One overseas diner told me that he was not going to come back to Hong Kong, but after visiting my restaurant he saw that there was more to our city than he originally thought, and he would therefore be back. That made me proud.
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.
In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.
On any given day, I want to know which restaurant near me is serving knoephla or chicken dumpling soup.
Some of the things I think I learned from that were very educational as far as just paying bills - the basics in dealing with a restaurant like that. It was just life - the education involved in running the organization, even on a small level.
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.
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.
'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.
When I first started playing, the only time you knew you would get photographed was if the paparazzi were outside a smart restaurant in town.
We came over when I was 8 from Taiwan. That was my life: going to school, working at the restaurant, playing basketball.
I was a busboy, a waiter, a manager, a sommelier... like... all of it from a family-run Polish restaurant, with, like, grandmas in the basement hand-making pierogies, to working at Bond Street for a while. I've done it all.
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 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 have new music coming out. I'm working on some television shows. I still do a tremendous amount of concerts. I'm doing my restaurant. I got a club coming in New York. The restaurant is called Doug E. The club is called Fresh.
I don't really eat a lot of fast food, ever, but if I had to eat at one fast food restaurant, it'd be In-N-Out.
I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth.