I’m lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn’t open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees. Michael Symon Read Quote
For the longest time, chefs and restaurateurs were able to get products home cooks couldn’t get, but that’s not the case anymore. Michael Symon Read Quote
With all the hybrid stuff and things like that, I think that’s a fabulous direction to go with cars in that sense. As someone who grew up around muscle cars, I’ll never not be able to not love a muscle car. Not that I don’t care about the environment, that’s not it. But I adore muscle cars. Michael Symon Read Quote
You’ve always got to work to your highest ability level. When times are great and restaurants are jamming, that’s when some restaurants get sloppy and take things for granted. Never take things for granted. Michael Symon Read Quote
The exposure from ‘Iron Chef’ has been helpful, but at the end of the day your product and your service determine whether you get customers or not. If people decide to eat out less during a recession, the first restaurants that they will cut out are the ones that don’t do a great job. Michael Symon Read Quote
It’s not always possible to sit down and eat at home in this day and age of fast-paced living, but if you are going to eat out, do so as a family and support all the great local places in your areas. I’ll still eat at the same diner I did as a kid with my parents. Michael Symon Read Quote
People come up to me all the time and say, ‘Oh, I love to watch Food Network,’ and I ask them what they cook, and they say, ‘I don’t really cook.’ They’re afraid, they’re intimidated, they know all about food from eating out and watching TV, but they don’t know where to start in their own kitchen. Michael Symon Read Quote
In Cleveland, I’m so fortunate that we’re surrounded by farms with an endless variety of beautiful vegetables. For me, I always eat very tightly with the season, even if the season is only six weeks. Michael Symon Read Quote
When I met my wife 20 plus years ago, she was a vegetarian, so I was the closest thing to the devil that she had ever met. Michael Symon Read Quote
