Describe your latest project.
My Les Halles Cookbook is designed to be a rude, unpretentious, utilitarian — and hopefully entertaining — field manual to classic French bistro cooking. It is designed specifically to have food spilled and smeared on it (hence the brown butcher-paper cover). I wanted to do a cookbook that would be the exact opposite of the usual ghostwritten cocktail-table food porn. No one should hesitate to take this book into their kitchen and actually use it and refer to it. I've trained a lot of cooks in my career as a chef. So the tone of both essay sections and recipes is conversational — meaning, I wanted it to sound just like me talking/encouraging/bullying a new cook in my kitchen at Les Halles into the strategies, techniques, and tactics of cooking in an effective and organized fashion. I also wanted to take the intimidation factor out of French cooking. There was absolutely NO food styling involved in the photographs in the book. All dishes depicted are the real recipes — and were, in fact, eaten immediately after the photos were taken. My hope is that people will actually cook from the book — and that it will quickly become an old (if occasionally obnoxious) friend.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at the table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment."
— A. J. Liebling

What section of the newspaper do you read first?
I read the front page of the New York Times, the international news, followed by the op-ed section — except on Wednesdays, when I go straight to the "Dining In" section. I've got to see which friend or foe got reviewed — and how they did. A lot of schadenfreude in the cooking business.

What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
My favorite pair of shoes is absolutely no shoes. I have long believed that food tastes better — that life is better — with sand between your toes, and that there is a direct relationship between my personal happiness and how frequently I have to endure socks or footwear. In fact, the thing I'm beginning to resent most about haute cuisine is that I have to dress up to eat it. The three-star restaurant I'm waiting to see is one that opens on a beach.

What was the best breakfast of your life?
The best breakfast of my life was and will always be a bowl of pho, eaten on a low plastic stool on a sidewalk in Saigon. Breakfast does not get any better than that.

Name the best Simpsons episode of all time, and explain why it's the best.
Picking the best Simpsons episode of all time is tough — as the show is pretty much the font of all knowledge and wisdom. I love any episode involving a monkey — as the writing seems to particularly sparkle. Perhaps the "Homer gets a helper monkey" episode — or any Krusty episode with his faithful chauffeur/friend Mr. Teeny.

What do you dislike most?
When I encounter an utter lack of curiosity in a person I'm always oppressed by the experience. Snobbery — particularly when it comes to food — is a terrible sin. And certainty will destroy us all.