Gourmet Experience Quotes

For summer soirees, I recommend being bold. Add a flavorful herb or a fresh, exotic fruit or vegetable to transport your guests to another place.

The Ritz Hotel has never yet provided game of such wondrous flavor as the bird plucked and half-cooked over the small boys' camp fire.

I've never said I was a chef - I think I make great food. I will never open a restaurant to do, like, tasting courses.

Gourmet: Usually little more than a glutton festooned with credit cards.

In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.

I think there are two ways of eating, or cooking. One is restaurant food and one is home food. I believe that people have started making food that is easy that you want to eat at home. When you go out to a restaurant, you want to be challenged, you want to taste something new, you want to be excited. But when you eat at home, you want something that's delicious and comforting. I've always liked that kind of food - and frankly, that's also what I want to eat when I go out to restaurants, but maybe that's me.

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 spent time at my grandfather Dino's gourmet store where he brought in chefs from Naples to cook. I thought of them as rock stars.

Reservations and cloth napkins are really minor pinnacles in the high sierra of the New York lunch. The zenith, the Mount Whitney of lunches, the noon meal at which all local lines of force converge [is] the Bar Room of the Four Seasons.

Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.

Aakhri Pasta is an extension of Sajid Khan's personality.

As life's pleasures go, food is second only to sex. Except for salami and eggs. Now that's better than sex, but only if the salami is thickly sliced.

One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I'm in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant's chefs.

In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

Some dishes are of such indisputable excellence that their appearance alone is capable of arousing a level-headed man's degustatory powers. All those who, when presented with such a dish, show neither the rush of desire, nor the radiance of ecstasy, may justly be deemed unworthy of the honors of the sitting, and its related delights.

Whosoever says truffle, utters a grand word, which awakens erotic and gastronomic ideas.

I think my level of cuisine was pretty good even before I came to France, but it's the wine here that's really improved my palette - when I have it, anyway. It's meant to be good for you, right?

The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.

I like to go out to different restaurants in New York. I'm a restaurant junkie.

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

I have an impressionable palate. A well-worded menu or beautifully presented dish excites me. I get a great deal of pleasure just thinking about food.

The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.

One of life's finest things is enjoying your food.

I love food: biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken-fried steak with white gravy... but my favorite dish is my wife's beanie weenie cornbread casserole. It's so good. It sounds stupid, but if you eat it, it's heaven. Of course, it's only something you can eat if you've got a lot of money.