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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was 14 years old, I decided I could cook. It was either that or puberty.
I remember being a young boy in Spain and watching my parents cook. We didn't go to a lot of restaurants because we didn't always have the money, so cooking at home was just what we did.
I started cooking from watching my mom. My mother was a really, really great cook.
I could cook from quite an early age - purely because I liked it.
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.
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.
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 opened my own restaurant when I was 17. I went broke, then traveled around the country, learning about different kinds of foods, had three other restaurants that went broke. It didn't all start just a few years ago!
I left school when I was 14 to work in kitchens.
I started cooking when I was 18 years old, and now I have restaurants all over the world.