The best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst.
In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.
But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.
I do have a thing for eating out; that's one of life's great middle-age pleasures.
Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.
Anything that improves people's expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is definitely a win for the good guys.
Gus: "It tastes like..." Me: "Food." Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?" Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table." Gus: "Nicely phrased." Gus's father: "Our children are weird." My dad: "Nicely phrased."
Whosoever says truffle, utters a grand word, which awakens erotic and gastronomic ideas.
Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.
Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it's filet mignon.
The whole banquet is in the first spoonful.
If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
I'm sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.
Caviar used to be my drug of choice, but since my husband is on a no-salt diet, I've kind of given it up. I still have dreams of sitting down and gorging, though. I love it with a good vodka; I don't like it with champagne.
When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.
At the end of the day it's just food, isn't it? Just food.
Mushrooms can be very fancy. It's the closest you can get to eating dirt.
Presently, we were aware of an odour gradually coming towards us, something musky, fiery, savoury, mysterious, - a hot drowsy smell, that lulls the senses, and yet enflames them, - the truffles were coming.
