The cooking profession, while it's a noble craft and a noble calling, 'cause you're doing something useful - you're feeding people, you're nurturing them, you're providing sustenance - it was never pure.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.
Having realised that in cooking there was a vast field of study and development, I said to myself, 'Although I had not originally intended to enter this profession, since I am in it, I will work in such a fashion that I will rise above the ordinary, and I will do my best to raise again the prestige of the chef de cuisine.'
You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.
As chefs, we cook to please people, to nourish people.
I had always been told cooking was a servant's job.
Cooking is an art form, a creative thing.
What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.
The one reason why I got into cooking was because I wasn't good at anything else - not that I was good at it, but it was considered honest work.
In all my work I like to convey the fact that I like cooks, that it's noble toil and that it is hard.
At culinary school, none of the things we use to define ourselves outside that world - actor, producer, student - none of that matters. It's a magical art form.