These chef quotes will inspire you. A chef is a trained professional cook and tradesman who is proficient in all aspects of food preparation, often focusing on a particular cuisine.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging chef quotes, chef sayings, and chef proverbs.
Best Chef Quotes
- “A great chef is an artist that I truly respect.” ~ Robert Stack
- “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
- “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
-
“A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.” ~ Thomas Keller
- “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “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 , Chef quotes about life
- “Kitchens should be designed around what’s truly important-fun, food, and life.” ~ Daniel Boulud
- “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
-
“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients.” ~ Julia Child
- “I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.” ~ Geoffrey Rush
- “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
- “I can’t stand people that do not take food seriously.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “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
-
“The best way to learn to cook is to do some serious eating.” ~ Alexandra Guarnaschelli
- “People who love to eat are always the best people.” ~ Julia Child
- “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
- “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” ~ Julia Child
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “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
- “I think the most wonderful thing in the world is another chef. I’m always excited about learning new things about food.” ~ Paul Prudhomme
- “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
-
“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
- “A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.” ~ Wolfgang Puck
- “You’re getting to know who the great chefs are through their books.” ~ Thomas Keller
- “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
- “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
-
“Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.” ~ Alice Waters
- “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
- “Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I’m not a chef.” ~ Nigella Lawson
- “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
-
“If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.” ~ Gordon Ramsay
- “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
- “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
- “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
-
“In any restaurant of this caliber, the chefs are in the same position, building relationships.” ~ Thomas Keller
- “Your pantry is your first line of defense against food-borne illness and things like high blood pressure and cholesterol.” ~ Joe Bastianich
- “A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.” ~ Wolfgang Puck
- “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
- “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.” ~ W. C. Fields
-
“A good apprentice cook must be as polite with the dishwasher as with the chef.” ~ Fernand Point
- “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
- “I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” ~ Julia Child
- “First of all, I can’t really claim to be a great chef.” ~ Martin Yan
- “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
-
“You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made. Even after you eat it, it stays with you – always.” ~ Julia Child
- “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 , Chef quotes about learning
- “Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.” ~ Wolfgang Puck
- “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
-
“There really is a camaraderie among chefs and a willingness to help out whenever we can.” ~ Rocco DiSpirito
- “Being a chef is the best job in the world.” ~ Gordon Ramsay
- “The internet has become such a great tool not just for chefs but for everyone. The net has given everyone the tools to see and almost experience new and different ideas.” ~ Graham Kerr
- “It goes back to the early days in the kitchen where you would be tasting dishes all night long, so the last thing I want to do in the morning is eat. Chefs generally tend to be grazers.” ~ Gordon Ramsay
- “Now everybody thinks that once you do Top Chef, then 13 weeks later you’re a chef. Nobody wants to learn to cook anymore.” ~ Wolfgang Puck
-
“Generally a chef’s book is like a calling card or a portfolio to display their personal work.” ~ Sally Schneider
- “Chefs, as a whole, say yes to any project, fundraiser, or tasting because they have such a generous spirit.” ~ Charlie Trotter
- “The restaurant chefs in Spain are breaking ground, but in terms of the everyday cooking in Spain I still hear people coming back and saying they were disappointed. I think it’s because they’re expecting the chef stuff.” ~ Sally Schneider
-
“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” ~ Harriet Van Horne
- “A lot of people love the idea of improvising but are terrified of it, so I tried to make a book that was not a chef’s book about improvising but a real home cook’s book with a real home cook’s pantry, supermarket ingredients, that sort of thing.” ~ Sally Schneider
- “It’s very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I’m not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA-trained chef.” ~ Ted Allen
