My mom who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.

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When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.