Zitat des Tages von Daniel Boulud:
I usually try to eat in my restaurants before I fly, as I'd rather sleep on the plane and just order a salad with cheese, maybe some ice cream.
I never go to Vancouver without stopping by Thomas Haas' shop for the best chocolate in North America. A former chef patissier at Daniel, he returned to his hometown and created a top quality brand by sticking to his passion.
I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky.
For me, the food I like to make is the food I can enjoy all the time anytime. It's not too calculated or technical.
A lot of chefs don't have a natural sense of economy. I was with one guy the other day, and I had to show him how to peel a turnip, because the way he was peeling turnips, he was throwing half of it in the garbage. It's not about being cheap. It's about being proper.
From Japan to Thailand, I keep discovering amazing talent, cuisine and food markets.
I can't conceive of cooking in a sunny place like Florida because my motivation comes from the changing seasons. That's why I decided to live in New York.
If you're in a major city, there's a 25-year cycle. In Vegas, it's probably 10 or 15 years, except for those landmark places like Spago or Nobu. In Vegas, you have to reinvent yourself once in a while.
Sauce is certainly ancestral to French cooking. The technique is very tricky, but it's also very fundamental.
The hardest thing for a chef is to become comfortable with what you do. Not to be too neurotic and worried with what you are doing and how wrong or right you are.
I actually don't think there is any difference between French and American cuisine. French cuisine was always about discipline, about ingredient, about creativity, but also about simple. I see America as very similar in these rights.
I had a lot of fun creating some restaurants with a casual note to it, such as DBGB, for example, where it was about bangers and beers, being a very casual brasserie with very affordable food but very interesting homemade program.
I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.
I think Spain will always remain inspirational, and I think French cuisine will continue to be very French and yet very relevant with its time and keep evolving. But the last thing you want for it is to become too trendy and confusing. It has too much history.
In Singapore, there is this life and locals and restaurants and then big casinos and an array of chefs, and even Miami is almost close to Vegas when it comes to an amazing presentation of chefs. But they don't have these massive hotels that have become their own culinary villages.
As a child growing up, it's going to be what you're going to remember most. What you liked or not liked then is going to define who you are at the table!
For me to go casual is not to go simple. To me, it is to be able to bring back the art of tradition and the soul of French food and my interpretation of that.
No one knows restaurants like a New Yorker - they're incredibly discerning and restaurant savvy.
A lot of young chefs today get carried away by trends, by influences, by movements.
I've discovered the burger is a crazy thing in Vegas, but I was one of the early chefs to do a lot of burgers.
I think D.C. has always been very, very vibrant for food. Like Boston in a way. Boston and D.C. were really the two cities that were the most active with their local chefs and their local food scene.
When we manage a restaurant, we start making money from the first day. When we own a place, it's often five years before we earn the first penny that is clean of debt.
I've always loved it in Las Vegas, and it is the only city in the world that brings so many different talented people from so many places.
That's what's interesting about the Lower East Side: It's New York, but it's also edgy. It's not as stuffy as Tribeca or Soho.
25 years ago, when I started in New York, I had the pleasure to cook for Andy Warhol. At the time, I could have traded art for food - I should have done so, because I could get his work for nothing!
I think fine dining should be part of the community where it is, more than just for the people who are going to make a special occasion.
If you're on a budget, Sweetgreen is a new chain of salad bars that are very good but inexpensive. You choose from a menu or customise your own, with some protein, a healthy salad and a great dressing.
I always had a lot of fun in America, with much more freedom than if I had tried to cook in France. I wouldn't have the same motivation or inspiration, and I wouldn't have cooked for the same kind of people in France, so it wouldn't have given me this edge I had in America.
I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant.
New York has an amazing history of farming and fishing that goes right back to the Pilgrim Fathers. At its core are the four seasons, which are distinct, well-established and similar to those in Lyon, where my family lives: when it's snowing in New York, a week later it will be snowing there.
