Dining Culture Quotes

What's sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food.

In Japan, the more expensive a restaurant is, the larger the plates and the smaller the portions. The cheaper a restaurant is, the smaller the plates and the larger the portions.

She smiled again. "Do you like cat?" she said. "Yes," said Richard. "I quite like cats." Anaesthesia looked relieved. "Thigh?" she asked, "or breast?

I think in France, for example, we can say whatever we want about the French, but going out and dining is more about the intellectual moment to share with the people you dine with than trying to figure out what the chef did with that little piece of salmon or lobster and all that.

When I first came to Australia, one thing that struck me was how everything closed early. Singapore is very much a 24/7 place. You can get good food any time of the day - in the middle of the night, even.

I don't eat bad stuff too much but I have my glass of wine as I am French and it would be insulting not to.

The fate of a nation depends on the way that they eat.

A gourmet meal without a glass of wine just seems tragic to me somehow.

I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.

I'm not sure that some of the food purists are in touch with what really goes on in American households.

Fish must swim thrice--once is the water, a second time in the sauce, and a third time in wine in the stomach.

We've become such a restaurant society.

I prefer the Chinese method of eating. You can do anything at the table except arm wrestle.

I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be - and there has to always be - room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.

Many a man has been dined out of his religion, and his politics, and his manhood, almost.

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

Steakhouses sort of have this old-school nature to them; they're like museums full of good food. It's fun hearing the waiter share his expertise on the different cuts of beef and how they're going to cut up your baked potato.

In more day-to-day restaurants, things have undergone a seismic change towards informality and sharing, which has been years in the making. Nowadays, people don't want just one dish; they want to order lots of things and they want to do it in fun places, places that give them an experience. The experience that a restaurant needs to offer is no longer just based around the food.

I don't like people's table manners. That really puts you off eating food.

If an earthquake were to engulf England tomorrow, the English would manage to meet and dine somewhere among the rubbish, just to celebrate the event.

Gramercy Tavern appeared on the cover of New York Magazine the day we opened, and it was five deep at the bar with people who were not necessarily here to dine. They just wanted to kinda sniff out the hot, new restaurant.

If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.

Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch.

Nothing is more pleasant than to see a pretty woman, her napkin well placed under her arms, one of her hands on the table, while the other carries to her mouth, the choice piece so elegantly carved.

I think for diners, it is about crafting an identity around food which we have not really had in a mainstream way in this country. So there is a mass movement of people who identify themselves through their food preferences or even just that they prioritize food - that's where we get this idea of being a foodie.