101 Quotes by J. Kenji López-Alt

Book proposals are written like business plans. You need to identify your market, see what the competition is in the space, calculate how many books you think you can sell, work on building a platform to sell them and promote them.

People should eat what they like, even if it's some jalapeno and cheese-covered monstrosity with blueberry cream cheese.

I started freelancing for Serious Eats while I was still living in Boston. I was born there, grew up in New York City, but went back to Boston for school, and then I lived in Boston for about ten years.

So, the first step to opening a restaurant is, don't. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. I mean, even once you're open, it's still a series of putting out fires. Step one: don't.

I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I'm pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate.

So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room, where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything, because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you're forming it, it doesn't bind properly, and your sausages end up crumbly and dry.

I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you're living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people.

I mean, my family liked eating, but I was one of those kids who, you know, I hated fish until I was probably in my early 20s. When I went to college, I had no idea how to cook.

I found, when I was working in restaurants, that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.