To be fair, restaurant culture has always been about bragging rights – such is the elitist nature of food. It’s just that social media makes it that much easier for everyone to play the game.
I’m gonna open a small restaurant on the beach in Mexico. We’re only gonna have a few tables, and we’re only gonna cook what’s fresh that day. We’re gonna get back to the basics… Real food for real people.
If it took seven days to make a living with a restaurant, then we needed to be in some other line of work.
Having been in the restaurant business, our job in the restaurant business is to be responsible for our customers’ happiness. It’s the nature of the hospitality business. You need to take care of people. You take care of customers above all others. Customers are your lifeblood.
Everyday I eat some soup. This is part of our culture – our mommies and grammies make it, and at any restaurant in Serbia, you can go in and find some soup. There might be minestrone, butternut squash, chicken noodle soup, tomato soup, mushroom soup, lamb soup. Whatever you can find, you can make a soup with that.
I lost about 60 pounds. I don’t really have a moment specifically that made me do it. I remember little things, like, when I was in Japan, I remember looking around at the portion sizes of a fast food restaurant and being like, ‘Well, this has something to do with it.’ Americans definitely eat too much.
I was raised by my grandparents, and they always made sure that I had a pencil and some paper, whether we were in the car or at a restaurant. While they were enjoying a nice meal, I would be sitting there drawing funny pictures of the waitress.
It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they’ll keep coming back.
If people want to wear a mask into a Walmart or into a restaurant or into any other business – not only should they be allowed to do so; in many instances, they ought to be credited for doing so.
Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It’s like wearing the crown of ‘Restaurant Man’ without being ‘Restaurant Man.’ You’re trying to run the business, but you’re running the ranch without riding the big horse.
I was a guy who wanted to become famous. There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly. You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant. I didn’t think what the repercussions would be.
I had talked for years about doing a restaurant with Rocky Dudum, who’s been my friend since I first came to San Francisco. Then Rocky’s son, Jeff, said he wanted to design it, so he traveled around the country to sports restaurants like Mickey Mantle’s and Michael Jordan’s, and he came up with a great concept.
Le Cirque at first was one of those general French restaurants in town, which were cooking more or less the same food. At Le Cirque, I wanted to do something different while respecting the foundation of the restaurant. I did that through the menu.
I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin’ restaurant type – and what I had at home never measured up to that.
Growing up, my dad owned a restaurant in Washington, DC, and food was something I was passionate about. But when I finally got into it, I felt like it was so late in the game; that’s why I worked seven days a week at Craft and Mercer Kitchen. I wanted to see how far I could take it.
My family never took vacations; we never traveled together. We never did anything. My spring breaks were going home to help my dad at the restaurant.
I went to a restaurant and sat at the bar and ate by myself. I have my iPad, which is my favorite instrument of all time. I talked to a few people next to me. I’m just trying to be out. It’s a little bit scary.
Maybe I’m like acts of Congress or your favorite Chinese restaurant – you don’t really want to know what’s going on behind the door. I’m a real study in contrast, I expect, looking from without. But it adds up to what you get on stage.
I think everybody at some point in time has thought to themselves, ‘I have a really great idea for a restaurant.’
After I got my first job in a restaurant, it just clicked. I was like, this is it, this is what I want to do.
The disparity between a restaurant’s price and food quality rises in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill.
I was born in 1937, in Yakima, Washington, the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas. My sister Jenepher was born in 1939 and my brother Peter in 1940. My parents had moved to Yakima from Seattle to open a small restaurant, The Lucas Ice Creamery.
I had my first child at 21, my first restaurant at 24.
Whether it’s at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn’t have to happen in a military installation by any stretch of the imagination.
Hipsters being hipsters, coolness and inaccessibility have overtaken all other concerns. Food no longer matters. Even burgers are too foody. All a restaurant needs to be now is a place with bricks and exposed plumbing where you can take an edgy selfie that will make your friends feel like they are missing out.
I’ve known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.
It’s tough, you know: I’m a chef first, and a restaurant owner, way before I was ever on Food Network, and it’s a tough business.
The typical jobs that a lower-skilled immigration worker might do might be construction work, it might be hospitality work, it might be restaurant work, or might be not working at all and just going onto the welfare system if there isn’t a job for that individual.
I always say the best Thai restaurant in Dubai is my home.
I make fun wherever I go… If I go to a restaurant by myself, rest assured, people will be talking about it. I always have a great deal of fun being with people. It’s part of the journey.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
I can go to any restaurant without a reservation, but while I’m there, everyone’s gonna be staring.
I lived in Cuba – I was there for one year in the 1950s. We built the famous nightclub, which is still there, Tropicana, and a restaurant, Montecatini, that I opened is still there. I was there when the U.S. ambassador said everyone must leave because Castro was arriving the next morning.
I have great fans that come up to me, and they just want me to sign stuff. I have a restaurant in Beverly Hills – Prego – and they come in all the time asking for me to see when I’m going to show up. That doesn’t really scare me.
There’s nothing like a home-cooked meal – nothing! When people ask me what the best restaurant in L.A. is, I say, ‘Uh, my house.’ It’s more intimate. Food can connect people in a forever sort of way.
My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh.
My first memory in life is grilling my thumb to the griddle in our restaurant on Cape Cod.
I’m from a Cuban family, so we’re used to talking really loud. You come to a Cuban restaurant anywhere in Miami, and we’re practically screaming at each other.
When I was a teenager, my parents made me take a part-time job at the local Black Eyed Pea, which was a home-cooked-food family restaurant.
I realized I didn’t want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen.
I learned all my life skills working in a restaurant. How to have a relationship, manage, develop a brand, dress people, make people confident – everything.
I was working at a restaurant, I booked the role in ‘Twilight,’ put in my two weeks’ notice, got fitted, flew to Portland, filmed, and then it started getting hype. That helped me get my foot into certain doors before the movie even came out.
As a make-up artist, you always want to be in a good light, whether you’re walking down the street or in a restaurant. It is a very key element to me; you can’t apply good make-up in a bad light.
Well, I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good, everything’s cool, and you don’t necessarily want to know what’s in it. The same thing holds true with movies.
Both my parents are chefs… I grew up in a restaurant and was always surrounded by cooks. I love food.
Every restaurant in the world is owned by a Greek.
The livelihood of the restaurant is dependent upon getting the word out.
In Japan, the more expensive a restaurant is, the larger the plates and the smaller the portions. The cheaper a restaurant is, the smaller the plates and the larger the portions.
I’d love to open a restaurant that changes every month. One month it would be a mom and bar spaghetti-and-meatball, Red Sox place, and the next it would be a British pub, and everyone gets in a fight.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that’s all there was on the jukebox.
