It's true that writing and pastry-making are similar, but when you work as a pastry chef, you can get a kind of mania that everything you see is related to pastries.
Maybe one of the only things I do well: I cook like a maniac! I would be a chef if I weren't an actor.
I am not a fine chef, but I can certainly get dinner on the table for 14 people. With that many, I try to keep it simple: salmon, mashed potatoes, sauteed spinach, and salad.
The margins for restaurants to make money are very, very narrow. It's a tough business, and to be a chef is a little bit masochistic.
I worked on the line, I've been an executive chef, I've worked for the Mets, I've worked for various steakhouses, vegetarian restaurants, a lot of Middle Eastern stuff. I've worked my fair share of a lot of different things. I've worked at festivals and street fairs, you know? I've been through it all.
There is an old story that says that Julia Child dropped a chicken on the floor when she was filming 'The French Chef.' And then - that, in fact, is not true. She just, you know, dropped some potatoes she was trying to flip in a pan.
I think that 'celebrity' and 'chef' should be a permanent oxymoron.
I'm crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on 'Iron Chef America' when I got 'SNL.' It was one of those situations where you're concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.
A chef's palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.
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.
I don't want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.
A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef's book about improvising but a real home cook's book with a real home cook's pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.
The biggest challenge of being a pastry chef is that, unlike other types of chefs, you can't throw things together at a farmer's market. When you're working with baking powder and a formula, you have to be exact. If not, things can go wrong.
Forget Paula Dean; when it comes to on-air celebrity chefs, no one makes my stomach go pitter-patter more than Chef Anthony Bourdain. He is absolutely fearless.
As a chef, I could not wash my hands - nor clean pots, pans, utensils, meats or produce, nor make soups and sauces - if I did not have clean water. Were this to happen, of course, these would be the least of my concerns. Because water is the linchpin of survival: without it, not much else matters.
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.
I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.
I make a really delicious eggplant and squash curry that's inspired by Vij of Vij's Restaurant, a great chef and restaurateur in Vancouver. I like to cook that dish because it's really simple, but the flavor is so pungent and intense that I feel like I'm a real chef whenever I create it.
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.
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.