Finishing Food Is About The Tiny Touches.

Italy Itself Has 21 Different Micro-regions. You Go Within Each Of Those Regions, There's Even Super-micro-regions; And The Beauty Is That When You Go From Place To Place, Although There's A Common Thread Of Pasta And Joie De Vivre - In The Way That They Approach Their Meals And The Simplicity Of Cooking, Celebrating More The Product Than The Chef - There's Still So Much Variety That As You Go, It's Always An Exciting Moment.

In Growing Up In Seattle, I Don't Know A Single Family That Didn't Barbecue Or Cook On The Weekends And Make Its Own Kind Of Simple, Pared-down, What I Call Pacific Northwest Cooking.

Chefs Don't Actually Say 'that's A Spicy Meat-a-ball,' Except To Indicate That There's A Bomb Threat In The Restaurant Without Alarming The Customers. Terrorism Is The Spiciest Meatball There Is.

Once You Become An Elaborate And Well-developed Culture, Anything From Rome Or The Etruscans, For That Matter, The Food Starts To Become A Representation Of What The Culture Is. When The Food Can Transcend Being Just Fuel, That's When You Start To See These Different Permutations.

You Sit Down At Katz's And You Eat The Big Bowl Of Pickles And You're Eating The Pastrami Sandwich, And Halfway Through You Say To Yourself, I Should Really Wrap This Up And Save It For Tomorrow. But The Sandwich Is Calling You: Remember The Taste You Just Had. So Fatty. It's What You Want. It's What You Are! I've Never Gotten Home From Katz's With A Doggie Bag In My Hand. A Pastrami Sandwich At Katz's Is What's Bad And Good About Food. It's The Sacred And The Profane.