Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.

The food at my restaurants is mostly the food of Italy's grandmothers.

The lighting and the buzz and everything in addition to the food have an impact on what the customer feels.

I guess the success of selling this kind of food to New Yorkers is that to them it seems new. Serving the head or the tail or the tongue certainly doesn't make me a pioneer in the real world-although maybe, in New York, in a fancy restaurant, I was a bit of one.

The Food Network is getting a little more entertaining than I would have thought a couple years back. They're in 80 million homes now. This is no longer a niche market.

Some things are being destroyed, because the Italians are just as tired of their basic food as the Americans and French were 20 years ago. So they're reinventing to avoid palate exhaustion.