When we manage a restaurant, we start making money from the first day. When we own a place, it's often five years before we earn the first penny that is clean of debt.
In one respect, it's easier to open a restaurant in New York because you get more media attention than anywhere else. Almost everyone will try a new place once, irrespective of the reviews, because it's a spectator sport.
When I grew up in Pittsburgh in my parents' restaurant, I was almost like a country bumpkin.
In any restaurant of this caliber, the chefs are in the same position, building relationships.
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.
I wanted to disprove the notion that you couldn't open a great restaurant in a casino.
At the restaurant, we strive to create an excellent experience for our guests, and in the kitchen, we could not do this without having access to the best ingredients, equipment and tools, including Victorinox Cutlery.
The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant.
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.
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.
Chalkboards being used inside the restaurant seem to be a good sign that the proprietors are proud of their food, and that's kind of nice, actually - it's a nice personal touch.
When we show up in a city, we ask, 'Where's the best restaurant? What's the best beer?' You start doing that, and you get exposed to a lot of great stuff.
The livelihood of the restaurant is dependent upon getting the word out.
Actors really are superstitious. You can always spot a group of actors at a restaurant. They're the ones spitting on their knuckles and hurling salt everywhere.
I think perfect dates involve walking a lot, and not a bunch of driving around in cars. Ideally, you can walk together and go to a restaurant, and then walk from there to another nice place - this is, I guess, because of really great dates that I've had with my wife here in Portland.
There's only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing. Sometimes you can avoid a traffic violation. But the only time it really matters is in the emergency room with your kids. That's when you want to be noticed, because it's very easy to get forgotten in an ER.
You'll always find me at a good sushi spot. Once, at a restaurant, a cook came out from the kitchen and asked for a picture with me. That was flattering.
But it's really hard to eat good when you're traveling because you see fast food and you want to go to this restaurant and that restaurant.
I'm a Hall of Famer, and I can go outside today and go to a restaurant or wherever, and somebody will come up to me and say, 'Practice? We talkin' 'bout practice?' Man, I am a Hall of Famer, and that's all you can think about?
I was about 7 and my family was eating at a restaurant when we saw my first Elvis impersonator by total accident.
I've made money in real estate, hotel, and restaurant investments.
Every restaurant needs to have a point of view.
I hate to say 'chain restaurant,' but we're sort of a corporation now. How do we defy that concept, where people assume each restaurant can't be good?
Sure, I like my short hair. It also quadrupled my rate. I did get sick of seeing it on everybody, though - every stewardess, every salesclerk, and in every restaurant.
If I wanted to know what a certain future would feel like to me, I would find someone who is already living that future. If I wonder what it's like to become a lawyer or marry a busy executive or eat at a particular restaurant, my best bet is to find people who have actually done these things and see how happy they are.
I had a job at this French restaurant, and I hated it. I don't like serving; I don't like getting people ketchup.
If I go to a restaurant, other people stare. The meal is ruined.
My grandmother was a chef, and she taught me to cook. One day I want a restaurant, a small Italian grill. That's my aspiration.
I bask in the affection I get on the streets. I recently went into the kitchen of a restaurant to meet the cooks. They were people I didn't know, but what a joy it was meet them! Such experiences wouldn't happen if I were doing only one kind of cinema.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with this idea of opening a restaurant back in Indiana on a little pond. The guests would order their dinner and then take a little boat out with a colored flag on the front of it. When the matching color of the flag on their boat went up on a flag pole, their dinner was ready!
I can judge a restaurant by its bread: it winds me up that a lot of places buy pre-packed ones in and don't bother putting them in the oven to crisp them up again. And you shouldn't put bread on a side-plate: it needs to be pushed back into the centre of the table.
I talk to my fan club members, and I blog, and they know what's going on. 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.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.
There's always been something a little pathetic for me at the work parties I've attended, especially thinking back to the restaurants I worked in. I remember a Christmas party in which we all got free T-shirts with the restaurant on the front and our names on the back.
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.
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.
