We go into restaurants, and people aren’t talking anymore. They’re texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we’re losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.
Oliver Reed was a great man who did things his own way. He used to come into Harveys, my restaurant in Wandsworth, and sit on the floor to have a drink before going to the table.
After a two-year stint at Stars, I wanted to start my own full-service restaurant, but I didn’t have the funds to do so, so I got a modest loan from my parents and opened Chipotle with the goal of having it fund that restaurant.
Wherever we go, in a restaurant or on the street or on a ski hill or even travelling, people come up to see us and they’re just so friendly. They always have a super story to tell us concerning his dad or when he was young and I’m always interested to get to know stories about Justin and his family.
If you are a chef, you have an incredible responsibility in this world. Don’t just open a restaurant to serve food. Include the community, and make sure that you are not taking advantage of what the planet has given us.
Forgive me but I’ve been tutted at in Paris a fair few times and I still don’t know if it’s because I was wearing Asda jeans or had the temerity to order food in a restaurant.
I find myself hoping I can get on a TV show, and then people from Oklahoma will come to my restaurant. Then I’ll be able to make enough money to open my own place.
I was a grown-up when ‘celebrity’ happened. So I knew exactly what it was like to be in line at a restaurant and watch someone famous walk in and get a table immediately. I knew I didn’t like that; I don’t want to make somebody else feel the way I felt.
One day, I just thought, if you see a bird with a broken leg, you really have the urge to do something about it and help the bird. Then, at the same time, you go to a restaurant and eat a chicken or something. It doesn’t make any sense.
One good way of measuring the mood in Israel is just how alert or relaxed the guards at every restaurant entrance appear to be.
Every time I open a new restaurant, I wake up in the middle of the night moaning about bread and water. I dream I am in the middle of the dining room, and I am panicked.
My idea of opening a restaurant was important. The whole point is that I couldn’t have been totally dependent on acting for my income… even though I want to remain in the field of entertainment forever.
I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad’s restaurant in San Diego.
I have to say I love Dempsey’s Brew Pub & Restaurant. It’s gorgeous with that Camden Yard brick surrounding it, and it just screams Baltimore. I love the Black and Orange Burger that is topped with fresh orange bell peppers, caramelized onions and sharp cheddar cheese.
Every month, about 20 tons of paper are wasted in restaurant menus alone, and so, you know, by that rationale, if you just ate your menu that was made from organic, local products, you could eliminate that paper waste.
I used to create meals for my friends. Eventually one of them suggested opening a restaurant. So I did.
There’s always room to improve in a restaurant. A restaurant is better or worse every day than it was the day before. It’s impossible not to be, because it’s human.
As an outsider to and observer of the restaurant business, one of the things I most admire about it is the risks people are willing to take.
I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.
I’m brilliant at working out numbers up to 180 but if you ask me to split a restaurant bill I’m rubbish.
I used to do my Nelson Mandela voice to blag restaurant tables in Cape Town. It rarely worked. Now what a great city that is.
I love food, and my girlfriend comes from an architecture background, so we might open up a restaurant.
I pay people very, very well – probably more than I have to. But that costs me less money in the long run because I’m not having to constantly train somebody. I pay them enough that they don’t go seeking a higher scale at the next restaurant.
I hate to be treated as if I’m invisible. I get incensed when people talk across me or refuse to catch my eye in a restaurant or shop.
But as far as Twitter, I’ll be in a restaurant and I’ll get home and somebody tweeted and they talked about what I ordered and what I was wearing. In some cases, that could be dangerous, because you don’t want everybody to know where you are every second of every day.
Working in a restaurant means being part of a family, albeit usually a slightly dysfunctional one. Nothing is accomplished independently.
Never underestimate the power of being popular in pop culture. You have to be able to do something. You can have a good seat at the restaurant, but you still have to pay for the meal. Fame is important, but to be rich is more important.
My grandfather Urey was my hero. He worked three jobs. He had a dry cleaner’s factory job in the day and a dry cleaner’s factory job at night and when that was done with that, he mopped floors in a restaurant.
I do love a good salad, so Sweetgreen has been great. But my favorite Cambridge restaurant overall is Darwin’s – that’s the greatest restaurant of all time.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet.
If I wasn’t acting, I would want to be in the food and restaurant business. I really love to cook and am fascinated by the art of cooking in general.
I like it when a man puts thought into the kind of restaurant we’re going to. That doesn’t mean it needs to be fancy – some of the best meals of my life have been having a taco on a street corner.
Sometimes in a restaurant you’ll see a lady dressed very nice, she picks up a menu or something… a little fan is always a little bit nice.
I’m not really into gourmet food; I’m the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.
Hardly any of my most memorable meals have been eaten in a restaurant, and definitely none in one of those fancy marble-floored, polished-silver establishments.
During one of his uncannily well-timed impromptu visits to my restaurant, Union Square Cafe, Pat Cetta taught me how to manage people. Pat was the owner of a storied New York City steakhouse called Sparks, and by that time, he was an old pro at running a fine restaurant.
Ruth’s Chris is my favorite restaurant, and I always order the rib eye, medium-rare.
I’m a leader at the restaurant. If I do this, the people at the restaurant will try to do better. I believe in that, and that’s the way it is.
If I’m brought the wrong order at a restaurant, I don’t send it back, because I don’t want the waiter to get mad at me.
The good news about showcasing chefs and the TV shows is they’ve attracted a lot more smart kids to the profession than 30 years ago. On the downside, though, these young chefs all say they want their own restaurant and their own TV show.
Whatever it is that’s bothering me – interacting with annoying guy at a restaurant, contemplating my age, or losing friends to illness – I’ll start to chip away at it. If you can poke holes in it, it’s not as formidable; it’s not as scary, and ultimately, it becomes another truth.
I learned more from the one restaurant that didn’t work than from all the ones that were successes.
I absolutely love the restaurant industry.
Life in the restaurant business can provide a start in the working world for young people or a stable living for many Americans and their families.
I don’t want to do anything and everything. I want to be a brand that, every time I leverage my name, I want people to feel sure that it’s going to be something good – so whether it be my movies, my perfume, my restaurant, my musical, it’ll be good work, good food and good everything.
If you go out to dinner with a group of people, pay for the dinner at a nice restaurant, for the amount of money for that dinner, you can get a John 5 Squier Telecaster and have it for the rest of your life.
My father was the first entrepreneur in the family. He started his own record label, his own restaurant. He knew that, in order to give something back to the people, he had to create.
I think I have the secret of a successful L.A. restaurant, especially now that so many Europeans live there. You have to have a place where they can see out the windows, see the world passing by. Europeans fancy that.
Restaurant critics all struggle with the difficulty of writing about eating without resorting to the word ‘delicious’ and its synonyms.
When we go to a restaurant, they don’t ask, ‘Do you want the asbestos section or the non-asbestos section?’ They do ask, ‘Do you want smoking or nonsmoking?’
