Charles "Charlie" Trotter (September 8, 1959 – November 5, 2013) was an American chef and restaurateur. Read full biography of Charlie Trotter →
Excellence is about fighting and pursuing something diligently, with a strict and determined approach to doing it right. It's okay if there are... →
All four elements were happening in equal measure - the cuisine, the wine, the service, and the overall ambience. It taught me that dining could... →
My fantasy is to have a restaurant where there are no written menus, but where you just ask people, 'What are you in the mood for? Fish? Meat?... →
Any fool can be happy. What I'm interested in is satisfaction. There's got to be more to life than just being happy. You've got to be... →
I believe in focusing on details.
Maybe it's good to be traumatized in your youth, to make you think differently and step outside the box. Anybody can be comfortable, but if you... →
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis... →
I never considered Miles Davis a perfectionist; I always considered him as an excellence-ist, where deviation is actually kind of cool.
I wasn't using college as a stepping stone to law school or some other career. I just wanted a liberal-arts education.
I love faltering. I love, in a sense, coming up short. Because you learn nothing from success. You learn so much from failing.
I timed my previous wife's pregnancy to the moment to have my son born on Bob Dylan's 50th birthday. There is no bigger Bob Dylan fan than... →
People say, 'Oh, do you experiment? Do you have a laboratory?' It's not like, 'Eureka! This works!' Because you taste so much... →
Sometimes I think I should have chosen a line of work where it was just me alone in the room, with the sun coming in, and God, insofar as he or she... →
Charles "Charlie" Trotter (September 8, 1959 – November 5, 2013) was an American chef and restaurateur.