I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.
I'll never understand those greasy little deep-fried wings most bars serve.
Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it.
I don't think it's a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef's a fat pig.
On New York's Palm restaurant: Their steaks are often good, but the lobsters-with claws the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's forearms-are as glazed and tough as most of the customers.
The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.
Cuisine Nouvelle was just a concept, and one which, crucially, the English managed to get wrong. I mean, if you run a restaurant, you've got to feed people, not make pretty little pictures on plates to make up for your lack of ability.
I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.
I don't like it when I go to a restaurant and I'm lectured from the menu.
The Cheesecake Factory's not that bad.
The disparity between a restaurant's price and food quality rises in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill.
I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.
One of the things that happens to you if you write about restaurants - one of the reasons restaurant critics are the real heroes - is that whenever anyone has a grievance about any aspect of the business, they tell you about it.
I don't think I've actually ever had cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. I've had the Steak Diane. I don't like cheesecake!
Find what's hot, find what's just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.
While you can have the cult of the celebrity chef, the food still must taste good.
