181 Quotes by Mario Batali

One of the most important leadership lessons is realizing you’re not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times.

Find something you love, because if you love what you do, you’ll never spend a day at work.

Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for that matter, the food starts to become a representation of what the culture is. When the food can transcend being just fuel, that’s when you start to see these different permutations.

The tradition of Italian cooking is that of the matriarch. This is the cooking of grandma. She didn’t waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it.

Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.

Chefs don’t actually say ‘That’s a spicy meat-a-ball,’ except to indicate that there’s a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

There’s a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you’re charging, you’re still giving.

The difference between ‘Molto Italiano’ and ‘The Babbo Cookbook’ is that the ingredient lists in ‘Molto’ are about half or even a third the size. In ‘Babbo,’ they are very long, they are very real. That’s exactly how we make them in the restaurant.