Mario Batali Restaurant Quotations

In New York, a lot of people come into the restaurant and it's not that they don't want what's on the menu, they just want to flex a little bit. They want to control the situation.

D.C. is a complicated market that I don't understand very well. The restaurant business is a slippery slope, and it gathers speed very quickly when it's going downhill.

This is what we think is missing in New York City. A luxurious and comfortable Italian restaurant expressing everything we know about Italian culture in a slightly rarefied atmosphere. The food is to be elegant and simple without losing the essential heart of the Italian purity. As a gastronomic experience it's everything I have to offer.

The English have been burning everything for so long, and no one paid attention to them. But now there are guys like Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsey. The London restaurant scene is as vibrant as anywhere in the world-London, Paris, New York.

To get to New York, I was actually on my way to Brazil to help someone open a restaurant and stopped in Florida and met an old college buddy of mine who had a restaurant called Rocco. I came up to open that and I've been in New York for 11 years.

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.

The minimum time spent in any one restaurant should be a year, no matter what. You may feel that you're done earlier, but it's truly in a year that you learn the discipline and technical things you need to know about a particular restaurant.

From a great restaurant to a B-minus player can happen in six weeks.