David Hemmings Quotes

We'll serve, on a good Saturday night six or seven thousand people in all the restaurants, and it's like, the percentages are that maybe one person's not going to like what they get. And I can't be there to fix it. I hate that. We're in this business to make things that please people.

'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it's the restaurant business.

Growing up as a young kid, I was in a restaurant. So, you know, I always had a very good understanding of the nuances. And in a way, that was a bad thing. Because it kind of programmed me to believe that if you're going have a restaurant, this is what you need to do, and this is the way it's going to be run.

My first job was as a waitress, and I waitressed for a long, long time. I was a very bad waitress. I didn't care if people had ketchup or if they were allergic to fish. It really didn't bother me either way. I didn't care. I was bad, but it was a good way to make money. And it's a fun job if you are working with fun people.

If a customer walks out without shoes, you really want to find out why. 'It didn't fit' is not good enough.

For me, good service is efficient and discreet; it's that critical balance. As soon as the client sits down, the communication flow has to start. Customers need to feel that the waiters are supervised - that there's a system in place.

I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.

Some of the greatest businesses operating from a deeper purpose have a real commitment to service, like Four Seasons, Joie de Vivre hotels, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue.

I don't know anything about the hotel business.

Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.

I grew up in the motel business, and it evolved into hotels.

We're all in the service business. If you hire me to do a job I expect everybody else to be where I am. A little bit of crazy is good. It keeps things - balanced.

I just figure if it has my name on it, and I want to make people feel good about wearing it, I can't pass it off.

I started in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Birmingham. I wanted to be a sponge, wanted to learn and progress. I knew I didn't want to work in a hotel forever, but I had some good teachers there.

It's a very, very difficult space to operate in, the restaurant business-it requires a lot of human beings to intersect at just the right place to make it all work out.

I think the only thing I would've ever been any good at was probably being a pub landlord. I've thought of that a couple of times.

My organization, my colleagues and I, are paid to run hotels in good times and fair times. We're professionals. That's what we do. I don't give a damn about the short-term market implications.

I think I'm in the service business. I mean, our sandwiches are pretty good; I don't know if they're extraordinary. But our service is.

Obviously, the hotel is related to my name, so my mom makes sure the staff, the service, the cleaning part of it is 100 out of 100. Not 99, 100 out of 100. We've got great reviews because of that. That's why a lot of people want to stay out our place, because we provide a lot of good services.

It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.

...the waiter has to come from a place of concentration, subjugation, and complete, limitless service. Nothing is too much trouble. The customer is always right, even when he is wrong. There is no limit to what you will do to serve while that person is in your bar and in your care.

The service in L.A. is the best. You don't get sarcastic, surly, fed-up waiters and waitresses like you do in England. They're good at their job and they're there for the customer. The only depressing thing is a lot of them have written more screenplays than me.

Many years ago I sent an old, beloved jacket to a cleaner, the Sycamore Cleaners. It was a leather jacket covered in Guinness and blood and marmalade, one of those jobs... and it came back with a little note pinned to it, and on the note it said, 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' So that will do for me. That can go on my tombstone.

A hotel is a place that keeps the manufacturers of 25-watt bulbs in business.