"I moved to Chicago in 1980 to go to college." — Steve Albini

When I'm in a restaurant, I don't eat red meat. It doesn't taste like anything. But if a friend of mine is grilling stuff at his house, its almost always great.

The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.

I hate 'foodie' because it's cute, like pretty much all diminutives associated with eating. 'Veggies,' 'sammies,' 'parm.' I eat food, and I cook it: it's for eating, preferably with friends, and I don't make a fetish out of it.

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.