I love creating new things. It’s difficult to be creative once a restaurant’s open. People want the same dishes. For me, the creativity is in opening a new place and starting a new menu.
No restaurant, however brilliantly situated, can give you the constantly changing views that you can see from a railway. Revolving restaurants at the tops of tall buildings try to compete, but spinning around is no substitute for speeding along.
I wanted to disprove the notion that you couldn’t open a great restaurant in a casino.
I wasn’t meant to be a cook. It’s a profession I accidentally fell into one summer between college semesters while looking for an easy job as a waiter. Nobody would hire me as a server, but one restaurant, in desperate need of a prep cook, told me that if I could hold a knife, I could have a job.
Many people don’t know our famous ‘soup kitchen’ episode on Seinfeld was inspired by an actual soup restaurant off 8th Avenue in New York.
Here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to go to a restaurant, take pictures of my food, download them, and call that a blog. That is beyond the pale. The Internet is such a bazaar of self-indulgences that I don’t know why that particular one should bug me so much. But it really does.
The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.
I’ve never sexually harassed anyone, and yes, I was falsely accused while I was at the National Restaurant Association.
There are advantages to being a star though – you can always get a table in a full restaurant.
I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!
On any given day, I want to know which restaurant near me is serving knoephla or chicken dumpling soup.
I was never In a restaurant until after I left home. My mother came from Abruzzi and they’re noted for their great cooking.
We opened Panda Inn on June 8, 1973. The whole family – my parents, a brother and sister – all worked at the restaurant for free. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in San Gabriel and didn’t have any money.
I come from the restaurant business; you’re talking to a guy used to working 12, 14 hours a day.
I can walk into a restaurant and knock five guys out, become 5-0 real quick. It’s about the quality of opponent. You have to beat the right guys to call yourself the No. 1 contender.
A child did approach me in a restaurant in Cornwall, but he thought I was Gandalf.
Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.
I’d never scan the starters and main courses on a menu in a restaurant as a child. I’d want a dessert for starter, for main course and for dessert.
Traditional British desserts with lots of custard are my biggest weakness – I particularly love the puds at St. John restaurant in East London.
No one knows restaurants like a New Yorker – they’re incredibly discerning and restaurant savvy.
People ask me how come you say hello to your customers every night? It’s because I need that. It’s not just a restaurant. It’s my house.
I am not interesting in making money. I go to the most expensive restaurant in Boston to have dinner. It is where billionaires come to eat. Even if I become richer, I will still have to go there to eat. After some time, money doesn’t make a difference.
When you do a menu at a restaurant, you have to be the engineer of that menu. It has to be a crowd-pleaser.
I hate when you go into a nice restaurant – someplace where you’re going to spend good money – and there are kids in there crying.
Even if we give parents all the information they need and we improve school meals and build brand new supermarkets on every corner, none of that matters if when families step into a restaurant, they can’t make a healthy choice.
A pastry chef’s lifespan in a restaurant is limited. You have to open a bakery or pastry shop. There’s only so far you can go in a restaurant.
I don’t allow meat in my house or in my oven. My whole family is vegetarian – and although I’ve given my kids the choice to order meat at a restaurant when they reach five, they’re not interested.
I like books steeped in the quotidian – details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading ‘Mildred Pierce.’ And I like fiction about money.
There wasn’t much around. After the shows, we would go to an Italian restaurant that a friend of ours owned and so I didn’t get a chance to see much. Actually, that holds true of most places I’ve been.
When I started out in the early 1970s French cooking was really my only serious influence. For the first 10 years of having the seafood restaurant open I went to France, and particularly Brittany, to pick up ideas.
There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there’s a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.
I’m open to starting restaurants anywhere as long as the produce that’s readily available is high quality. For example, I’m never doing a restaurant in Shanghai because I saw the produce available there, and it’s just not good. I won’t do a restaurant in Moscow for the same reason.
There are just some really beautiful people in the world. When you’re walking down the street, or you’re at a restaurant, someone catches your eye because they have their own look. It goes way beyond what they’re wearing – into their mannerisms, the way they smile, or just the way they hold themselves.
Even if you can’t afford to travel the world, you can take your children to the museum, zoo or local park. And don’t be afraid to take them to grown-up spots. Eating out in a restaurant teaches children how to be quiet and polite and gives them the pleasure of knowing you trust them to behave.
I learned from my first restaurant: Make customers happy, make sure the customer comes back again. And automatically, success has followed me.
I went to the Paradise Restaurant on 49th Street and Broadway which was where they were playing, and I sat in.
When you go out for a good meal, chances are that there will be a deep fat fryer in the kitchen. Every Michelin star restaurant will have one.
I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
The best Chipotle restaurant managers get the title ‘restaurateur’ and a $10,000 bonus for each person they hire who starts as crew and goes on to become a manager.
I have the restaurant, too. I serve Southwest, barbecue.
Munchery is a full stack, end-to-end meal provider that specializes in delivery. It isn’t a restaurant, and it isn’t a delivery service.
In the restaurant business, if you break even, you’re lucky. It’s a really hard business, it’s a survival business.
It’s easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
A plate of food hits the table, lands right in front of you. One of two things happens. Either you sit up and look at it and react to it, or nothing happens. If nothing happens then that restaurant is stuck in mediocrity forever.
When I was 13, I had my first job with my dad carrying shingles up to the roof. And then I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant. And then I got a job in a grocery store deli. And then I got a job in a factory sweeping Cheerio dust off the ground.
In the restaurant business, as opposed to the theater, center orchestra is an 8 P. M. reservation. Orchestra on the side is 7 or 8:30. Mezzanine is 6 and 9. But people don’t take it personally when they call the theater and can’t get what they want.
When I was in the restaurant and bar business, I followed a rule, which was that the places that I opened were places that I wanted to go to.
I’ve never bribed my way into a restaurant. I’ve never slipped a C-note or greased a palm. In truth, I’ve never even considered it. I’ve assumed, of course, that people do such things.
I was a hostess in a restaurant in New York when I was 21, and I was too good of an employee. I was putting most of my energy into that instead of acting. But my father told my sister and me to look at whatever needed to be done and do that job well, no matter what it was.
While the set-up of my home kitchen looks very different from that of a restaurant, theres one thing that has remained from my years as a line cook: the stack of sizzle platters thats always by my side. And its not going anywhere.
Country town to the city heart, in every corner of the globe you’ll find a Chinatown, a Chinese restaurant or an Asian grocer. From this vast and ancient culture, we credit noodles, dumplings, rice, countless spices and cooking techniques to have enriched every culture that they’ve landed in.
When I first decided to open a restaurant, I was turned down by several banks. It was the late 80’s and many restaurants were failing. I refused to give up because I knew I had a good concept.
