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.
Look around you in any restaurant, and you will see couples, families, and friends glued to their phones.
My way of discovering of what I like was to create a restaurant list and eat my way through it, and I call it my 'inner fat girl bucket list.'
Wherever I live, if there isn't a restaurant I want to go to of a certain type, then I open it. That's all. For selfish reasons.
I was raised in restaurants. My parents opened their first restaurant, Buonavia, in Queens when I was just 3. This business has always been my way of life. As a kid, home was reserved only for sleeping. After school, you could find my sister and I helping out at the family restaurant.
Days off are few and far between in the restaurant business. But on an hour off, I like to have a glass of wine with my wife.
Most of my recipes start life in the domestic kitchen, and even those that start out in the restaurant kitchen have to go through the domestic kitchen.
I'm a restaurant junkie.
I take apart restaurant menus everywhere I go. I kind of tick off a lot of chefs in restaurants because I'll say, 'You can keep all of the sauce, keep all of that garbage - just give me that piece of fish. Forget the salad dressing, I don't need all of that extra stuff. Just give it to me straight up, and I'll eat it.'
At my restaurant, we made a dessert called 'milk and honey.' It's milk ice cream that looks like a snowball, and then you cut into it, and honey runs out.
In the restaurant business, there's the concept of pivot. Pivot to the stove, pivot to the refrigerator.
You wouldn't have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.
I lived in L.A. for four years, and basically, every corner you go to, or in a restaurant, you can't even find people from the same background.
I absolutely love the restaurant industry.
I learned from my first restaurant: Make customers happy, make sure the customer comes back again. And automatically, success has followed 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.
I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
Obviously, I don't like to use my new celebrity status as a way to get first class service at a restaurant. For me, it's just more special to use it for good.
I'm meticulous about tasting everything at the restaurant, so I taste all the preparations before lunch and dinner. That means tasting around 50 dishes twice. There are times when I think I can't taste another thing.
When you work on a Jerry Bruckheimer film, you can be sure of two things: no production value will be spared, and the catering will be as fine as any really really good restaurant. Jerry is an amazing producer, with a commitment to his films second to none.
It's always good to leave a little space between eating and lying down in bed at the end of the day. The best thing to eat at night in general is protein, fat, and vegetables. For instance, if you're in an Italian restaurant, have chicken piccata with lemon-butter sauce, lots of vegetables, and a big salad. You'll sleep like a baby.
I love putting on a red lip. I don't do it so much for events - somehow, I don't seem to get it right - but when I just go to the pub or to a restaurant or something, I just put a red lip on.
I wanted people to come to the restaurant and feel at home, so I put it in a house.
You would never see anyone go to a restaurant in Milan wearing a jumpsuit!
My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
I'm one of those people who has a toothbrush and toothpaste with me at all times. After lunch, I'll brush my teeth in a restaurant bathroom!
Music has become so ever-present in our lives. You can't walk through a shopping mall or go into a restaurant without what we used to call Muzak.
I've been in L.A., but I wasn't acting. I didn't know that I wanted to act, so I was in L.A. but working at a restaurant seven days a week and trying to figure out what I wanted to do and all that kind of stuff.
I love steakhouses. When I'm in Chicago, I know there's a Gibsons that's open late. 13 Coins at Sea-Tac Airport in Washington is a gourmet restaurant I love.
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.
I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant.
Catfish's mild taste adapts well to a wide array of flavors, especially strong assertive ones, which is why you used to see it 'blackened' Cajun style on so many restaurant menus - a trick which soon became a tired cliche.
I walk into a restaurant, and people stare as though I've just landed from another planet. Every time I walk out in public, it's like the alien freak show has arrived. It does have its advantages. I hardly ever get bothered by the paparazzi, probably because of some of the more edgy characters I've played in movies.
I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.
A quarter century of running a restaurant - that's a long time to do one thing.
