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You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.

I started cooking when I was 18 years old, and now I have restaurants all over the world.

My grandmother used to cook for eight every day - sitting down lunches and dinner, the way you do it in Italy, you sit down. And when my parents could afford their own place, I went with them but still my mother used to work but used to come back from work to cook lunch for my father, come back from work, cook dinner for my father and me.

I started cooking 30-something years ago. When I was 14, 15, I was a short-order cook in a snack bar. That was at a place called the Gran Centurions. It was an Italian-American swim club my parents belonged to.

My love for cooking began when I was young. Because my parents were in the army, they were both really busy. A lot of times I'd have to cook for the family; I'd rotate with my siblings. It started out as a chore, but as I got older, my mom started to see that I was really good at it. I became her sous chef.

As a child, I first wanted to be a cook because my mother was such a good cook.

My mother was really young when she had me, so she was a horrible cook, but we lived with my grandmother, who was fantastic. We eventually got our own place, and my mother started learning to cook. But it was also the '70s, so she was very experimental, and, well - thank God we had a dog.

Nobody cooks anymore. To me, to watch your parents cook, and to have a house that smells warm and delicious, is a very vital memory that I think kids don't really have anymore.

I started cooking from watching my mom. My mother was a really, really great cook.

I cook. I did the Escoffier course in Paris when I was 21 in one of those periods when it was like a pause. I can cook anything Italian, Chinese.