High-End Dining Quotes

Customers should complain more. You know, food's expensive nowadays. And these sommeliers come along with their thousand-page wine list and practically throw it in your lap. They're all businessmen and know that customers get intimidated and buy something overpriced. I say, always put them on the spot. 'You come back to me with a red wine at $30, $40. Come back to me with a choice.'

I don't like venison or sushi - I don't want to eat what some people think are 'luxurious' foods.

I love Vegas. God knows that I know how to find my way around the buffets in Las Vegas.

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

Fine dining is an occasional treat for most people.

I've actually eaten in The Ivy in London. I love their shepherd's pie.

In an avant-garde cooking restaurant, it's the experience that's the difference.

I opened Leith's in Notting Hill in 1969 and it eventually worked its way into being awarded a Michelin star. At the time, there were a few women running small bistros - but I was the first woman to have a 'serious,' expensive restaurant.

I discovered that the world of the finest restaurants was something akin to the world of the Mafia.

My mother certainly loves caviar, but I think that's generational - they grew up thinking it's romantic or sophisticated or something.

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey.

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.

Outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Standard flies only when the reigning monarch is in residence. Sadly, there's no similar flag outside The Woods Jupiter, which Tiger opened in the summer of 2015, spending a reported $8 million to make an upscale sports bar-and-restaurant in his image.

Whenever I'd go to restaurants, the main chef came out and was cooking for me, and he's asking me how the food is. I get, like, VIP service, so it's weird.

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

'Fine dining.' I'd love to know who coined the term and whether they meant it to be as offputting as it is. The words evoke an idea of phoney refinement, of needless flummery, snooty waiters, and an atmosphere designed to intimidate the customer.

I am not interesting in making money. I go to the most expensive restaurant in Boston to have dinner. It is where billionaires come to eat. Even if I become richer, I will still have to go there to eat. After some time, money doesn't make a difference.

If you like foie gras, that doesn't mean you no longer need a regular steak.

We are thrilled with the response we are getting to Le Cirque at The Leela Palace New Delhi. Our goal is to bring a luxury dining experience consistent with international standards of excellence to the expanding and discerning clientele in India.

Give me a platter of choice finnan haddie, freshly cooked in its bath of water and milk, add melted butter, a slice or two of hot toast, a pot of steaming Darjeeling tea, and you may tell the butler to dispense with the caviar, truffles and nightingales' tongues.

People are bored of these 12-course gastronomic menus. They want affordable glamour.

If you're a New Yorker, there are two things that are most important: a car and a washer and dryer. Literally everyone else in America has those things! It's so weird to them that these are our luxuries. You can eat at Per Se every night, but I don't have a car or washer and dryer!

Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips.

I eat leftover caviar by hand, with baked potato, like peasants.

I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be - and there has to always be - room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.