I have dreams of becoming a professional pastry chef and having a little bakery - that's how much I love baking. I love to cook in general, but my heart lies in desserts.

A burnt and experienced hands are more important than the vessels in the kitchen.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did.

The hardest thing about being a full time chef is leaving my work behind when I go home at night. I'll toss and turn about a menu item or forget to order produce and wake up at 4 A.M. In a cold sweat over some artichokes.

At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.

You hit a certain age and - especially because of TV - the young cooks coming up say, 'You're a sellout, because you're doing something other than what you should be doing.' 'Top Chef' is a double-edged sword for me: There's a whole group of people who will not come to the restaurants because they assume I'm not in them anymore, all I do is TV.

Cooking is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don't realize it. Even if you're not a great chef, there's nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn't.

Why don't you like the foods I like?' he asks sometimes. 'Why don't you like the foods I make?' I answer.

People come up to me all the time and ask how I stay the way I am, and it's no secret. The first lesson a chef needs to learn is how to handle a knife; the second is how to be around all that food.

When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant - sushi restaurant.