I'd always been a very competitive boy - I hated coming second.

My cooking philosophy, what I try to do, is to make a cuisine where the produce and the product shines, compared to some current trends that are maybe more adding additional things, like molecular cuisine, with a lot of additives and chemicals, which are now showing that they could be bad for your health.

Vegas represents the idea of America I had as a kid. The big cars, the pretty girls; everything is possible in Vegas.

Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me, like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking, this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian food, which appeals to the senses.

The wellbeing we all crave goes hand in hand with economic success.

I'm learning a lot how to be good at what I do and also how lucky I am and take it all in and be grateful for all this late in life success I've been having and it's good to have people that have been around and successful for awhile and work with them and see how they behave and it's why they are who they are and why they're still successful.

It is exciting to work with students thinking about issues of the day, from closing the achievement gap to finding a cure for cancer.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.