It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
First of all, I can't really claim to be a great chef.
With chefs, the problem is we have to be very confident because people are looking at us for that. So pretty soon, you think you're a plumber, you think you're an electrician, you think you're an accountant.
People come up to me all the time and ask how I stay the way I am, and it's no secret. The first lesson a chef needs to learn is how to handle a knife; the second is how to be around all that food.
I always say that I don't believe I'm a chef. I try to be a storyteller.
I'm not a trained chef. I'm a self-taught cook, and I want people to be like, 'Yo, I could do that! Maybe I didn't think to or maybe it seemed harder than it really is.'
Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'
The hardest thing for a chef is to become comfortable with what you do. Not to be too neurotic and worried with what you are doing and how wrong or right you are.
If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did.
Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.
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.'