French and Italian cooking have been elevated to a really high art form.
The very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there's so much noise that you really can't even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.
The objective.. is to achieve a comfort level between the cook/artist/performer and the customer/viewer/diner. And if we can achieve that, and the customers are happy and the cooks are happy, then we have a great experience.
I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.
Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it.
Cooking in France and Italy has a particular high resonance, and it's hard to say how or why it developed other than that they've been smarter and there longer.
If you approach cooking as a trade school, then you may not have as many interesting things to think about or do later on in life.
When I got to college age, my parents suggested, why don't you go to cooking school instead of going to a traditional college? I said that's not for me. That's ridiculous.
It's more interesting to talk about the whole lily family and say, did you know that lily bulbs are also part of the onion family? It's like the stream-of-consciousness way I think about food when I'm just cooking it.
Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews.
They have what's called the cooking school bloc, which is in the afternoon between 1 and 5. It will be interesting to see how my show, which is travel and food tied together, goes across America.
I started to train in economics, and I hated it. I never really entered that world, and went to a cooking school in London. Since then I've been cooking in great places all over the world: mostly California, Italy, and a little bit of France.