Startle

Always. I’m very much about doing wine dinners. Early on in my career, I took a wine tasting class where you learn about the components of the wine, so basically what you do is you get a tray of all these little tastings and figure out, ‘what is blackberry extract,’ ‘what is smoke,’ ‘what is chalk,’ And you taste all of these components and you learn all these flavor profiles, and how your palate reacts to certain things. And your nose holds the best memories of food and scents, so when you smell these you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what elderflower smells like.’ And you can answer, ‘what is in that wine,’ and pair foods that represent that, and bring out or highlight or feature those things, and I love that.

There would certainly be white truffles, and caviar in some capacity. I also feel like I’d have to put a meatball somewhere in there— I love meatballs and my mom made me meatballs when I was a kid. So yeah, I’d have a kilo of caviar, a bucket of fried chicken, and a 1952 Dom Perignon.

I spend a lot of time at my Food Hall in New York City. I love the diversity of it, like we designed a pasta station, and you sit at a 40-foot long, 12-foot wide slab of Carerra marble, and on that marble slab is a pasta machine with rollers and with cutters, like the ‘R2-D2’ of pasta makers, and it spits out all these pastas. And next to it is all the stuffing that goes along with it, so you pass it down and then the next process is obviously the cooking and the saucing and the plating, so you see the whole process right in front of you, and it’s pretty cool. So that’s in New York and we’re expanding the Food Hall in New York, but we’re also going to do that at our new Food Hall in Chicago.

I hate when people wear sweats when they travel. I get it, but it drives me crazy. I was brought up in the time that when you traveled on a plane, you dressed up, and that was the way you do it. So I’ll wear some jeans, a shirt and a blazer. I’m always a carry-on guy, there’s only carry-on or lost luggage.

I’ve always been a flavor guy, so whatever can inspire flavor. I find that I love ethnic flavors, I love spice, and ginger is my new garlic, and has been for a while, but I love it and use a lot of it. I find ginger very refreshing and just really healthy. I like acids, I like vinegars, I like finishing things and then adding flavor, whether it’s the zest of an orange or a flavored salt. I did a whole thing of recipes based on just basically searing a protein or a vegetable, and then putting the flavored salts over the top, so now it’s seasoned before you cook it. It’s kind of an old, interesting series of things that you can do.

I try not to accumulate anything. I find that you can usually find it in the U.S., unless it’s something really unique like a painting or a one-of-a-kind.

I like alternative stuff, so I like Foo Fighters. I also like John Legend and some more classic stuff. I like Black Crows, Jack Johnson, so not just one genre. I also like classical, so some different concertos, I’m a big Mozart fan.

When I was taping my PBS TV show in South Africa, I went on the safari at Penda. It was amazing because I had my kids with me, and it was really unbelievable. I also took a trip to Spain, where we went to places like Madrid and we had some of the best food, really classic Madrid. And then they took us out to the country, and that’s when I experienced some San Sebastian food, and also a restaurant in Segovia, which is this big farmhouse restaurant, and I forget the name of it. But you sit in the dining room, and there are wood-burning ovens all around you—probably 20 of them—and they’re filled with these little pigs that they roast for four or five hours. So the food came out and we had that, some baby lamb, and all sorts of potatoes and salads and things like that around it— it was unreal.

There’s was a restaurant right outside of Lyon called Chez Tante Paulette, where people like Patricia Wells and Alice Waters were inspired to do the chicken with a hundred cloves of garlic. You had to make a reservation, and there were four tables and you sat and a simple salad came out with toasted garlic all over it, and then the next course was chicken with a pork roast and garlic, and it was the breast of chicken, and then it was also roasted potatoes with garlic and duck fat. The ultimate garlic meal.

The Aman Group does an amazing job with their hotels, I was just at the one in Turks & Caicos and it was pretty spectacular. The service is amazing, but when you go in and you experience something, you feel the zen, you feel the calmness, you feel all the things they’re representing. The Grand Hyatt and the Park Hyatt in Tokyo — both amazing hotels, and so is Four Seasons Milan.

Paris, Istanbul, Rome, New York. Istanbul is one of my new favorites — I love the culture, the Turkish food. In a city with 18 million people there’s just so much going on. Paris — It may be the hopeless romantic in me. The French just do it big. <br/><br/>And Rome is up there too, they just get it right. There’s history, there’s culture. <br/><br/>And that’s what’s cool, getting to know the local restaurants, the local market. There’s just an aesthetic there, a lifestyle, and it’s a great walking city. I love New York — what I’ve found is that, when I first started cooking in the city, it was kind of the Upper East Side and everything else and Midtown, and now it’s more about downtown in so many ways. You’ve got SoHo, which has become too much in a few ways, and Meatpacking is getting to be that way but it’s still cool. I love the Lower East Side and the Alphabet City. I’m finding that New York just grows on you — every time you think you’ve seen it all, something happens and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’