181 Quotes by Mario Batali

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.

The whole thing of the risotto as a side dish with pasta: If no one is ever going to ask for risotto on the side of their spaghetti again, we have won something. We've turned them around.

Some things are being destroyed, because the Italians are just as tired of their basic food as the Americans and French were 20 years ago. So they're reinventing to avoid palate exhaustion.

D.C. is a complicated market that I don't understand very well. The restaurant business is a slippery slope, and it gathers speed very quickly when it's going downhill.

As far as TV, I have a new show... It's me traveling around to Italian-American families and enclaves throughout the States and learning about the dishes and ingredients that these people love.

This is food that can be made at home without too much shopping,

The whole concept of the supremacy of the family unit in the Italian culture... That's all based on the relation of the mom and the children and the bambino.

Think of the cooking of the Southwest: Arizona, anything on the border of Mexico, the rich chili culture, the unbelievable stews.

Think of American food. In my generation, growing up in the '60s and '70s, Banquet Fried Chicken and TV dinners were the thing. Now people are back into roasting their own chickens, and TV dinners are a point of kitsch. It will be interesting to see what survives another hundred years.