28 Quotes By Mario Batali


Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.
Mario Batali on beauty

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.
Mario Batali on change

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.
Mario Batali on family

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
Mario Batali on family

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.
Mario Batali on family

My family makes these vinegars - out of everything from grapes to peaches and cherries. We go through the whole process with the giant vat and drainer, label them, and give them as Christmas presents.
Mario Batali on family

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.
Mario Batali on food

In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.
Mario Batali on food

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.
Mario Batali on food

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno it's the working poor. They don't look any different, they don't behave any differently, they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged, and that's it.
Mario Batali on food

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.
Mario Batali on food

Finishing food is about the tiny touches. In the last seconds you can change everything.
Mario Batali on food

Everyone makes pesto in a food processor. But the texture is better with a mortar and pestle, and it's just as fast.
Mario Batali on food

As far away as you can get from the process of mechanisms and machinery, the more likely your food's going to taste good. And that - that is probably the largest thing I can hand to anybody is let your hands touch it. Let them make it.
Mario Batali on food

When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there's something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.
Mario Batali on food

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.
Mario Batali on food

Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.
Mario Batali on food

Unlike curing cancer or heart disease, we already know how to beat hunger: food.
Mario Batali on food

I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, 'How'd you like to be on TV?' Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a 'Ready, Set, Cook' with Emeril Lagasse, I believe.
Mario Batali on food

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
Mario Batali on food