Adam Richman Quotations

There's no way that I could have known about a 72-oz. steak challenge in Amarillo unless thousands upon thousands of locals and travellers alike had attempted it. I guess if 'Man V Food' is me paying homage to these legends, then I suppose 'Man V Food Nation' is the legacy.

A good spicy challenge strikes a balance between flavour and fear.

There is no right way to go on an edible journey. You can never tell what is going to be great, so you have to try everything. If you become doctrinaire about sticking to lowbrow foods or epicurean delights, your just being an extremist, and it won't do you any good.

I remember my late father, who was the biggest football fan I have ever known, used to stress when I was younger that, win or lose, you always have to compete with honor.

I like being the people's champion when it comes to dining.

I love that you can pick up your phone at a hotel and have something to eat in your bed. I love home, but there are amenities at a hotel that you simply don't have at home.

Now you can get artisanal everything - pickles, coffees, house-cured meats, mustard. The pendulum has swung back to this kind of food, and it gives me the greatest hope for the future, especially because we're living in a time with issues like polluted Gulf Coast seafood and food labeled organic that may not really be organic.

I was logging 15-hour days, sampling food every minute. I had access to these amazing dishes, and it was easy to lose sight of how quickly the bites added up.

'Man v. Food' was the biggest career-defining opportunity. I went from anonymity to someone of note with access to amazing eateries.

The Travel Channel had success with their 'Food Paradise' series, '10 Best Places to Pig Out' and those types of specials, so they knew there was a market for comfort food and wanted to develop a show around it.

I've long struggled with my body image and have worked hard to achieve a healthy weight.

If you're a guy who's always been the fun-to-be-around teddy bear, then all of a sudden people are viewing you as sexy, it's nice. It's great not having to be the plucky best friend or the comic relief anymore - I love that.

The first Mardi Gras I went to, I stayed at the Tulane AE Pi house on Broadway. Slept on a pool table one night, slept under it the next.

I always hated watching cooking shows where the chef would use ingredients that I couldn't get my hands on, cooking implements that I couldn't afford, recipes that I could never have access to.

Natto, Japanese ferment bean paste, will never cross my lips again. Spam Musubi, on the other hand, is something I love. I used to have a roommate of Vietnamese descent, and he would eat it all the time. It looked gross, but I finally had it - wrapped in seaweed and rice - it was terrific.

To combat the monotony of gym workouts, I started playing soccer. I looked at workouts as training sessions. My soccer training includes squats, pushups, resistance-band work, and sprints. Ninety minutes of running became part of my love of the game rather than a chore.

In a day and age when there are so many culinary competitions - ranging from contests of taste to those of technique - The World Food Championships will be the ultimate food competition.

Super polished signage is not always a good sign. I'm always looking for places that you have to know about to find. Also, just food-wise, if I'm eating ethnic cuisine - I hate that phrase, but still - If I'm eating Mexican food, I'm looking to see that there are Mexicans in the restaurant. They know if the food is being made right.

I realized that I didn't need nearly as many calories as I'd grown accustomed to. I ate 100 to 200 calories every two hours or so, consumed healthy proteins (yogurt, lean meat, turkey jerky), and drank a gallon of water a day. And as my weight dropped, my energy soared.

I went in for a checkup, and when my doctor had me stand on the scale, even he was surprised. Seeing that number (which I'll take to the grave) was a turning point. I knew I needed to make a change. I cut out white flour and starches and worked with my doctor and a nutritionist to develop a plan.

If you do a quantity challenge, the problem you'd face would be a starchy challenge. If it has a lot of potatoes, a lot of bread or fried elements, that's difficult. With heat challenges, challenges that use the whole pepper are much, much easier than ones that use pepper extract. That's concentrated, and also devoid of flavour. It's just heat.

My most memorable food challenge was probably the Big Texan in Amarillo. All the big executives called me because it was such an iconic challenge, and a victory in that would be a legitimizing device for myself as much as for the show.

Back in the day, I used to watch 'The Cajun Chef' with Justin Wilson. His mixing would go one way, and his stomach would go the other.

To go from hating the way I looked to being a 'Cosmo' centerfold is a profound honor.

I think the most surreal moment for me having been a kid who was on unemployment, was on food stamps - I'm not kidding you, to utter these words aloud is so surreal to me - but to say, "I had to give up my Super Bowl tickets for my all-expense paid research trip to Argentina's wine country," it was like, who's life is this? It was splendid, and the nice thing was that they renewed my contract for another year.

We were filming in Greenland, and I treated my crew. It's 24 hours of pretty bright daylight there right now, and I always try to do something nice for my crew every trip or in every other city. So I greeted them with a midnight cruise, but it looked like two in the afternoon.

That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.

In the early '90s I was floating somewhere between the Brat Pack/Andrew McCarthy/James Spader/Pretty In Pink kind of stuff and the alterna-pop look, crossed with a very distinct grunge sensibility.

When Lollapalooza started, and I was really into Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction, Soundgarden. I went to that Lollapalooza tour twice, I think.

I've always been a massive Beastie Boys fan, so if you look at their style aesthetic on Check Your Head, that was the headspace I was in for a minute. Whatever that was, that was me.

I was 12 or 13, and I had seen a demo about origami at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. My dad, my step-mom, and I were at the Japan pavilion of Epcot, and my dad was going to get me an origami book. They had these really sick origami books with an overleaf, but those packs can sometimes blow, because they give you, like, eight sheets.

Actually, I am loathe to admit, but I also remember freshman year of Emory - and I'm so sorry to have to admit this - but there was a Domino's Pizza in Emory Village, where I went to college, and I was ordering a pizza.

There are soccer athletes that are known the world over except in the U.S. Thierry Henry, for example.

I think that in terms of who is known the world over, I would wager that it's probably someone like Mark Wahlberg or Dwyane Wade.

Generally speaking, there's a difference. Moose nose is just pure cartilage. It's not just the end of a chicken leg, it really is - imagine the cartilage of game meat.If I ever took the spare tire off of my car and was on a survival show, and Bear Grylls was like, "What you need to do in a survival situation is eat your tire," I'd be like, "That's moose nose!"

I lived in San Jose for a little bit, and one of my neighbors was Vietnamese and was teasing me. I said "I've had pho," and then he goes, "Oh, what do you get, the number one big bowl?" I was like, "Come on, man. You don't have to come at me like that." But yeah, I've tried tendon. Tendon eventually yields.

People believe what they want to believe. You have to run your race and be proud of the person you see in the mirror.

One of my great personal triumphs is, because I stay vigilant about my health, I was never going to give my detractors the satisfaction of not feeling well, or allowing my health to falter while eating rich and indulgent food all over the world.

If something is nice about you, usually one or two people will tell you. If something is foul about you, everyone will tell you.

Did you see The Never-Ending Story? That's one kick-ass dragon. It's basically a giant puppy dragon.

If I had Sirius FM and fire-breathing in a giant puppy dragon, I'd be golden.

I produced a play in New York that got nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater. He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially - shortest synopsis ever, like I'm the Cablevision guide button - it's the true story of a man stalking and plotting to kill the man who raped him when he was seven. It's by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.

I'm a big soccer fanatic, and although I support a team called Tottenham Hotspur in London - I love that team, I wear their symbol around my neck on a chain - I've always had a soft spot for this little club.

Shaq is Shaq. I did an episode of The Soup with Shaq, and he shook my hand, and I felt like I was a Ken doll, like I had no hand.

The first one that I went to with my friends was with my buddy Michael - and we actually cut class to get tickets - was INXS at the Garden.

People follow me on social media, and they can tell I have varied interests. I think in the U.K. people perhaps know me for some other stuff because of my involvement with soccer and support of Tottenham.

People also respected my culinary acumen and my intelligence, and that was their whole thing. They flew me over, and it was this immersive experience.

I do feel that, generally, people will see me and go, "He knows where the good food is," which is an awesome correlative. It's an awesome simplification.

My mom always says, "Pack your smile," but [the sound guy] articulated it beautifully, because he saw me go from Joe Schmo who had been on food stamps to Adam Richman from Man V. Food. He said, "For you, it may be your 50th or 100th selfie, autograph, or whatever of the day. But for that person, it may be the first or the only time in their life that they've seen someone they enjoy on television. Never lose sight of that."

Gratitude is the attitude. That's the thing.

I thought maybe I would be everyone's favorite dude-food friend.

To be asked to do the pairing menus by Alamos Wineries in Argentina [was the most interesting opportunity]. There are so many chefs out there, and so if you were to say, "The dude who used to host Man V. Food is doing pairing for Jim Beam," you'd say, "Okay, that's kind of conceivable." If you're talking about the dude from Man V. Food is doing pairings for fine wine, then I think people might not necessarily anticipate that.

I'll go to a restaurant where I've never been before, and someone will say, "I don't have anything big for you to eat." I used to be a little salty about that, but at the end of the day, what they're saying is, "I know who you are. I watch your stuff." What's better than that? Gratitude is the attitude. That's the thing. What am I being pissy about?

I'm not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety. I have a master's from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this. So obviously I want to be in the limelight in some capacity, or I want to be in entertainment in some capacity.

Man V. Food is the highest-rated show in the Travel Channel's history, so clearly there's going to be a correlation.

I sponsored every team in the Park Slope Little League for years.I sponsor two soccer teams in England, one of which is called Broadley F.C. A kid wrote to me through Facebook because they started a team in honor of their friend who died of leukemia, and he played in the band of this very obscure team in England.

You can change your spouse, your friends but never your club.

I'm Adam Richman. A food fanatic who's held nearly every job in the restaurant biz. Now I'm on a mouth-watering journey to find America's greatest pig-out spots. And take on the country's most legendary eating challenges. I'm no competitive eater, just a regular guy with a serious appetite. This is my ultimate hunger quest. This is Man v. Food.

These $40 burgers with foie gras and truffles and all of that flies in the face of one of the most proletarian foods around. It's overpriced, overdone and just not worth it.

It's weird because people think the biggest guys are the biggest eaters, but fat doesn't expand as much as muscle, so you want someone with a big frame who can expand.

In L.A., I love the L'Ermitage in Beverly Hills. Also, the Beverly Wilshire, where they make great huevos rancheros. I also love Shutters on the Beach, where I walk around everywhere in a bathrobe.

I knew what I was getting into: 72-ounce steaks, shakes by the quart, atomic wings. When I landed 'Man v. Food' in 2008, I accepted the fact that my weight would fluctuate. But instead of stressing about the scale, I made my long-term health a primary concern.