My mother, dazzled and fascinated with the cuisines of the Mediterranean, began planting a garden almost as soon as the ink was dry on the deed for our tumbledown farmhouse in the mountainous wilds of Tuscany. And while she planted all the great Mediterranean vegetables that grow so well in that climate, she also brought over sweet corn and planted it too. She loved to cook and throw dinner parties, Mediterranean-style: there is always enough for one or 10 more guests, and the midday repast takes place outside and goes on for hours—appetizers, mid-courses, entrees, salads, demijohns of wine. The sun sank low in the sky and the grown-ups slunk off to snooze under the haystack, and we kids ran wild and exhausted ourselves running through the scrub of forest and blackberry bushes and broom that kept trying to take back the land.

It wasn't until I went off to college in cold and gray early 1980s Providence Rhode Island that, somewhat desperate for the flavors I loved and missed, I started trying to cook for myself. It never occurred to me, though, that cooking for myself wasn't the best way to eat good food. Somehow I knew from being part of an unbroken chain of home cooks that this is what you do for yourself.

So while my fellow students lived on Kraft mac and cheese and ramen noodles, I tracked down a sweet little vegetable store miles from my apartment that had magnificent fresh strawberries in the spring and asparagus and arugula and beautiful bunches of basil that perfumed the air. I lugged home five-liter containers of olive oil from Italy to dress my salad with; I scoured the Italian neighborhood of Providence to find decent bread and canned tomatoes and imported pasta. And slowly I taught myself to cook well.

When I started cooking professionally, I threw dinner parties on my days off because that's when I could cook what I wanted to, experiment with the techniques I was learning, and recreate the big convivial meals of my golden Mediterranean childhood. When I became a chef for the first time, I really knew nothing about cooking in a professional setting. I didn't know that soup was something you made and kept simmering on a burner to be shoveled out effortlessly, one scoop into the bowl and there it's gone. I didn't know the menu was supposed to have a chicken, a beef, a pork, and a veal, or that the main course should be a protein, a starch, and a vegetable garnished with a sauce again kept simmering on a burner ready when needed. I didn't know stock was supposed to be made with a mishmash of vegetable trimmings collected in a giant vat lurking in the deepest recesses of the walk-in, slowly rotting over the week.

I did know what Italian food was and I knew it meant shopping well and following the seasons, I knew how to make food taste really good, and eventually I figured out how to put out food all night for a lot of people that still tasted really good. And that, I like to say, is what I do best—make food in a restaurant setting that tastes like the food I make at home.