for us to eat, you have to eat the whole thing. It would be silly to just eat the chops and throw everything else away. — 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

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

Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules. — Mario Batali

Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good. — 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

In growing up in Seattle, I don't know a single family that didn't barbecue or cook on the weekends and make its own kind of simple, pared-down, what I call Pacific Northwest cooking. — 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

Spaghetti is love. — 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

What will always remain is love, passion and family time. — Mario Batali

Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it. — Mario Batali

Food is much better off the hand than the fork. — Mario Batali

My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends. — 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 Hamptons are usually filled with what I had hoped to leave behind in New York City. — 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

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

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

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

One of the most important leadership lessons is realizing you're not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times. — 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

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is. — 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

Life is not a recipe. Recipes are just descriptions of one person's take on one moment in time. They're not rules. People think they are. They look as if they are. They say, "Do this, not this. Add this, not that." But, really, recipes are just suggestions that got written down. — 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

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

I like thick or middle (spaghetti). Thin for me is always overcooked by the time I'm eating it. — 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 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

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

The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other. — Mario Batali

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

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink. — 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

There's a pretty equitable distribution in the restaurant industry of how money gets paid, except for in the kitchen. The kitchen is the lowest-paid group of people. — Mario Batali

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

Protein has been intensely over-represented on the plate. Now, the garden should be the main drag for main courses. — Mario Batali

You sit down at Katz's and you eat the big bowl of pickles and you're eating the pastrami sandwich, and halfway through you say to yourself, I should really wrap this up and save it for tomorrow. But the sandwich is calling you: Remember the taste you just had. So fatty. It's what you want. It's what you are! I've never gotten home from Katz's with a doggie bag in my hand. A pastrami sandwich at Katz's is what's bad and good about food. It's the sacred and the profane. — 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

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

Day-old bread? Sadly, in America a lot of day-old bread just becomes nasty. Italian day-old bread, not having any preservatives in it, just becomes harder and it doesn't taste old. What I would warn people about is getting bread that's loaded with other things in it, because it starts to taste old. — Mario Batali

I really want to be a rock star. — 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

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

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

When we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we're kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands. — Mario Batali

I am happiest when I am with my wife, Susi, and our two boys exploring and loving something for the first time. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

I can tell in two minutes if I should hire someone in the kitchen. Two minutes. It's his desire. It's that open-eyed, attentive expression. If he doesn't have it ... I mean, I can teach a chimp how to cook dinner. But I cannot teach a chimp how to love it. — 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

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

It's fascinating to travel around Italy and realize just how many different ways they make spaghetti. — 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

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

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

There are two activities in life in which we can lovingly and carefully put something inside of someone we love. Cooking is the one we can do three times a day for the rest of our lives, without pills. In both activities, practice makes perfect. — Mario Batali

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

I put hibiscus flower in every cup of tea I have. It's sweet, sexy, and cleansing. — Mario Batali

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all. — Mario Batali

You have to live life to its full chorizo. — Mario Batali

The American Dream is ownership ... a house, a car, a vacation home and, even better, your own business — 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

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

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage. — 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

Find something you love, because if you love what you do, you'll never spend a day at work. — Mario Batali

Indianapolis versus Denver would not be a great one gastronomically. — Mario Batali

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. — Mario Batali

In case you're wondering why Guy Fieri is here, he won a contest. — 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

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