3 December 2020 Mario Batali There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali My family makes these vinegars – out of everything from grapes to peaches and cherries. We go through the whole process with the giant vat and drainer, label them, and give them as Christmas presents.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food’s going to taste good. And that – that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available – logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali I like cast iron coated with enamel for longevity and forgiveness if I happen to take my eyes off the prize while pouring Chianti.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I’m looking for something different. A lot of chefs’ cookbooks are food as it’s done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it’s just as fast.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali Are we Darwinists – where we live and let live? Or are we nurturing as a society? There has to be a standard of living that we decide to support.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don’t have a bad deli. There’s no mediocrity accepted.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there’s something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.
