Get the best green beans and don’t screw them up.

Enhance.

Don’t overdo.

My definition of happiness can be described in one word: Balance.

Acting it out is a little more difficult.

If you’re obsessed by money, you’re not going to get anywhere . . . unless you’re an investment banker.

If you can mix an obsession for what you do with a little talent, then the money will come.

My parents were very poor. We had meat only once a week. Wiener schnitzel was my favorite. I only ate half and filled myself up on mashed potatoes so I could save the other half for the next day. That way I could have it for two days.

If you play it safe, you might never fail. But you might never go anywhere, either.

It’s very passive in comparison to the way it used to be. When I did my apprenticeship in Austria, the chef was not only screaming, he was also hitting me. And when he was done, you had to say thank you.

It started really badly. When I was fourteen, I wanted to become an architect or go to school. But my parents didn’t have the money to send me to Vienna.

So then I wanted to be a pastry chef because I liked sweets. But I couldn’t find a job at that. Finally, my mother’s boss found a job for me in this hotel with a crazy chef.

My mother and my grandmother were angels. But my stepfather was a terror. He said: “You’re gonna be a cook? Cooking is for women. You’re good for nothing. Be a mechanic or a carpenter or something. Get a man’s job.” So I go to this hotel, happy to leave my parents’ house.

But the chef was terrible. I was peeling potatoes and making mashed potatoes. I had to purée them and everything, and one day after about three weeks we ran out of potatoes — on the Sunday lunch, the busiest meal.

And the chef comes screaming at me, “You’re good for nothing! You have to go home to your mother. You’re out of here! Forget it! Come and pick up your paycheck tomorrow, and that’s it.”

I thought to myself: I’m not going home. So that night, I went on the bridge. I said: I’m going to kill myself. I stood on the bridge, and I said I’m gonna jump, I’m gonna jump, I’m gonna jump.

After an hour or so, I thought: You know, I’m just gonna go back and see what happens. Maybe the chef was drunk. Maybe he forgot about it. Maybe he’ll say: “Okay, you can stay.”

So I go back the next morning and the apprentice who I had replaced as the potato peeler was all happy because that way he didn’t have to go back and peel potatoes for another six months. He hid me in the vegetable cellar. So I was peeling the potatoes and onions and carrots, whatever, and he used to pick them up, bring them up, and the chef didn’t know.

About two weeks later, the chef walks down and sees me sitting there, peeling. . . .

“What are you doing here?!” He starts screaming like crazy at me.

I said, “I can’t go home. I’m going to kill myself.”

He said, “Get out of here!”

I said, “No, I’m not leaving.”

Then he calls the owner of the hotel, who was also the manager, and he said, “What should I do with this idiot here? You know, he’s good for nothing. He doesn’t want to leave. He says he can’t go home. He wants to kill himself.”

The owner took me aside and said, “I will send you to our other hotel.” They owned two hotels in town. So I went to the other hotel, where there was a lady chef who had a kid my age. She said, “Don’t worry. I will take care of you. You just listen to what I say and don’t screw around.”

She was tough, but like a mother in a way. So I started there and things began to go better.

When I look back now, I see how everything could have been completely different. I could have said: Okay I’m going home to my mother. My stepfather would have been terrible, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.

You can be good in bed. But if you really love her and she is passionate, it’s a different experience.

Taking the salt out of a dish that someone is accustomed to . . . is like taking away drugs from an addict.

When you don’t have your green card, you get paranoid. A police car is behind you in Indianapolis and you think: Uh-oh, one violation and they’re going to deport me. It affects the way you cook. You have to be polite. After I got my green card and was at Ma Maison, a customer ordered his steak well done and I told the waiter to tell him to eat chicken.

California can be the basis of good cooking.

I want to be challenged. I like it when people sit down and say: “Oh, just cook me something.” That makes me happy.

The problem when I was young was I didn’t go home happy. I had a hundred happy customers, but the four who were not happy were all that mattered to me. They stuck in my head and wouldn’t let me sleep. They used to drive me crazy. Little by little, I understood that this was a very bad way to live. I made them unhappy and then I made myself unhappy.

I was totally obsessed, and part of that obsession made me successful for sure. If I wouldn’t have cared that much, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Sometimes it’s 80/20; sometimes it’s 20/80. When you have children, you have to find the balance.

When I turned sixty, I said: Every summer I’m going to take a month off. Before, it was ten days, sometimes a week. And even then, I called every day. I was on the telephone for hours. Could I have done something if the place burned down?

The world will go around no matter what. . . .

We definitely eat with our eyes first.

For a chef, the plate is the canvas.

I don’t know if a customer would notice. But I notice. And that’s what matters to me.

It used to be there were three or four food critics in a town like L.A. But because of the iPhone today, everybody is a critic. They might not know much. But at the end of the day they can go on Twitter, say that they had a terrible dinner, and tell everybody not to go to the restaurant. Are people going to go there? Probably not.

What good is it to send e-mails if you have to answer them? I don’t want to answer them, so now I don’t send any.

It’s just like in football. You lose a game not because you play bad. You lose because you make mistakes.

Make somebody wait and they’re already pissed off. You must have a good waiter to smooth things out and make them happy.

Bring the customer who’s waiting at the bar something to nibble on. Give them a drink on the house. Then they will feel like they’re being taken care of — and that’s really what people want. Personal attention is just as important as the food.

In the old days it was a war between the waiters and the kitchen. They were like enemies. When chefs started to become owners, they began to understand that if they didn’t have good people out front, their business would go down.

When there’s no consistency, there’s disappointment.

You cannot get stuck in the eighties. There has to be an evolution in life.

Winemaking has become a little like restaurants. There were very few good restaurants in the sixties in Los Angeles. Now you have a hundred. When I started out at Ma Maison in the seventies, there were maybe forty wineries in Napa. Now there are something like four hundred. Every rich person wanted to be the next Baron de Rothschild . . . and many discovered it’s not as easy as it looks. It’s like that expression. “How do you make a little fortune? You start with a big one.”

I don’t order a great bottle of burgundy when I’m in Turkey. I ask for the best Turkish wine.

Warren Cowan, the famous publicist who represented Paul Newman and Gene Kelly, came in once and asked for a steak well done and a baked potato. I told him: “First of all, I don’t make steak well done. Second of all, I don’t have a baked potato. Go to Lawry’s.” You know what he did? He stayed in his seat and sent his driver to Lawry’s to pick up his meat well done and a baked potato. We became good friends.

I stayed six years at Ma Maison before I opened Spago. A lot of chefs, after two years, would’ve left to do something else. But I waited, waited, and waited.

People wondered how could I open a Chinese restaurant. I knew nothing about Chinese food. I’d never cooked Chinese food. Well, I told them, I will learn, and I’ll do it my way. I did, and Chinois is still open today after thirty-two years.

Sometimes when I wake up I think: Jesus Christ, did we just open in London and Singapore? I think back to my little village in the mountains with the cows and the pigs. And the trajectory I took to get here. Why did I go to France? Why did I come to America? Why Indianapolis? Why Los Angeles? How did this whole thing happen?

I wanted Spago to be a neighborhood restaurant. And then we had presidents coming in.

Everybody has options. The owner of Baumanière, Raymond Thuillier, always said: “Life is like being at the train station. There are many trains, going, stopping, going, stopping. A lot of them look nice. But you can’t get on every train. Be sure it’s going to the place you want to go. Then jump on the right one.”