Eric Ripert Quotes

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

When I was twelve, I decided to become a chef. I stole a book from the library about the greatest restaurants in France. I'd flip the pages and dream. I should return that book to the library some day.

Cooking is a holistic process of planning, preparing, dining and sharing food. I place food at the center of our humanity, as it nourishes not only our physical bodies but also our emotional and spiritual lives. Food is truly a cultural phenomenon that informs our traditions and our relationship with the earth. I genuinely believe that food connects us all.

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream. Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.

For me, food is about memories, feelings, emotions, and so is Le Bernardin, and that's why it's not just a restaurant.

A lot of foreign people say, when asking about eating habits, 'What is your guilty pleasure?' I have no guilt. Whatever I do, I enjoy and it's the point. I think if you start to feel guilty about it, that's a problem. So, no guilty pleasures. I have pleasure and no guilt at all.

In a professional kitchen, the idea is to have your cooks not moving much while theyre cooking. You want them to stay in the same spot.

When you serve lobster, you've taken a being's life away. Therefore if you create a recipe, you have to be very dedicated to elevate the lobster, to make it good and tasty of course, but at the end of the day it's a matter of paying homage.

My New Year's resolution is to cut my diet sodas down to two cans a day!

I love garlic, and I use it often.

I don't like it when I go to a restaurant and I'm lectured from the menu.

If I go to a nightclub, even if the music is good, if the sound system is not, I don't stay.

Obviously California is fantastic in terms of produce, vegetables.

Well, cooking starts with shopping. If the ingredients are not good, you don't do it. Just change your mind and do something else.

The fish is the star of the plate.

I love eggs. When it's the season of truffles, scrambled eggs with truffles, and I'm happy. I'm smiling like that.

I am a Buddhist, therefore I should not be collecting anything - however, I have a collection of Buddhas. I have a lot of them.

Fast food is both evil and genius. Because of it we can feed a large number of people fairly decently at an affordable price. However, all the artificial flavors and artificial ingredients in some of their products are unacceptable. And it's designed so you can eat fast so you get back to work more quickly. Not good.

I come from a family of farmers on both sides of my family.

California is lucky, the East Coast is lucky because we get great seafood and a lot of produce from Florida, locally in good weather, but in the winter we have to buy it.

We lived in St. Tropez when I was young, and there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees in France at the time, after the war. My mother had many Vietnamese friends who entertained a lot, and she was taught how to make that spring roll. She would make them all the time.

My mother and my grandmother would make an apple tart in different styles, and I had one per day. Every day I would eat one full apple tart.

I have more eating memories than cooking memories and many memories of being in the kitchen - I was always attracted to the kitchen - but nobody ever wanted me to touch anything.

I have very vivid memories of being a young child. My mother would create dinner as for us, and when she would bake, she would leave some dough for me. I would roll the dough into little sticks while she was cooking the apple tart of whatever. I was looking through the window of the oven and flipping the light, and then my bread would come out, and it was inedible, of course.

In New York there used to be some very good clubs with amazing sound systems. Techno was part of the process.

I am an audiophile. It's almost like a virus. I'm completely crazy about the quality of sound. It's interesting and painful at the same time; you have to really spend a lot of money on the equipment.

I'm very bad, but I like to dance.

When I realized, "Hm, I'm not that good at all. It will take me weeks, maybe months, to master the 32 yolks." When I did, it was a turning point in my career.

Today, because I want to be gentle on my back, I listen to jazz.

At 15, I had to choose a vocational school, and I was delighted, of course, to go to culinary school. But learning the basics was not as exciting as being the chef I am today.

Just walking in the kitchen (and we have three kitchens at Le Bernardin), I exercise quite a lot. I also walk in Central Park for 50 minutes from my house to Le Bernardin every day, rain, shine, snow.

It was my first day working at Tour d'Argent, a famous restaurant in Paris, in 1982, and they were celebrating their 400th anniversary. I am in the fish station and after many mistakes, including cutting myself after 30 seconds in that kitchen, the chef said, "Make a Hollandaise sauce with 32 yolks." It takes me forever to separate the yolks from the whites, and I put them in a bowl and try to go close to the stove, but the stove is way too hot for me.

When you are 25, 30, you know, you have no responsibility, no mortgage, no kids, no retirement to think about, nothing.

You don't become a chef to become famous.

I had a passion for cooking, and I was a very bad student.

When I started to work in Paris in fine dining, the passion really kicked in, and I knew that I would not, for the rest of my life, do anything else.

Money is not necessarily, although it helps a lot for happiness, it’s not necessarily the best way to be happy, to be rich, you know.

I don't follow the food trends.