I worked in 40 restaurants over a five-year period.

For over 20 years, I have been saying that Chicago is by far one of the greatest food cities in the world.

As good as we were in Seattle over that five-year period, and that five-year period was as good a five-year period as there had been in the history of the league, I don't know if we had a 14-game winning streak.

It's a lot harder to get people to 'ooh' and 'aah' over beets and carrots than it is to get them to 'ooh' and 'aah' over artichokes or asparagus, and I enjoy being able to take these humble, 'lowbrow' foodstuffs up a few notches and serve them with great exuberance.

I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.

Any fool can be happy. What I'm interested in is satisfaction. There's got to be more to life than just being happy. You've got to be fulfilled. You've got to be satisfied; philosophically satisfied is what I mean.