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It's a funny habit to write encyclopedia entries. It's not a mass taste.

I'm not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.

When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach.

Me, I'm an encyclopedia. I'm not a very smart guy, but I'm an encyclopedia. You can ask me about anything you want. Probably I have the book; probably I have a first edition.

Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

People take issue with individual aspects of Wikipedia all the time. But it's kind of hard to hate the general idea of a free encyclopedia. It's like hating kittens.

I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description of every item, regardless of whether or not I'm interested in eating it.

Taking dishes straight off the restaurant's menu and putting them into a cookbook doesn't work, because as a chef you have your own vision of what your food is, but you can't always explain it. Or you can't pick recipes that best illustrate who and where you are and what you're doing. And if the recipes don't work, you don't have a book.

I'm loath to use my personal life to promote what I do, but at the same time, I don't like a journalist going away with no more than you could get off Wikipedia, where most of it's invented anyway.

What makes cookbooks interesting is to find out about the people and the culture that invented the food.