You know, my brother won't walk out of a restaurant with me anymore because he doesn't want to be linked to me as my new 'mystery man.' Same with my close guy friends.
The one thing I like about being a celebrity more than anything is being able to get into any restaurant I want.
It's nice when you happen into a vegetarian restaurant, but really, you can find veggie food everywhere. Pastas, salads, a vegetable plate - I actually like ordering vegetarian in a meaty place because it gives them a jolt to come up with something and recognize the demand.
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.'
My parents own a restaurant in downtown Oakland - Garden House - and I started working there at 8. I'd work the cash register while people looked at me skeptically. Free child labor!
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.
In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.
I always have melodies flowing in my head - whether I'm just at home, at the mall, at a restaurant or wherever. I'm always humming along to the random melodies that form in my head. My friends always ask me, 'What are you singing?' and I'll be like, 'I don't know!'
I never have crushes, apart from my husband Michael, I guess, because I was obsessed with him, and I didn't speak to him for nearly a year. I kept going into the restaurant where he worked to look at him.
A good restaurant just makes me giddy. I can go all day with anticipation just knowing where I'm going to eat. Sometimes it's well planned, sometimes it's spontaneous. Either way works.
I have no pretension that I belong in D.C. I mean, I have to be cautious on how we do our restaurant.
The last time I ordered soup in a restaurant was - well, let me see - possibly never. That's because in my mind, soup is something to be made and eaten at home, ideally with a cuddly animal at your feet in front of a blazing fireplace while the wind whips outside.
Had I not been an actor, I would have been counting cash at my father's restaurant or supervising activities in the kitchen. I did it for a year when I was in college. I put on 10 kgs and then it hit me that I couldn't do that anymore.
One afternoon I decided, with a couple of friends, to eat out. We set out hunting for a good restaurant and couldn't find a single place because everything was shut. Finally we had to have idlis at a place and that too at 5 P. M. I didn't know Goa totally shuts down in the afternoon.
When I was 11 or 12 - a young boy in Japan - one of my older brothers took me to a sushi restaurant. I had never been to one, and it was very memorable. Back then, sushi was expensive and hard to come by, not like today, when there's a sushi restaurant on every street corner and you can buy it in supermarkets.
The classic French blanch-and-cool technique I learned at Chez Panisse yields the kind of brilliant, picturesque vegetables we all want to see on restaurant plates. Long-cooked foods, on the other hand, fall firmly into the 'ugly but good' camp of the Tuscan cucina povera, where flavor far outshines looks.
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.