101 Inspirational Chef Quotes To Inspire Your Cooking (2023)

Some best quotes of all time comes from famous cooks. These 101 Inspirational Chef Quotes encourages and motivates you to brave the kitchen, manage a team or simply to host the best dinner part ever! My favourites includes Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain.

Jump to:

• Famous Chef Quotes
• Thomas Keller
• Julia Child
• Gordon Ramsay
• Wolfgang Puck
• Anthony Bourdain
• Paul Prudhomme
• Others Celebrity Chefs

Famous Chef Quotes

Thomas Keller

Julia Child

Gordon Ramsay

Wolfgang Puck

Anthony Bourdain

Paul Prudhomme

Others Celebrity Chefs

1. "Good food is very often, even most often, simple food." Anthony Bourdain
2. "Design a menu which will allow you to actually be part of the dinner party atmosphere" Kerth Gumbs
3. "Never try to marry more than three flavours in one dish" Joel Robuchon
4. "I like a bit of chocolate as much as the next person, but cheese is a complete world on its own. The sheer variety is staggering and there's always going to be a cheese to tickle your taste buds" Ainsley Harriott
5. "A kitchen without a knife is not a kitchen." Masaharu Morimoto
6. "I could put this on a flip-flop and it would taste good." Guy Fieri
7. "Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 per cent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well." Alain Ducasse
8. "The most important thing for me is to really buy the best ingredients." Wolfgang Puck
9. "Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?." Julia Child
10. "People who love to eat are always the best people." Julia Child
11. "If you really want to make a friend, go to someone's house and eat with him... the people who give you their food give you their heart." Cesar Chavez
12. "It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato." Lewis Grizzard
13. "A recipe has no soul. You as the cook must bring soul to the recipe." Thomas Keller
14. "There is not a good or a bad cuisine, just the one you like the best." Ferran Adria
15. "You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces, just good food from fresh ingredients." Julia Chila
16. "Cooking is at once child’s play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love." Craig Claiborne
17. "Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation — experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way." Paul Theroux
18. "The ambition of every good cook must be to make something very good with the fewest possible ingredients." Urbain Dubois
19. "We're working people, and that's what we like to do, work." Paul Prudhomme
20. “I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits.” Shauna Niequist
21. “Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.” Shauna Niequist
22. "You don’t need to have a Rolls-Royce kitchen to make a great meal.” Tom Colicchio
23. "I think the most wonderful thing in the world is another chef. I'm always excited about learning new things about food." Paul Prudhomme
24. "I opened a restaurant that had nothing but California wines." Paul Prudhomme
25. "...who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression." Maya Angelou
26. "A sushi chef has to spot the best-quality fresh fish instantly." Nobu Matsuhisa
27. Chefs don't make mistakes; they make new dishes." Elizabeth Briggs
28. “I always say that I don't believe I'm a chef. I try to be a storyteller." Jose Andres
29. "Chef' doesn't mean that you're the best cook, it simply means 'boss'." Tom Colicchio
30. "Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls, and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them." Gordon Ramsay
31. "A lot of people call me a celebrity chef, but I don't think that I'm a celebrity. So I want to stay keeping just a chef. That's more comfortable." Masaharu Morimoto
32. "People want honest, flavourful food, not some show-off meal that takes days to prepare." Ted Allen
33. "To me, there's no great chef without a great team." Daniel Boulud
34. "There's a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family." Gordon Ramsay
35. "If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did." Gordon Ramsay
36. "I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that's it." Gordon Ramsay
37. "Get to know the Chef and you will start to enjoy dining out even more." John Walters
38. "No great pastry chef has sweet teeth." Morley Safer
39. "You don't call yourself the Demon Chef by being gentle. I am tough." Alvin Leung
40. "Chefs have a new opportunity - and perhaps even an obligation - to inform the public about what is good to eat, and why." Rene Redzepi
41. “Hunger gives flavour to the food.” Amit Kalantri
42. "To me, my recipes are priceless." Colonel Sanders
43. "Chef Thomas Keller was an inspiration to me and many, many young cooks like me. He told us that the role of the new, modern chef is different." David Chang
44. "You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I'm not going to freak out about it. I'm not that bad. I'm certainly not a boy, and it's been a while since I've been a chef." Anthony Bourdain
45. "If you're a happy person around food, you can be a professional chef. It's fueled by passion." Ranveer Brar
46. "Chefs. You either loved them or tolerated them, but either way you had to learn to live with them.” Nina Harrington
47. "When I was growing up, my grandmother cooked every day. She is the best chef ever." Baron Davis
48. “Stay calm and be quick on fixing a problem, stopping a problem head on is vital.” Monica Galetti
49. “Add a teaspoon of single cream, say, to a sauce just before serving to give it a touch of extra smoothness and depth.” Rick Stein
50. “An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.” Anthony Bourdain
51. “Get your shit together!” Gordon Ramsay
52. “A great chef is an artist that I truly respect.” Robert Stack
53. “I don’t like food that’s too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I’d buy a painting.” Andy Rooney
54. “A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that’s when cuisine is truly exciting.” Charlie Trotter
55. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Virginia Woolf
56. “I want to talk to the bullied kids of the world. Tell them to hang on, it will get better. Know that an ‘Iron Chef,’ actors, musicians, artists and all successful people have probably been bullied in their life. And the best part of your life is yet to come. Whatever it takes to live, do it!” Cat Cora 
57. “Kitchens should be designed around what’s truly important-fun, food, and life.” Daniel Boulud
58. “I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.” Geoffrey Rush
59. “Let’s face it: if you and I have the same capabilities, the same energy, the same staff, if the only thing that’s different between you and me is the products we can get, and I can get a better product than you, I’m going to be a better chef.” Thomas Keller
60. “I can’t stand people that do not take food seriously.”Oscar Wilde
61. “I liked the energy of cooking, the action, the camaraderie. I often compare the kitchen to sports and compare the chef to a coach. There are a lot of similarities to it.” Todd English
62. The best way to learn to cook is to do some serious eating.” Alexandra Guarnaschelli
63. “People who love to eat are always the best people.” Julia Child
64. “Japanese chefs believe our soul goes into our knives once we start using them. You wouldn’t put your soul in a dishwasher!” Masaharu Morimoto
65. “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”Julia Child
66. “I call all chefs cooks. They’re all cooks. That’s what we do, we cook. You’re a chef when you’re running a kitchen.” Tom Colicchio
67. “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” Julia Child
    “Maybe one of the only things I do well: I cook like a maniac! I would be a chef if I weren’t an actor.” Ian Somerhalder
68. “I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.” Gordon Ramsay
69. “I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef’s table… Unless they can identify what they’re tasting, they don’t get to cook it.” Gordon Ramsay
70. “I have a chef who makes sure that I’m getting the right amounts of carbs, proteins and fats throughout the day to keep me at my max performance level.” Barry Bonds
71. “One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been that I have never stopped learning about Good Cooking and Good Food” Edna Lewis , Chef quotes about food
72. “I remember when I was in college, I used to watch Julia Child’s cooking show during dinner and joke with my roommates about becoming a TV chef.” Martin Yan
73. “I think the most wonderful thing in the world is another chef. I’m always excited about learning new things about food.” Paul Prudhomme
74. “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” Calvin Trillin
75. “In normal life, ‘simplicity’ is synonymous with ‘easy to do,’ but when a chef uses the word, it means ‘takes a lifetime to learn.'” Bill Buford
76. “A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.” Wolfgang Puck
77. “You’re getting to know who the great chefs are through their books.” Thomas Keller
78. “Just like if you were brought up on a farm, you would most likely carry on your father’s business as a farmer; I was brought up in the kitchen and ended up becoming a chef.” Martin Yan
79. “Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.” Nathan Myhrvold , Chef quotes about cooking
80. “Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.” Alice Water
81. “I sometimes think the chef end of cooking is not the real end of cooking. Cooking is all about homes and gardens, it doesn’t happen in restaurants” Delia Smith
82. “Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I’m not a chef.” Nigella Lawson
83. “Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.” Anthony Bourdain
84. “If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.” Gordon Ramsay
85. “I believe that food is one way to make people happy. I also believe that food can unite people from all walks of life and cultures. When we sit together and eat, we promote better understanding and harmony.Food brings love, peace and compassion to the table.” Chef Wan
86. “News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.” Randall Munroe
87. “Peace begins in the kitchens and pantries, gardens and backyards, where our food is grown and prepared. The energies of nature and the infinite universe are absorbed through the foods we eat and are transmuted into our thoughts and actions.” Michio Kushi
88. “In any restaurant of this caliber, the chefs are in the same position, building relationships.” Thomas Keller
89. “Your pantry is your first line of defense against food-borne illness and things like high blood pressure and cholesterol.” Joe Bastianich
90. “A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.” Wolfgang Puck
91. “Chefs don’t do ponytails and we shouldn’t do them because I guarantee that whenever there’s a discovery of hair in the food, it’s guaranteed it’s from the chef’s ponytail.” Gordon Ramsay
92. “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.” W. C. Fields
93. “A good apprentice cook must be as polite with the dishwasher as with the chef.” Fernand Point
94. “All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It’s a part of their job. If you work with me you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef.”  Rene Redzepi
95. “I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” Julia Child
96. “First of all, I can’t really claim to be a great chef.” Martin Yan
97. “My grandfather was a chef for a Baron in Sicily before he came to America. I grew up with him. I used to do my homework at one end of the kitchen table while he cooked at the other end.” Vincent Schiavelli
98. “You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made. Even after you eat it, it stays with you – always.” Julia Child
99. “I wanted to learn everything I could about what it takes to be a great chef. It was a turning point for me.” Thomas Keller
100. “When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony.” Marie-Antoine Careme
101. “There really is a camaraderie among chefs and a willingness to help out whenever we can.” Rocco DiSpirito

What motivation phrases from famous chefs inspires you about eating together? What is the biggest challenge to become a successful chef or better cook at home?

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