Carla Hall Quotes

You have to think of a restaurant as a series of impressions. But what makes my job so great is there's no one answer that's right for every restaurant.

Of course, there are benefits to having prosthetics. I can make myself as tall as I want. I can wear flip-flops in the snow if I wanted to. There's benefits.

Every single project deserves a different approach.

I think my service is better than my food... I focus so much on the service.

You pick what your customers want, not what your entrenched business model may require you to do.

The chef can be very innovative, but the decision is made by the customer.

I am not very convinced with having a signature dish. The whole point of being a chef is going to a new place, adapting and curating a new menu as per the culture and community.

And every match is different: you have different opponents, different situations, different conditions. So there's no one approach that's going to work all the time.

What we strive for is how we can provide the best performance and best design, whatever the customers want.

You cannot stick with the same media strategy forever any more than you can stick with the same football tactics forever.

Being right is important. Too many great teams march off saying, 'If we build it, they will come,' and then never are able to change the idea towards something that people really want.

When you do a menu at a restaurant, you have to be the engineer of that menu. It has to be a crowd-pleaser.

Ultimately, we're in the service business. We will always have an important human element.

If I go to a restaurant, which I do often, I know what I want, and it's not on the menu half the time. Half the time, they have to adjust the menu or what they got in the back, and they'll make it for me.

The 1970s crystallized the service mantra as we now know it.

What feats of ingenuity have we not been forced to perform, at times, in order to meet our customers' wishes? Those only who have had charge of a large, modern kitchen can tell the tale.

That's what my game is built around: versatility.

I love creating new things. It's difficult to be creative once a restaurant's open. People want the same dishes. For me, the creativity is in opening a new place and starting a new menu.

I don't have any specialties. Anything I cook, I just make it special.

There are times when you can take yourself seriously and there are times when you can cut loose. It really depends on your goals and it depends on what you're promising the customer.

I used to have a five-year plan when I was younger. But that's changed. Technology is changing every day. So you have to live in the day. You have to see what the opportunities are, and go for them.

Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

Parenting cannot just be one size fits all.

If you get basics that can be switched and piece it together, that is so important.

The pace of change is so great, there is always something else going on. What that says to me is that you have to have strategic vision and peripheral vision. Strategic vision is the ability to look ahead and peripheral vision is the ability to look around, and both are important.