I love the simplicity the ingredients the culture the history and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.
The type of cuisine I do especially after being on 'Iron Chef' for several years is a lot of global cuisine. My strength has always been Mediterranean cuisine across the board from Morocco Spain Italy Greece France but I think now I'm doing a lot of very different cuisines all the time.
My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom Zarela Martinez was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef once you have that basis that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
My cooking philosophy what I try to do is to make a cuisine where the produce and the product shines compared to some current trends that are maybe more adding additional things like molecular cuisine with a lot of additives and chemicals which are now showing that they could be bad for your health.
My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.
Taste is developed by the diversity of the products one can sample. I think our children today may be missing an education about food. We must teach them to know their cuisine and to know the equilibrium of nourishment. That is very important for health.
In France today people no longer eat as much heavy food and fat as they did 15 or 20 years ago. These days French cooking through the influence of 'grande cuisine ' has become a bit lighter. And we are beginning to discover the original flavors of our produce.
The food in Sydney is an Asian Pacific cuisine. It's eclectic but above all it's fresh inventive and creative and that's what I love about it.
I am a serious food lover and Peruvian cuisine is one of the best in the world.
It's fun to pick a cuisine and say I'm going to research Ethiopian food and see what it's all about. You find that there are a lot of similarities in cuisines from around the world and a lot of similar flavors.
I also want to go to an Italian island and do cuisine properly with some famous Italian chef and like his mother.
In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.
My personal feeling if I can interject a political note is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.