1. “Put your head down and work hard.”
2. “The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody’s ego, that’s it, game over.”
3. “Being a chef never seems like a job, it becomes a true passion.”
4. “There’s no bigger pain anywhere in the world than a vegetarian.”
5. “Best to start at the bottom and gradually climb up. It’s much more fun, too.”
6. “Pressure’s healthy. It becomes stressful when you can’t handle that. I mean, if you don’t want to become pressured in this environment, then don’t be a chef.”
7. “Push your limit to the absolute extreme.”
8. “Never wait for things to happen, make them happen for yourself through hard graft and not giving up.”
9. “Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls, and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.”
10. “Swearing is an industry language. For as long as we’re alive, it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.”
11. “Two key ingredients in any successful chef—a quick learner and someone with a sharp brain.”
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12. “Initially let your food do the talking. You’ll be surprised how far you go in a short period of time.”
13. “Stopping junk food and eating well is partially about cooking well and having the skills to do that.”
14. “I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.”
15. “I don’t like looking back. I’m always constantly looking forward. I’m not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I’m too busy looking for the next cow.”
16. “However amazing a dish looks, it is always the taste that lingers in your memory. Family and friends will appreciate a meal that tastes superb—even if you’ve brought the pan to the table.”
17. “Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.”
18. “Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.”
19. “Everything has to be done for a reason, and everything has to be done to make sense in terms of running a proper business today, and it’s not just about the food.”
20. “The level of jealousy and insecurity in this industry is far greater than ever before.”
21. “When you cook under pressure, you trade perfection.”
22. “I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.”
23. “In any situation, location is crucial.”
24. “Cooking a dish is fine; cooking it under pressure is a completely different ballgame.”
25. “The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate.”
26. “You need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.”
27. “I’m Gordon Ramsay, for goodness sake—people know I’m volatile.”
28. “I suppose your security is your success and your key to success is your fine palate.”
29. “You know, running a restaurant is something you have to be working at each and every day; it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’re a success.”
30. “In order to create a little bit of confidence, start cooking with pasta.”
31. “I hid myself in food.”
32. “I think pressure’s healthy, and very few can handle it.”
33. “Cooking today is a young man’s game, I don’t give a bollocks what anyone says.”
34. “We’re fragile, fragmented souls who are very sensitive to criticism.”
35. “I quite like that jeopardy, those up-against-the-wall odds. I don’t like it when it’s over-comfortable, too easy, something that can be done in two or three weeks. I like a challenge.”
36. “You can’t depend on the exposure of a TV screen to keep your feet on the ground and your food tasting delicious. You’ve got to push yourself.”
37. “I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.”
38. “There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.”
39. “How many restaurants do we know across the world that customers visit once and once only?”
40. “I swim like a fish and I have an amazing kick.”
41. “We launched it in the London branch—phenomenal sausages, incredible eggs, homemade baked beans, black pudding—and it’s something I wanted to bring to Dubai.”
42. “The secret is to make sure the business is running to perfection, with or without me.”
43. “Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.”
44. “It goes back to the early days in the kitchen where you would be tasting dishes all night long, so the last thing I want to do in the morning is eat. Chefs generally tend to be grazers.”
45. “I hate it when people just downright copy. I hate it.”
46. “That first approach to the naked eye is crucial, so when you see pictures coming through on your social media, it does push you to be a little more creative and raise the bar a little bit higher.”
47. “One thing I can’t afford to get sucked up in is the trend of restaurants here. I’ve invested heavily. We have a ten-year lease. More importantly, the style, the feel and the décor of the dining room is vibrant.”
48. “We outsmarted ourselves and raised the bar even higher, I think.”
49. “Here, in L.A., trust me, there will be fireworks from the canapés right through to the desserts.”
50. “First of all, for me, the secret is in the ingredients. You don’t need to start spending fortunes on organic foods and start becoming way over budget.”
51. “The better the ingredient, the littler that needs doing to it.”
52. “I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword—two jackets: one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, a thoroughbred, hates incompetence and switches off the stove, takes off the jacket and becomes a family man.”
53. “Focus on your customers and make that restaurant synonymous to where you are in terms of area.”
54. “I cook for a living; I’m not a scheduler.”
55. “Being a chef is the best job in the world.”
56. “I am well aware that a chef is only as good as his last meal.”
57. “Eating out doesn’t have to be a formula. Eating out is about having fun. I get really frustrated when it’s badly done.”
58. “I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.”
59. “Pasta is phenomenal. Once you’ve cooked pasta properly for the first time, it becomes second nature.”
60. “You don’t come into cooking to get rich.”
61. “I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.”
62. “When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.”
63. “I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30, and bath, and change nappies.”
64. “I’m a big lover of fish. Cooking fish is so much more difficult than cooking protein meats, because there are no temperatures in the medium rare, well done cooking a stunning sea bass or a scallop.”
65. “Cooking today is far greater than it ever was, and more importantly, a chef’s role today has changed dramatically over the last decade.”
66. “I still , though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.”
67. “To have 95% of the ingredients sourced—food and wine—within 100 miles radius, that’s a dream come true for any chef.”
68. “Full English Breakfast—it’s what we grew up with! It is the one big treat that the kids get on the weekend. It’s good family time.”
69. “How many chefs do we know that prefer cooking for chefs than they do customers, yet customers are returning repeatedly and it’s the level of support that determines the level of success that restaurant will have.”
70. “When you’re a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat.”
71. “If you become a chef because you’re obsessed with becoming a celebrity, getting my *ss kicked and working my nuts off the way I did in France and getting pushed around those kitchens wasn’t about becoming famous.”
72. “Making pasta, cooking pasta, and baking bread are two essential ideas to create a little bit of excitement, and you learn the basics, and then evolve it. Flavor the bread, flavor the pasta, go to a fish, go to a meat sauce and take it to another level.”
73. “I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that’s it.”
74. “I’m actually not really a breakfast person.”
75. “My , a schoolteacher, is very disciplined. If you think I’m tough, trust me, and wait till you see when the children are on the naughty step. It’s hilarious. So we decided that I’m going to work like a donkey and provide amazing support for the family.”
76. “My kids don’t need to cook to keep me happy. It’s my job as dad to create opportunities so that they can find their passion. Forget about money, find what you really want to do with your life.”
77. “The amount of customers who take pictures before they eat is insane.”
78. “Why can’t it be a curriculum? Why can’t it be a life skill that they learn just to look after themselves in terms of a healthy way of eating? I think we need to shake up that whole curriculum and give them a little bit more of a lifestyle early on, before they leave school at 18.”
79. “From 16 to 26, no one really knows what they want to do for the rest of their life at that age. Latin’s not f*ck*ng one of them.”
80. “There’s a bond among the , I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.”
81. “Being assertive and somewhat really firm has to be backed up with being fair.”
82. “I’ve always said that I think females make the best chefs anywhere in the world.”
83. “I am what I am—a fighter.”
84. “What’s frustrating more than anything is when chefs start to cut corners and believe that they are incognito in the way they send out appetizers, entrees, and they know it’s not 100%, but they think the customers can’t spot it.”
85. “I train my chefs with a blindfold. I’ll get my sous chef and myself to cook a dish. The young chef would have to sit down and eat it with a blindfold. If they can’t identify the flavor, they shouldn’t be cooking the dish.”
86. “Stop taking things personally. Throughout the time with ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ and ‘Hotel Hell,’ when they work, you don’t get any praise. When they fail, you get blamed. You’re f*ck*d either way, but it doesn’t stop me from doing them, I think.”
87. “My mum doesn’t enjoy sometimes listening to me tell the staff off, and I say to my mum, ‘It’s a kitchen, not a hair-dressing salon.’”
88. “Long Island, for me, it’s producing more chefs coming out of there than Paris.”
89. “I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.”
90. “Rude staff, bad lighting, and dirty bathrooms are all signs of a bad restaurant and a good reason to leave a restaurant!”
91. “I’m quite a chauvinistic person.”
92. “Given that level of responsibility with your 25-year old or 35-year-old chef, it’s just quite nice to see how they handled that exposure. Not every chef deals with it properly; they get slightly excited, a little bit overconfident and then they miss out on the most important part.”
93. “Certainly, in business terms, considering how thriving the market is. Understanding what people want is essential. We have a team on the ground whose job it is to keep tabs on what’s good, whether it’s a tapas bar in Barcelona, or an amazing fish and chip shop in Yorkshire.”
94. “I think reality TV now needs a big kick up the *ss to get creative and be meaningful, I think. Otherwise, people are becoming famous for having no talent, based on pure exposure. That’s the grating part.”
95. “Long Island is buoyant. It’s on the outskirts of Manhattan, and so they have access to phenomenal restaurants.”
96. “Bread Street Kitchen is a big operation, a unique beast, and it needs bedding in.”
97. “You know how arrogant the French are—extraordinary.”
98. “It’s quite weird knocking that out of them and telling them to forget cooking for chefs; forget what chefs say about your food.”
99. “Something you need to do three times a day, seven days a week, and something you need to stop worrying about. If kids don’t know how to cook, they go to junk, and then the junk becomes addictive, and then all of a sudden they’re left with no choice.”
100. “It’s very hard when you eat out everyday for a living, and a new restaurant comes along and you haven’t got that same vigour that you had 10 years ago.”
101. “If everyone could just cook properly, I wouldn’t have a problem.”
102. “If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.”
103. “We have never done anything in a cynical, fake way.”
104. “I don’t run restaurants that are out of control. We are about establishing phenomenal footholdings with talent.”
105. “The thing is, I can teach. I can teach bloody well. So few chefs have that level of . I demand a lot—a f*ck*ng hell of a lot, but I give a lot back.”
106. “It’s amazing. Long Island, I don’t know really. It’s quite a fascinating area.”
107. “Chefs don’t do ponytails and we shouldn’t do them because I guarantee that whenever there’s a discovery of hair in the food, it’s guaranteed it’s from the chef’s ponytail.”
