Latest Mario Batali Quotes from Interviews

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• If you go to Italy and you drive from the airport to the town, there isn't 30 square feet that isn't planted by someone. Even next to the train tracks, they see the joy of the interaction with the planet as integral to the experience. The idea that you can get free arugula just by planting seeds... because it will regrow itself the next year. We've come a long way from foraging to now planting. The next step of that will be continuing that expansion of planting and really owning the crops.

  Mario Batali

  Long, Track, Joy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think the more prominent the actual product in its raw nature is to its final consumer, the more sympathy and likelihood they'll consume it they'll have. Some friends of mine are trying to do these rooftop farms in Brooklyn, and I love that idea. As long as they're using clean water and real soil and creating delicious things by the sun, then brilliant.

  Mario Batali

  Real, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think that there is philanthropy and there is publicity. If you can marry the two to do something good, then I think it's great. Some of the other guys go around and slag people as a profession. That's not so interesting to me, because it's easy to take down, it's harder to build.

  Mario Batali

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think any way of getting people into the field by lowering the threshold of the cost to get them to play, is great. That said, there's all these restaurants around that are very popular that have one menu. And they don't even have tables, and they don't even have backs on their chairs. It's not really the experience I'm after, but I'm happy they exist.

  Mario Batali

  Thinking, People, Very Popular

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've been lucky enough in 20 years in the media to have a nice soap box that put me in a position to describe to an American viewership that Tuscany is different from Umbria, and it's different from Emilia-Romagna and, not that that was news, but it was never presented to them in a way that was, "Hey, look. This is a different plate from that different place." And although we all think of "spaghetti, lasagna, ciao," as what Italy is all about, there's all of this great stuff... I was merely an interpreter. I wasn't the developer of the content.

  Mario Batali

  Nice, Thinking, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• If I hear something's not quite going right, then I'm there quicker than if I hear something's going wrong.

  Mario Batali

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Even though you'll see gnocchi or linguine everywhere in some of the regions of Italy, each of those chefs has their own expression of that which expresses more about the place they were exactly born than it does about trying to be a part of the greater mass. And that's the Italian culture.

  Mario Batali

  Italian, Trying, Culture

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Breakfast is the best time for me to figure out what my kids are doing. Right after you wake them up at breakfast, you pepper them with questions. You can get in there because they're not protecting what they thought was cool: "What happened yesterday?" "Oh, Matthew stole my book and ran away and it was really annoying..." That wouldn't happen after lunch, because their defenses are up. In the morning, if you lull them into a comfortable place, you get more honesty, and that's without being a detective.

  Mario Batali

  Morning, Honesty, Book

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Italy itself has 21 different micro-regions. You go within each of those regions, there's even super-micro-regions; and the beauty is that when you go from place to place, although there's a common thread of pasta and joie de vivre - in the way that they approach their meals and the simplicity of cooking, celebrating more the product than the chef - there's still so much variety that as you go, it's always an exciting moment.

  Mario Batali

  Simplicity, Cooking, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The idea of having dinner together every day with your family removes the pressure from trying to explain everything. You tell us the good parts about your day, but you also tell us the bad parts about your day. And at the end of that, because you're in a ritual, you remove the pressure of admitting you had a failure that day. And it also takes the wind out of having a great day. I mean, it makes you a little bit more normal all the time. That moment of therapeutic sharing is something that happens in food, that doesn't necessarily happen when you're watching TV.

  Mario Batali

  Mean, Great Day, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The pendulum of cookery techniques became more significant than the actual experience. And when that happens, the customer's satisfaction becomes secondary to the chef's satisfaction. And in that case, you have an upside-down equation. Because the customer is the basis of our restaurant, first of all, and if the chef becomes the most important person at the table - even more so than the guests - then suddenly you're left with something that doesn't really work.

  Mario Batali

  Important, Chef, Significant

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What I like to do when I go out is enjoy my friends and the food around it. If we have to stop and give five minutes to the chef, then I'm down with that. But if the chef has to interrupt every course to tell us how important this new revolution that's happening is, then I'm not so much interested in that.

  Mario Batali

  Giving, Important, Revolution

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I might use milk if I was using a touch of milk to make like a lasagna or a baked pasta. But cream? That is totally not the way they do it in Italy, and it's not a very good thing. It's kind of a blanket for flavor.

  Mario Batali

  Might Use, Milk, Flavor

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• I don't put cream in any pasta noodles ever. I would use a little butter, but I don't ever use cream.

  Mario Batali

  Use, Pasta, Littles

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• I like anchovies, and I don't tell everybody about them. Almost every time, they don't even notice.

  Mario Batali

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• If you could learn how to make a perfect lemon tart then you got a story. If you don't feel like that, make a perfect chocolate chip cookie, but have five go-to dishes like that and you can move them around, change them up just a little bit, and always have something in the can.

  Mario Batali

  Moving, Perfect, Chocolate

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• [If] we can celebrate that in a way that celebrates our love for New England as well as our love for the Italian culture as well as the American culture, then we've done something that's really good and supporting these fishermen who are doing the right thing in sustainability . . . paying attention to make sure we don't overfish our world.

  Mario Batali

  Italian, Our World, Culture

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• I'm pretty confident that the seafood from the Northeastern Atlantic is one of the most delicious and unique in the country, so that we can represent that in a way that the Italians like to represent things.

  Mario Batali

  Country, Unique, Way

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• I'm a big fan of featuring all of the local shellfish and seafood provided.

  Mario Batali

  Fans, Bigs, Shellfish

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• The perfect recipe for a margarita is 2 ounces tequila, 2 ounces fresh lime juice, 1 ounce Cointreau, and a tiny splash of some kind of an agave or orange juice.

  Mario Batali

  Orange Juice, Perfect, Recipes

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• My favorite thing is always a nice, inexpensive draft beer, but if someone wants something a little more complicated than that, then I'd like a Michelada, which is where I take beer and a little bit of either a spicy or not-so-spicy Bloody Mary, mix it like six to one [ratio], so it's kind of a red beer.

  Mario Batali

  Nice, Beer, Want Something

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• When you use it in cooked foods, it changes [the Tabasco flavor] a little bit; it loses a little bit of the bright acid that you love on it, but you get that more cooked heat and chile flavor down.

  Mario Batali

  Flavor, Littles, Acid

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• When you add just a little bit [of Tabasco] at the end, what you taste is the spectrum between the cooked chile flavor and the kind of nearly raw, just kind of fermented chile flavor at the end.

  Mario Batali

  Add, Flavor, Littles

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• When you use Tabasco in the marinade, it kind of infuses everything.

  Mario Batali

  Use, Kind, Tabasco

  Source: www.popsugar.com

• The Chinese five-spice works really well in the quantity that I used. It makes it almost imperceptibly just a little bit sweeter without making it really sweet or really even that Asian flavored.

  Mario Batali

  Sweet, Chinese, Asian

  Source: www.popsugar.com