Restaurant Business Quotes

In the restaurant business, you never want to have enemies, whereas it seems that many politicians judge their success by how high their enemies are and whether they can show that they can hold their ground and give a punch for every punch they take.

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.

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

My mom, who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years, is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.

If you're a person who says yes most of the time, you'll find yourself in the hotel business and the restaurant business.

A couple of months ago, I was down in Florida for the Food and Wine Festival. And this journalist grabbed me and said, 'How does it feel to be a TV guy? You're no longer in the restaurant business.' And I laughed. I asked him, 'How long do you think it takes me to do a season?' He said, 'Well, 200 days.' And I was like, '200 days? Try 20!'

Sirio Maccioni is the perfect Maestro. He does it all: great food, great entertainment, and always with a room full of the best people. He's the only person I could ever imagine going into the restaurant business with!

[On entering the restaurant business:] Food has the dubious advantage of being legitimate, and one's customers somehow manage to live longer without sex than food, if you call that living.

Days off are few and far between in the restaurant business. But on an hour off, I like to have a glass of wine with my wife.

There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that's always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in the military.

As a restaurateur, my job is to basically control the chaos and the drama. There's always going to be chaos in the restaurant business.

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference.

I was told I had to go to business school to succeed. I gave it a shot, but eventually dropped out to bootstrap a restaurant with just a Visa card and a $20,000 line of credit. Everyone told me restaurants were hard work (and they were right! I have so much respect for anyone in the restaurant business). I ran the restaurant for two years, sold a franchise, decided to change paths, and sold the whole operation at a modest profit.

In the clubs, the entertainment and the restaurant business are at war with each other. You get crowds that are not the greatest, and it becomes like a babysitting job, rather than doing what you want to do. I have a more deliberate pacing in my act, and having a half interested audience is death. They have to hear what I'm saying for it to pay off.

I started in the restaurant business at the age of 19 as a waitress. I loved the atmosphere and the camaraderie of the restaurant business. I loved not having to go to an office. I loved making people happy.

I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.