Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To be able to serve and to eat a whole fish, especially a trout, is part of civilized dining. This applies particularly to the young, who should take to it as soon as they can handle knife and fork; this is a fine way for them to begin taking pride in themselves and their abilities.
I was completely surrounded by religion from a young time. I was taught by my father. I engaged in discussions with him and many of these scholars who visited and came around the dining table, the lunch table, and attended many lectures with my dad. And so I learned the apprentice way.
Television in the '80s was very limited. There was no Food Network. When I opened Spago, I had the kitchen in the dining hall. It was probably the first restaurant to do so. The dining scene became more casual. All these cooking shows have transformed our profession one-hundred percent.
He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.
I find myself wanting to make music at the dining room table or in the bedroom - I'm kind of a mobile writer, so I sort of move around the house. But the attic is definitely where I can make the most noise. While everyone on the lower floors screams 'Earthquake!' But no! It's just my bass!
The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality, and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants, the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them, though, as I'm usually on the run.
I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
In 1994, when I came to PepsiCo, there were really three businesses. They were soft drinks, which included both bottling and the concentrate company. There were salted snacks - Frito Lay. And restaurants where we had, we all talk of them, Pizza Hut, KFC and a whole bunch of casual dining chains.
I simply adore getting dressed up for a special occasion. I feel incredible stepping out in luxurious fabrics and a bit of bling. That's also how I feel about special-occasion dining rooms. Because these aren't everyday spaces, they contain all sorts of drama for that once-in-a-while 'wow' event.
Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, 'Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.' That's when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on - no matter what - sounding like I was just talking to the people.
I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars 'device-free zones.' We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work.
If I host something, even if it's just dinner at my house, I like the event to move. So that means cocktails in the family room, and then moving outside and having appetizers on the patio, and then moving to dinner at the dining table. It's just the idea of the event being curated to every little detail.
One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I'm in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant's chefs.
It will have to be a universal movement, and that will never be... because the big-league game, as it is now, is overrun with Southern blood. These fellows would have to stop at the same hotels, eat in the same dining rooms, and sleep in the same train compartments with the colored players. There'd be trouble for sure.
April Fool is widely considered one of the top yachts ever built by Feadship, the famed Dutch shipyard. Launched in 2006, April Fool has a huge master stateroom, a Jacuzzi on the fourth-level sun deck, a sauna, and sprawling outdoor dining lounge. The yacht first came onto the market in 2011 with a price of $69.5 million.
The menu should be part of the entertainment, part of the dining experience. It's kind of like reading the 'Playbill' when you go to the theater. It should be an alluring and interactive document. Does it have burn marks on it from the candle? If you ever get a greasy menu with food stains on it, it's time to run like hell.
I don't ever think of myself as coming from a particular class because my father was working class but made his living as a newspaper foreign correspondent - someone of no fixed abode, as he used to say - who was as comfortable dining with the Mountbattens in India as he was having a pint with the boys. He was very gregarious.
People have started consuming very privatised content. Initially, it used to be community viewing at the cinema, where you look forward to ice cream in the interval and then on to your dressing and dining rooms. Today, it's gotten so privatised that you're watching things on your mobile phone. That is a massive amount of change.
I do have a treadmill desk in my office, and for a while, I would walk on it while checking email and going through jokes. I haven't walked on it in probably four months. Now it's more of an upright dining table for me. At some point, moss will grow over it, birds will build nests, and nature will reclaim the treadmill as its own.
The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel.
Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.
I still have a fondness for books. Many a time I will be antiquing, and I'll say, 'What's that old-timey curio over there? What is that, a candlestick telephone, one of those old pull-chain toilets? Oh no, it's a book. I used to help make those things! I will buy it and use it to decorate my chain of casual family-dining restaurants.
We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.
In our fast-forward culture, we have lost the art of eating well. Food is often little more than fuel to pour down the hatch while doing other stuff - surfing the Web, driving, walking along the street. Dining al desko is now the norm in many workplaces. All of this speed takes a toll. Obesity, eating disorders and poor nutrition are rife.
