“A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.”

“I timed my previous wife's pregnancy to the moment to have my son born on Bob Dylan's 50th birthday. There is no bigger Bob Dylan fan than me. You don't just time the day and impregnate your wife to get your kid to be born on Bob Dylan's 50th birthday.”

“One must know combinations, one must have a true knowledge of food to be in the moment.”

“A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.”

“I never considered Miles Davis a perfectionist; I always considered him as an excellence-ist, where deviation is actually kind of cool.”

“I love cookbooks for completely different reasons. I love 'The Harry's Bar Cookbook' and Marco-Pierre White's 'White Heat' for their feel. For pure learning, Gray Kunz wrote a great cookbook, 'The Elements of Taste', published in 2001. The first time I read Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago chef's first cookbook, I was blown away.”