Restaurant Industry Quotes

As a teenager, I spent my days at the beach and nights cooking in Long Island restaurants.

I was a waitress years ago when I was first trying to become an actress, waiting tables in New York City.

I used to be a chef.

I got fired when I was a dishwasher at Denny's. That set me back a little bit. You don't realize how important dishwashers are until you do the job.

Way back in the day, I used to cook for Thomas Keller at Rakel in New York City. Keller is a down to earth, kind, supportive person. I wish people could see that.

'Triple D' is not going anywhere. I enjoy highlighting my brothers and sisters in the business.

Whether you were talking about Pillsbury, Burger King, Godfather's, the National Restaurant Association, in each one of those situations, I had a daunting problem that I had to solve. And I used the same business principles to approach the problem and, more importantly, solve the problem in every one of the situations.

My girlfriend works at Hooters. In the kitchen.

Fifteen years ago, France was the promised land of cooking. So I looked at a map, found five restaurants and faxed them to ask for a job. Within five minutes, I got a reply from the then three- star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier.

You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.

I started my cooking 'career' aged 15, almost 20 years ago. At the time it was quite a shock suddenly working 75 to 80 hours a week, without time to play football or other sports.

I think I could be a cook. Everybody always says I'm good, though I think it's quite gruelling as a profession.

When I used to work at Friday's, in a restaurant, that endless appetizer, that was my worst enemy as a server. Oh my god.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was cooking with two guys who became celebrity chefs, if you will. I became their sous chef for awhile. We'd go to all the big names in Hollywood.

I was a hostess, a waitress, a cafe manager, and a prep chef. For one job, I had to wear a hat shaped like a head of garlic.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

Being a cook doesn't necessarily mean you are a competitor.

I was watching TV and saw the 'Emeril' show, and it spoke to me. I went out and started researching the culinary world and chefs that I knew nothing about. Then I moved to New York and went to culinary school, and everything just fit like a glove. It's been on ever since.

The food business is very tough, but there's also a lot of love and very giving.

You don't go into being a chef for the money.

Having been in the restaurant business, our job in the restaurant business is to be responsible for our customers' happiness. It's the nature of the hospitality business. You need to take care of people. You take care of customers above all others. Customers are your lifeblood.

Being a chef would be too much hard work.

The girls, like, in we'll say Hooters, have less clothing than the girls I worked with in those days. We thought it was wild when they just wore little bells and so forth. But today, in restaurants, some of the waitresses almost work in the nude, you know, to get business.

I grew up around food and in a restaurant, so it never dawned on me that this was a thing to do; it just was. Then I found it as a profession in my mid-twenties after years of bad decisions and depression. The first step was going to the bookstore and learning about this craft. Then applying in kitchens and just getting to work.

Very good cooks who are employed as 'chefs' rarely refer to themselves as 'chefs.' They refer to themselves as 'cooks.'