The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be our ideal of freedom and justice how we were going to be different and what the American experiment was going to be about.
My mom who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.
