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.

It wasn't the traditional cooking most people do. For me, as a young chef, Thanksgiving meant going to work in the kitchen at places like Gotham, JoJo and Jean-Georges.

Extremely ripe things are not ideal for pickling. If you pour a hot liquid over super ripe strawberries, you're going to have strawberry soup.

I don't think of eggs as being fundamental to the flavor of mayonnaise, but they are to Hollandaise.

'Top Chef' is always entertaining - it's hard to stop watching, like a good hockey fight, but no one gets hurt. It's great that the format is so inherently dramatic and can make cooking so entertaining to people who might not ordinarily be interested in a cooking show. Good for the industry all round.

I've seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there's a cookbook. There's not much of a story yet.