338 Anthony Bourdain Quotes About Food, Travel, and Life

Anthony Bourdain was more than just a celebrated chef; he was a storyteller, a global adventurer, and a philosopher who used food as a gateway to explore the world. His deep insights on life, culture, and human connection resonate with people worldwide. In this post, we delve into some of the most thought-provoking and inspiring Anthony Bourdain quotes that capture his unique perspective.

Whether you are a longtime fan of his shows or discovering his wisdom for the first time, these Anthony Bourdain quotes will leave you reflecting on the way you view food, travel, and life itself.

Anthony Bourdain Quotes

Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

2. As you move through this life…you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you.

3. You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

4. Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can’t do.

5. Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

6. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

7. Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it.

8. In that sense, what a great way to live, if you could always do things that interest you, and do them with people who interest you.

9. Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

10. In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. … With the best restaurants in New York, you’ll find something similar to it in Paris or Copenhagen or Chicago. But there is no place like New Orleans. So it’s a must-see city because there’s no explaining it, no describing it. You can’t compare it to anything. So, far and away New Orleans.

11. Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

12. Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you.

13. Learn how to cook a (effing) omelet. I mean, what nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast? You look good doing it, and it’s a nice thing to do for somebody you just had sex with.

14. But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

15. I’m excited by any food that’s prepared by someone who’s proud of what they’re doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.

16. There’s always this assumption that you’re going to get everything right immediately. And any professional understands that that’s just not so.

17. Don’t lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don’t do it again. Ever

18. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.

19. Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime…Please, treat your garlic with respect…Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.

20. The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that’s not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.

21. Food is so personal – I mean someone is talking to you when people are cooking for you. I like to hear an identifiable voice.

22. It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.

23. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

24. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature.

25. One of life’s terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they’re doing.

26. If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people.

27. I listen a lot to how people speak. I’ve read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

28. Wholesome food is wholesome food anywhere. I may not like something but, generally speaking, if it’s a busy, street food stall serving mystery meat in India, they’re in the business of serving their neighbors. They’re not targeted toward a transient crowd of tourists that won’t be around tomorrow. They’re not in the business of poisoning their neighbors.

29. Always entertain the possibility that something, no matter how squiggly and scary looking, might just be good.

30. Get up early and go to the local produce markets. In Latin America and Asia, those are usually great places to find delicious food stalls serving cheap, authentic and fresh specialties.

31. Don’t dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don’t mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.

32. Let’s at least acknowledge who is working in America right now and what our needs are, as well as the moral question of somebody who’s been here 20 years, paying taxes to which they probably do not receive a refund, and not committing any crimes, working hard, and supporting an industry. Shouldn’t there be some middle ground here? Shouldn’t there be a way for them to be welcome in this country?

33. And now to sleep, to dream…perchance to fart.

34. There are chefs who are spectacular technicians, and often their food is worth eating once or twice, but if there’s no heart in it, if there’s no personality in it, it’s not something you want to go back for. But heart without any skill at all? All the heart in the world ain’t gonna help you if you can’t peel an onion, or if you don’t understand how to apply heat properly. A well-done steak is a well-done steak.

35. I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.

36. I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

37. The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, ‘I’m not interested,’ or you’re unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don’t understand that, and I think it’s rude. You’re at Grandma’s house, you eat what Grandma serves you.

38. What you’re going to be eating in the next year is decided by chefs. If the consensus is that pot-bellies are in next season, that’s what’s on your plate. And I think that’s a good thing, because we know, obviously, about food.

39. I think we should be honest about who is working in our kitchens.

40. An employer of mine back in the ’80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It’s a basic tell of character.

41. Those places I don’t understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

42. I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas – fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

43. People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

44. Always was Morocco. And recently the country’s leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier — what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in — that’s here to stay.

45. I do not have a merchandise line. I don’t sell knives or apparel. Though I have been approached to endorse various products from liquor to airlines to automobiles to pharmaceuticals dozens of times, I have managed to resist the temptation.

46. One of my few virtues – I don’t have a lot of them – would be a deep sense of curiosity. I’m interested in how other people live in other places; I’m interested in other cultures.

47. Thinking that your story is so interesting that other people will want to listen to it or read it or pay to hear it, that’s – what kind of person thinks that? A monster of self-regard. It’s not normal thinking.

48. My wife was easy because she trains [jiu-jitsu] all the time. She’s pretty much on a completely different diet. I always just threw meat at her and she’s happy on a 100 percent protein diet, so we seldom ate together.

49. I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking.

50. These pharmaceutical company executives are dope dealers and they should be treated worse, and more roughly than dope dealers. When you’re talking about millionaire and billionaire executives at pharmaceutical companies, these are people with something to lose if threatened with jail. Frog-march them out of their door in suburbia, handcuffed and surrounded by DEA officers, with their children and neighbours watching.

51. If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

52. Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine’s not so great.

53. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.

54. Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of ‘medicine.’ That’s something you might remind your New Age friends who’ve gone gaga over ‘holistic medicine’ and ‘alternative Chinese cures.

55. If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

56. “Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It’s about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting
your fate entirely to someone else. It’s about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a
warm bath. It’s about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.”

57. Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it’s interesting.

58. Jiro Ono serves Edo-style traditional sushi, the same 20 or 30 pieces he’s been making his whole life, and he’s still unsatisfied with the quality and every day wakes up and trains to make the best. And that is as close to a religious experience in food as one is likely to get.

59. At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

60. I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.

61. Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.

62. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

63. The Kobe craze really annoyed me. Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing it and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger. It’s completely pointless.

64. Anything that improves people’s expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili’s or T.G.I. Friday’s is definitely a win for the good guys.

65. You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

66. In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

67. Writing anything is a treason of sorts.

68. Venezuela is another place I’d like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I’d like to, very much.

69. I can’t do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I’m okay with hurting myself, like I’ll lift something until it hurts, but I don’t want to pass out or vomit in front of people.

70. I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

71. I think as a moral question, restaurant workers should get paid more.

72. I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

73. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

74. When I was writing ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

75. I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

76. It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

77. I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel – hell yeah, I’m going to do that.

78. I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

79. My daughter always behaved in restaurants. And if she didn’t, she’s going out. I mean, one of the parents is going to take her outside. Immediately.

80. I love New York. I’m a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

81. I’m not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that’s impressive.

82. Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

83. I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

84. I’m a control freak. If you’re going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.

85. I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I’m a bad friend. I’m not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I’m not up on what you’re doing in New York because I’m not in New York. I’m not what people call in parenting circles “present.”

86. I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living–all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

87. I could eat bloody Elvis – if you put enough vinegar on him.

88. I’m sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you’re confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

89. If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It’s reflective of history, often a painful history. It’s central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It’s communication at its most fundamental.

90. Drugs didn’t work out too well for me.

91. I’m evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.

92. Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

93. The world they live in now is in no way the world the Michelin system was set up to evaluate back in France, which was all about motorists and seeing if it was worth driving an extra 50 miles for a restaurant. It’s a silly thing. Why do you want to help a tire company? You don’t owe them nothing.

94. The ingredients of a hamburger seldom vary. It’s a percentage of fat to lean meat, add salt and prepare and that’s it. It shouldn’t need a recipe.

95. I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.

96. I think there’s a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

97. At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there’s nothing pretty about the garbage.

98. I’d never done anything useful as far as my writing.

99. Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.

100. You’d have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I’d probably want to die in San Sebastian.

101. Silly trends don’t last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don’t even really pay attention because it’ll be gone in a flash.

102. This is the dream of all the world. The dream is to live in Granada. You know, work in the morning, have a one-hour in the afternoon, at night go out and have that life. You know. Go out and see your friends and eat tapa and drink red wine and be in a beautiful place.

103. When do you stop to de-douche?

104. Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.

105. When you’re training for jiu-jitsu, particularly if you’re training for a competition, you have to be pretty prescribed in the variety of what you eat.

106. I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.

107. My mom had Julia Child and ‘The Fannie Farmer Cookbook’ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

108. Italy is good in the sense that when you bring a child to a restaurant in Italy, they’re happy to see it. The waiters will say “complimenti” and welcome you and dote after the kid. They don’t treat you like you just brought in this horrible probably soon-to-be-squealing creature who’s going to be difficult.

109. Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should b

110. Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

111. Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

112. Italy is hard to beat. It’s a family-friendly experience, they like to see kids in restaurants, and at dinner you see all the adults at the table and all the kids at the other end of the table. Maybe they run off and go play.

113. Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off…By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. A self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse.

114. If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

115. It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

116. I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

117. Luck is not a business model.

118. There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.

119. I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary

120. If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

121. The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.

122. I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don’t have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand – I don’t care about any of those things.

123. Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

124. Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.

125. [When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

126. I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

127. Only Texans and Jews understand brisket

128. I’ve seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth.

129. Whatever everyone else has asked you to do or never let you do, and let’s do that.

130. My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

131. I guess my whole life, as much as I might have wanted a child for the reason that everybody wants one, I always recognized that at no point until I was 50 was I old enough or up to the job. I thought, you know what, I not only really want a child, but at this point, finally in my life, I think I’m up to the job and I’m the type of person who could do the job well and I’m financially prepared to look after a child.

132. Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.

133. Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.

134. They’re professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don’t forget that the Russians – any Russian – can drink you under the table.

135. I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure

136. All of these concoctions that we think are Mexican, are in no way reflective of the deep, incredibly old, complex and sophisticated deep regional cuisine of Mexico. Or the new modern Mexican cuisine, which has really been exploding over the last few years. I think we just have a completely misrepresented view of how good, how complex these flavors are. I think we could learn a lot more. It’s a great cuisine that’s really moving forward, faster than any other.

137. I would frankly be shocked if Donald Trump even knows how to use chopsticks or is even able to manipulate them with those tiny little fingers.

138. I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

139. I’m definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working – if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

140. Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it – not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

141. Kitchen Confidential’ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

142. I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.

143. PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die ever and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious.

144. Do you really want to make risotto to order when you have eight guests sitting there? No. It won’t work. Most cookbooks won’t tell you that. They will say make it and it will come out perfectly. They should tell you you’re probably going to screw it up the first 10 times you make it.

145. The fact of the matter is that, for years, the restaurant and service industry has been, to a great extent, built on the backs of often underpaid immigrants of often dubious legal status.

146. I’d love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can’t play bass, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.

147. I’ve been cooking for a nine-year-old and her friends for the better part of seven or eight years. It’s how I cook today, it’s what makes me happy. I tend to overcompensate for my long absences when I’m home by cooking and it’s therapeutic to me – it’s how I express love for my daughter. It felt good to do.

148. If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.

149. I think we should increase the minimum wage and I think $15 is a good beginning.

150. What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we’ll all look like that… Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

151. There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.

152. Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

153. People’s choice to become vegan, from people I’ve spoken to, seems motivated by fear.

154. I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

155. As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it’s clowns and kid’s toys and bright colors and things like that.

156. One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody’s done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.

157. Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It’s one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It’s a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.

158. I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

159. I eat strategically. If I know I’m having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I’m not eating a big dinner tonight, and I’m not having breakfast.

160. In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I’m on television, and they remind me of that frequently.

161. If you’ve ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you’ll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.

162. New Orleans is a glorious mutation

163. In Italy, kids are taken to restaurants very early, they’re welcome there, and they learn how to behave. You don’t see a lot of screaming crying kids acting out in a restaurant in Italy. They don’t put up with that.

164. It’s as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside they’d like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women, have built themselves the most beautiful of prisons for their rampaging ids. Instead of indulging their fantasies, they focus on food, or landscaping, or the perfect cup of tea — or a single slab of o-toro tuna — letting themselves go only at baseball games and office parties.

165. When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

166. I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

167. I think fine dining is dying out everywhere… but I think there will be – and there has to always be – room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.

168. When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

169. I have the best job in the world.

170. I didn’t want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.

171. I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I’m looking across the full spectrum of genres.

172. A burger is something anyone can do, just follow the rules.

173. As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really – they don’t eat them.

174. It’s not normal, what I do. Just being on television isn’t.

175. I like the fact that Melbourne always seems to support their chefs and promote them in ways I find really admirable.

176. My love of soft, runny cheese – it’s impossible to resist.

177. I would like to see people more aware of where their food comes from. I would like to see small farmers empowered. I feed my daughter almost exclusively organic food.

178. I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don’t want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

179. The cooking profession, while it’s a noble craft and a noble calling, ’cause you’re doing something useful – you’re feeding people, you’re nurturing them, you’re providing sustenance – it was never pure.

180. The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can’t help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives.

181. It’s been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I’m enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

182. I’m a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It’s all about my daughter – I’m no longer the star of my own movie.

183. If you’re training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

184. I’m not Ted Nugent. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature. I would never hunt. I would never wear fur. I would never go to a bullfight. I’m not really a meat and potatoes guy.

185. Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a “decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.

186. I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

187. Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

188. In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

189. Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

190. Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

191. Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

192. If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

193. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

194. The way you make an omelet reveals your character.

195. Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.

196. Good food and good eating are about risk.

197. The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down.

198. Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone. Bad food is fake food, food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

199. You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.

200. I think it’s important if you’re going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking – it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I’m not interested.

201. Having been a chef for some many years, I understand what it’s like to work really, really hard to get good at something, only to have someone piss all over it.

202. You realize after you travel enough that there’s some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it’s edited, there’s no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there’s no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice.

203. I think of [street food] as the antidote to fast food; it’s the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.

204. I’m not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I’m not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I’m not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I’m out there trying to tell stories the best I can.

205. I’m certainly dismayed by what I’m seeing now. There’s a lot of ugliness of a kind I’ve never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I’m a romantic. I’m hopeful.

206. There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don’t even try to compare it to anywhere else.

207. I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don’t edit myself out of existence, meaning I’ll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

208. Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

209. We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they’ll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don’t really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

210. There’s something not normal about you if you’re writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you’re the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that’s tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that’s not normal either.

211. Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.

212. On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I’m going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I’ll bring Graham Greene’s The Quiet American if I’m going to Vietnam. It’s good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.

213. Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

214. I’m at my most productive before I even have my first cup of coffee. I only get slower and stupider as the day progresses.

215. You know, it’s not the world I would have wanted, for sure.

216. I’ve been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do A Cook’s Tour, I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn’t already.

217. When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes… It’s in bad taste if nothing else.

218. As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.,” an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin'” has never been truer.

219. When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.

220. To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

221. I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.

222. It’s that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.

223. The Italians seem to have a better attitude with kids and the food is great!

224. I believe – to the best of my recollection, anyway – that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people.

225. I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

226. I don’t snack. I don’t generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones.

227. When I cook, I generally stick with what I know, what I’m comfortable with, and what I feel I’ve paid my dues learning, and am good at.

228. If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It’s reflective of history, often a painful history. It’s central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It’s communication at its most fundamental.

229. I’m really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I’m out; I’m asleep for takeoff.

230. I do my very best to avoid shark fin.

231. I love bacon, but I don’t think we need it on everything.

232. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.

233. It’s wrong I think, morally and annoying in general, to try to get a kid to be a foodie, so I never even suggested, “Hey baby it’s good, maybe you should try it.” That never worked for me.

234. You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.

235. America’s most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets.

236. “I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‘No Reservations’ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.
“

237. In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

238. If I’m training I’m cutting weight for a competition. I’m hard. I’m pretty much eating animal protein and that’s it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

239. I’d learned something… Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me… and others. This was valuable information.

240. Naturally, I’m misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.

241. The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. She revels in unholy connections with evil corporations and she’s proud of the fact that her food is f—ing bad for you. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks.

242. Very few restaurant workers could even dream of eating in the restaurants they work in. Many do not make a living wage.

243. I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad that’s not me.’

244. I’m a comic nerd. I’m a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.

245. I don’t like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don’t like factory farming. I’m not an advocate for the meat industry.

246. There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that’s always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in the military.

247. What’s the opposite of suck? Un-suck?

248. Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it’s never Uzbek or Tajik food. It’s Thai, and it’s generally insulting.

249. I’m always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

250. I’m not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.

251. If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

252. My family is very far from normal.

253. I need the anesthetic qualities of the local fire water.

254. In fairness, you know, I’m a big believer in if your kid makes noise in the restaurant you should remove the child immediately.

255. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

256. I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.

257. A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone else’s skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent, the victim’s head or your pan, then throw that pan right in the trash.

258. I’ve been very careful about what I say yes to and what I say no to. And I think seriously always about… this may be a good idea right now or it may be a lot of money right now, but will it be good for me five years from now? Will it be fun? Will it make me hate myself? I think about all of those things.

259. Tokyo would probably be the foreign city if I had to eat one city’s food for the rest of my life, every day. It would have to be Tokyo, and I think the majority of chefs you ask that question would answer the same way.

260. I’m not looking to freak people out – eating rodents or bugs. I don’t do that anymore.

261. The older I get, and the more I travel in particular, the less I care about what exactly is in the dish than who’s cooking it and why.

262. I wouldn’t want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he’s also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.

263. I do the meatball recipe a lot. I think the army stew probably too. It’s the most useful dish because it was born out of necessity and poverty and any idiot can make it in 20 minutes on a hot plate. It’s cheap and uses readily available commercial ingredients. And it’s delicious. It should be the great American dish – perfect late-night stoner dorm food for college kids on a budget.

264. I couldn’t imagine a more unreliable, more unprofitable way to make a living than writing. My advice? Show up, do the best you can. Keep your day job. If you get a lucky break, don’t f*** up. It was helpful to be older because I had made all the really stupid mistakes already.

265. The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author’s voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

266. I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.

267. I’m really happy to see Filipino cuisine starting to really take hold outside of the Pinoy community.

268. If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.

269. My daughter takes pride in showing up with stuff that other kids envy or are freaked out by, so I send her to school with grilled octopus.

270. I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

271. Don’t touch my d**k, don’t touch my knife.

272. For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There’s a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

273. Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.

274. You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.

275. If you go to chefs all across America and ask them, ‘What’s your biggest problem right now?,’ It is finding people to cook in their restaurants. They’re having an enormous, countrywide problem here staffing their operations.

276. Even on the Serengeti, it ain’t a barbecue if there ain’t some kind of beer.

277. When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.

278. People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I’m with or without cameras.

279. My tastes in what I eat at home would be very familiar to most people who cook for families. I just organize those things a little bit differently.

280. I think there’s a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls – ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters – and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.

281. I’m really happy to see the explosion of interest in Korean food, and this hybrid Korean-American food.

282. I don’t think people should be encouraged to look like Kate Moss; I think that’s unreasonable. I think the normal human body should be glorified. By the same token, if you need a stick to wash yourself, you’re not healthy.

283. Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I’m not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy… That’s just the nature of my demons.

284. For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous.

285. When you have a child you’re no longer the star of the movie.

286. I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.

287. Being on television, being recognizable, this is unnatural.

288. Look, getting bullied in school and coming home crying in the rain and my mom making me a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup with some oysterettes. It was comfort food; that is what food should be.

289. I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

290. I wanted it to look like real cooking in someone’s real home or just so out-of-there bizarre that it would be fun.

291. I’m in no position to try to tell people how to live their family life.

292. We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.

293. For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.

294. Where once they used to say, ‘Cocaine is God’s way of saying you have too much money’ – now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.

295. I’m a decent cook; I’m a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

296. When you’re shooting that fast end to end, you wake up in a hotel and you don’t know where you are. You’re dreaming of Singapore, you wake up in Hong Kong. Or you just lose track. It’s one of the reasons I’m staying in hotels that I know I’ve stayed in before, and they don’t look like other hotels.

297. It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

298. A good, stinky French cheese or a good Stilton. These are things I really, really love. Dessert I can obviously live without.

299. I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don’t see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.

300. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

301. You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

302. Never try to get your kid to eat anything she doesn’t already want to eat. Just eat interesting stuff in front of her while completely ignoring her. Never, ever suggest “try it.” Never say those dreaded words “try it, it’s good.” Or worse, “It’s good for you.” That’ll poison the well.

303. I’ve sat in sushi bars, really fine ones, and I know how hard this guy worked, how proud he is. I know you don’t need sauce. I know he doesn’t even want you to pour sauce. And I’ve seen customers come in and do that, and I’ve seen him, as stoic as he tries to remain, I’ve seen him die a little inside.

304. I’d like to make a show with Keith Richards.

305. I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I’ve managed to gracefully avoid that. It’s hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.

306. Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

307. We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

308. I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.

309. The biggest empty space, the biggest gap in what should be a premier and always vibrant food scene in America is that we don’t have hawker centers like they do in Singapore, basically food courts where mom and pop specialists can set up shop in fairly hygienic little stalls all up to health code making one dish they’ve been doing forever and ever.

310. I think it’s a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.

311. [George] Orwell’s essays. It’s got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

312. Without new ideas success can become stale

313. On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It’s devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

314. If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation’s cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.

315. I’m away 250 days a year. It’s a tough situation.

316. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.

317. Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.

318. I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone’s ever had in the history of television.

319. The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

320. Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.

321. I’m not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

322. Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.

323. That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

324. Cooking is work that is traditionally done by working-class people. The work itself is not glamorous. It’s repetitive, and it’s a lot closer to factory work than art, whatever level you’re doing it at. Certainly chefs are used to living like rock ‘n’ rollers to some extent, inasmuch as we get a lot of those fringe benefits without having to learn how to play guitar.

325. Most of the time, I’m fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

326. What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?

327. You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas.

328. As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.

329. I’m of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don’t know if I have any regrets.

330. There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.

331. Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

332. Just because I like sushi, doesn’t mean I can make sushi. I’ve come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It’s a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.

333. I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport – would never do it and don’t like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it’s fine.

334. I’d like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I’m serious. That would be my dream.

335. Unlicensed hooch from a stranger in a parking lot. Good idea? Yes, of course it is.

336. An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.

337. I’m not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I’m going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I’m not a foreign correspondent.

338. The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.