Top 100 Chef Quotes
#2. My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.
Jacques Pepin
#3. Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible.
Wylie Dufresne
#5. Success is the accomplishment of any number of possible aims, dreams, aspirations or goals. It's very personal and unique to you. Your greatest desire could be someone else's idea of hell; you might want to be an award-winning chef while your best friend hates cooking.
Nigel Cumberland
#6. I have a full Tuscan lunch and dinner every day in my home; my husband's a fantastic chef.
Debi Mazar
#7. A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.
Wolfgang Puck
#8. A chef who doesn't wash his hands is like a cop who steals. It's a cry for help.
Jerry Seinfeld
#9. I was actually going to be a chef before I got sidetracked. I used to make deserts for restaurants as a young teenage mother to make money.
Suzanne Somers
#10. Both my partner and I did not get into cooking so that we could wear ugly chef's coats and stuff. We dress sexy in the kitchen.
Marc Jacobs
#11. The new luxury is the luxury of freedom and time. Once you've had a taste of that life, no corner office or fancy chef will be able to drag you back.
Jason Fried
#12. Between the ages of six and nine, my palette was taking shape as well as my identity as a chef. It was then that I learned the difference between salty, sweet, sour and even spicy.
Marcus Samuelsson
#13. I'm proud of the way I rearrange and put things together, like a chef who makes a great meal, or a filmmaker who puts together a story - it's casting, editing, cinematography.
Bonnie Raitt
#14. I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
Alexis Denisof
#15. In the orchestra of a great kitchen, the sauce chef is a soloist.
Fernand Point
#16. You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.
Jacques Pepin
#17. I'm not on chef level, but I'd make a good line cook. That's not too shabby.
Jon Favreau
#18. I try to pack light with a folding leather suit bag. Anything more than five days, I need to check in my luggage. What takes the most space? Chef jackets, aprons and tools.
Daniel Boulud
#19. Hassan, he has the makings of a great chef, it is true, and he has talent beyond anything you and I possess.
Richard C. Morais
#20. The restaurants express the spirit of the chef, the spirit of the city, the country.
Alain Ducasse
#21. During the course of filming 'Top Chef,' I gain 15 lbs., so I'm used to needing two dress sizes.
Padma Lakshmi
#22. I'm the joke of the family with cooking because I've never done it - primarily because I've been surrounded by people who are so good at it. Mum's brilliant. Boyfriends have always been good at it. I'm waiting for my inner chef to be released.
Emilia Fox
#23. You don't become a chef to become famous.
Eric Ripert
#24. On traditional economic theory:
We do not play chess as if we were a grandmaster, invest as if we were Warren Buffett, or cook like an Iron Chef. It is more likely we cook like Warren Buffett, who loves to eat at Dairy Queen.
Richard H. Thaler
#25. When I was a teenager, I worked in New Orleans for a chef named Paul Prudhomme. That was a very important time in my life as a chef. I developed my palate and learned a lot. And here I am now. I specialize in modern Mexican and contemporary Latin cuisines.
Aaron Sanchez
#26. TV is a deformed vision, an excessive caricature. A chef has to stay an artisan, not become a star.
Alain Ducasse
#27. The scotch egg is such a Scottish food. It's as though a great Scottish chef said: I need a tasty snack. Let's take an egg ... and wrap it in meat!! Makes it a bit harder.
Bill Bailey
#28. My contribution I hope is to get people to eat full-flavored food. If I could come away with that alone, that would be a fantastic accomplishment. I'm also very proud of being a very American chef.
Bobby Flay
#29. Mario you are a great chef but you look like a homeless James Gandolfini.
Jim Norton
#30. With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?
Nathan Myhrvold
#31. I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don't want my chefs to be cute and adorable.
Anthony Bourdain
#32. 'Chef' doesn't mean that you're the best cook, it simply means 'boss.'
Tom Colicchio
#33. Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine's not so great.
Anthony Bourdain
#34. A FRIGHTENED, ANGRY, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND, antisocial chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.
Dean Koontz
#35. We had to have white people front like the chef and owners. It was not OK for my dad to sell steak, but white people cooking Asian get more attention than the people in Chinatown who actually know what the fuck they're doing.
Eddie Huang
#36. I don't have any interest in being a chef without being on the business side of things, or vice versa, because if you don't make money at the end of the month, you're going out of business.
Tom Douglas
#37. 'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.
Richard Corliss
#38. It's like a kitchen, acting. Put a chef in a kitchen and they will have different recipes. Whatever your recipe, what works for you won't work for another.
Carole Bouquet
#39. Support a small chef. Not these big chains ... but support the people who are out there trying to do things right and working hard to do that.
Tom Douglas
#40. Because I'm a chef, I eat out frequently, so it's hard for me to control what I consume in terms of calories. But when I'm at home, I eat what my wife cooks for me. She works hard to avoid making foods that are high in calories and cholesterol, so most of the time, she makes vegetarian dishes.
Masaharu Morimoto
#41. I think in France, for example, we can say whatever we want about the French, but going out and dining is more about the intellectual moment to share with the people you dine with than trying to figure out what the chef did with that little piece of salmon or lobster and all that.
Daniel Boulud
#42. When you look at a kitchen, you tend to see that the people who are doing really well are those who have worked with the same chef or stayed in one restaurant for a significant amount of time.
Daniel Humm
#43. I saw then how I could be a good Buddhist and a good chef, and serve meat that is given freely, without suffering.
Matthew Johnson
#44. As a chef I'm not your dietitian or your ethicist, I'm in the pleasure business.
Anthony Bourdain
#45. I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.
Jane Green
#46. Chef and Ubuntu are often inseparable in serious server deployments, making mutual integration a must for our users. We're excited to offer Chef as part of the Ubuntu distribution and to deliver easy bare metal provisioning with MAAS and Chef.
Mark Shuttleworth
#47. My palate is simpler than it used to be. A young chef adds and adds and adds to the plate. As you get older, you start to take away.
Jacques Pepin
#48. You have to balance, but you can be aggressive as a chef. It benefits the food. You have to be passionate. You can't be angry cooking.
Marcus Samuelsson
#49. You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.
Jacques Pepin
#50. Its. A. Chicken. There ain't no Chef Boyardee prepackaged meals in nine different flavors.
Alessandra Torre
#51. I like the idea of being so passionate about everything I do and the fact that I might wake up tomorrow and say 'I want to be a chef,' and just pour myself into that.
Kat Graham
#52. I don't consider myself a rock star chef, I really don't. I cook for a living and I try to help out as many people as I can in my life and that's all I care about. I don't care about the fame of television, I use to a lot.
Robert Irvine
#53. I was lucky enough to marry a wonderful chef.
Mehmet Oz
#54. I enjoy what I do because it keeps evolving - when I was a cook, I wanted to be a chef de partie; when I was a chef de partie, I wanted to be a chef; when I was a chef, I wanted to be a restaurateur, and now I am a chef entrepreneur. I am still fulfilling my dream.
Daniel Boulud
#55. People with chile peppers on their chef pants shouldn't be allowed in the kitchen.
April Bloomfield
#56. Adorable. I had never seen grown women attack each other so fluently. No one tossed out adorable at Simone. No one declined Chef's tasting menu. And yet Simone wasn't stunned - she was braced. I realized that they were women who knew dangerous things about each other.
Stephanie Danler
#57. To me, there's no great chef without a great team.
Daniel Boulud
#58. I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.
Robert Moses
#59. A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.
Wolfgang Puck
#60. I am not a chef. I can't claim that title. The difference is a cook doesn't have a degree. A chef has formal education. It has nothing to do with talent or actual preparation - one just can't claim the title if you don't have degree.
Anna Pump
#61. I'm a home cook and love to read about food, but I'm not trained as a chef. I'm just really into cooking and passionate about it.
Ted Allen
#62. I used to take culinary arts at Job Corps so I'm a certified chef. I could cook chicken alfredo.
Gorilla Zoe
#63. People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.
Lemony Snicket
#64. I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.
Anthony Bourdain
#65. I always hated watching cooking shows where the chef would use ingredients that I couldn't get my hands on, cooking implements that I couldn't afford, recipes that I could never have access to.
Adam Richman
#67. As a chef, you need to respect your guests and their needs. If they decide that they want to eat certain things and not eat others, if for religious reasons or just decide they don't want to eat certain ingredients, you have to respect that.
Joel Robuchon
#68. My chefs don't apply for 'Top Chef'. They all know that there is no way. At the end of the process I look at the resumes of the last 25 options just to make sure they've never worked for me before.
Tom Colicchio
#69. Don't take a butcher's advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he'd be a chef.
Andy Rooney
#70. When I'm in L.A., I go to Spago because the chef is a friend of mine.
Nobu Matsuhisa
#71. Everybody these days wants to be a star, including myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm a chef but you want to market yourself and your projects.
Geoffrey Zakarian
#72. The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culinary institute. It's in the blood.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#73. At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.
Jon Favreau
#74. A special buffet would be opened at the end of a suite of rooms, and Prokhorych (the head chef at the club) would be in charge
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. I also want to go to an Italian island and do cuisine properly with some famous Italian chef and, like, his mother.
Elizabeth Olsen
#76. One of the great awards from a chef's point of view are Michelin stars. The ultimate is three Michelin stars. For example, Gordon Ramsey has three Michelin stars. Having one Michelin star is a big deal, two is incredible and having three puts you in a bracket of maybe 30 chefs worldwide.
Paul Rankin
#77. We are not really privy to all that crazy stuff that goes on in the show. I go to work, eat, and talk about food. The wild things happen when we aren't around. I expected Top Chef to last three or four seasons and we are now shooting season ten.
Tom Colicchio
#78. I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater.
Nigella Lawson
#79. My husband and I have always incorporated things into our life that reduce stress. We're very careful with our health. We go to bed early. In this job, fatigue would be very detrimental! We've always eaten very healthily; now it's really particularly easy because we have a chef.
Laura Bush
#80. My family truly believes they are better cooks than I am. They see me as Giada, not as a celebrity chef. To them I'm just me - their granddaughter, niece, etc., and they're older and wiser. I like that because it keeps you grounded.
Giada De Laurentiis
#81. Just like if you were brought up on a farm, you would most likely carry on your father's business as a farmer; I was brought up in the kitchen and ended up becoming a chef.
Martin Yan
#82. All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef.
Rene Redzepi
#83. Bringing your kids into the kitchen doesn't require you to be a top chef; only time and maybe a willingness to get a little messy.
Michael Mina
#84. Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.
Deborah Moggach
#85. I have a pet lizard named Puff, five goldfish - named Pinky, Brain, Jowels, Pearl and Sandy, an oscar fish named Chef, two pacus, an albino African frog named Whitey, a bonsai tree, four Venus flytraps, a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.
Chris Pratt
#86. Most people think buying is investing, but they're wrong. Buying doesn't make you an investor any more than buying groceries makes you a chef.
Gary Keller
#87. Being a sport star and a chef both require passion, commitment, work and natural ability.
Paul Rankin
#88. Giada De Laurentiis, of 'Everyday Italian,' is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise - she was trained at the Cordon Bleu and worked as a private cook for a wealthy Los Angeles family.
Bill Buford
#89. Here's Lego Zombie Chef! Here's Lego Zombie builder! See their grasping hands and posable limbs!
Kirsty McKay
#90. I do have a chef, but I still go out. Sometimes I can still blend in, and sometimes I get a little bombarded. It's the best of both worlds.
Kyrie Irving
#91. I liked the energy of cooking, the action, the camaraderie. I often compare the kitchen to sports and compare the chef to a coach. There are a lot of similarities to it.
Todd English
#92. You wouldn't know it but I'm no good at ... cooking. My chef does that.
Carolina Herrera
#93. I am a bit of a gourmet chef. I love cooking mostly Thai food. And a lot of times on movies, you have these trailers that have these little ovens and kitchenettes. A lot of actors never use them, but I would cook lunch just about every day.
Will Ferrell
#94. If I had to have a favorite chef, I'd probably say I like Guy Fieri.
G. Garvin
#95. My dad was a master butcher and I trained to be a butcher when I left school. I didn't enjoy it at the time but I love cooking now, so perhaps I would have been a chef.
Brendan Coyle
#96. I think every chef should have a food truck. It's a good way to test the markets, to invest in meeting the future restaurant goers.
Jose Andres
#97. First need in the reform of hospital management? That's easy! The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef.
Martin H. Fischer
#98. Becoming a great leader, a great athlete, or great chef takes more than desire or even knowledge. It takes effort. It takes practice.
Dave Anderson
#99. I am the chef of love. Let me utilize your oven.
Jarod Kintz
#100. As a chef and activist, I'm particularly concerned with food politics issues such as the farm bill.
Marcus Samuelsson
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