Ansara Restaurant Quotes

I know how lucky I am. I never take it for granted. In this country [USA], anything can happen - anybody can be what they want to be. All I ever wanted was to be a good husband and father, a good chef, and to have my own restaurant. And the celebrity was never expected. Wouldn't have even dared dream of it. And here I am. So anyone's dreams can come true. And I'm very, very grateful for everything that's come my way. I thank everyone who enjoys what I do. ~ Guy Fieri

My mum and dad ran a family cafe in Sligo for 35 years and worked long hours. We grew up in a very hard-working family and had a lovely atmosphere, as we lived above the restaurant. It definitely made me want to work hard, whatever I chose to do. As the baby of seven kids, I was definitely a bit spoilt. ~ Shane Filan

I was doing stand-up at a restaurant and there was a chalkboard on the street out front. It said, Soup of the Day: Cream of Asparagus. Ellen DeGeneres. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

If memory serves me correctly, and it doesn't always, Kate [DiCamillo] and I met in the fall of 2001 at the former Figlio's restaurant in Minneapolis. We were laughing within a minute of meeting - always a good sign. ~ Kate DiCamillo

When you do drugs, you count like a chemist: The numbers are wild, the formulas are easy. Then, when you try to get clean, you start to count like a pharmacist: How many hours between doses? How much or how little do you need to maintain? Then, when you finally give it up completely, you count like Noah in his dinky, seafaring ark full of pairs of every animal in God's creation: You count days. You wait for the rain to stop, for the sky to clear, for life to ever seem normal again. And then eventually it does. Then you start to count how many cups of black coffee you need just to get through every day, how many cigarettes you smoke. You know the address of every Starbucks in a mile radius, which is easy because there so many, and you know the names of every restaurant where they allow you to smoke, which is easy because they are so few. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I went to a restaurant and sat at the bar and ate by myself. I have my iPad, which is my favorite instrument of all time. I talked to a few people next to me. I'm just trying to be out. It's a little bit scary. ~ Teri Hatcher

Do you really behave like this, or just to people who've sustained injuries at your restaurant?" she asked.
"I was raised to be a gentleman, but if opening a few doors saves me some legal fees, consider me at your service. ~ Armada West

In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked. ~ Morris West

What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped? ~ Mike Klepper

Well, you did walk away from that beautiful creature in the kitchen without so much as a glance, so I don't know about the genius part," the other woman said, and DJ felt his face warm. "You want to go back in there? I'll introduce you. You can celebrate for real."
Both women broke into giggles. DJ almost smiled; maybe he'd overreacted in there a bit.
"No thank you," the good doctor said in that voice of hers. "But thanks for thinking I'm desperate enough to be set up with the hired help."
DJ stepped away from the door, the warmth on his face turning into an angry burn.
The hired help? He had worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant, for crying out loud. For years. People across Paris knew his name.
Who the bloody hell did this woman think she was? Sometimes he really, truly hated rich people. ~ Sonali Dev

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules. ~ Joan Didion

My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant. ~ Rick Bayless

The two palm worms are brought in separate bowls, still alive, wriggling fiercely in a bath of turpentine-colored fish sauce with a few slivers of chili. The glossy brown heads of the grubs, the larvae of a weevil that infests palm trees, glisten like popcorn seeds; the wriggling abdomens have pale rubbery ridges. The owner of the restaurant, chubby and affable, comes out to instruct Nhat and me: we are to grasp the heads, pull off the fat white bodies with our teeth, and discard the heads, taking care that the larvae do not nip our tongues with their formidable pincers in the process. Biting down on squirming larvae seems barbaric, but my brain is starting to swim due to hunger, and the fish sauce is muskily aromatic. How bad could their fat glistening bodies taste? And am I not a direct descendant of insectivores, albeit roughly 100 million years removed? I ~ Stephen Le

In LA, you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! ~ Martin Amis

As the months went on, I couldn't shake the feeling that Chris was still somehow with us. Maybe it was the depression; maybe it was grief. Maybe something else.
Feeling down and empty, I chance to look across the room and think I catch a glimpse of him.
I go to a restaurant with the kids and sit at a table. A while later I look up and swear Angel is sitting on Chris's lap.
I take a walk and from the corner of my eye see him in his camouflage jacket walking beside me.
He's in a crowd, or standing across the parking lot, or lurking nearby in the shadows. ~ Taya Kyle

If you want a reliable tip, drive into a town, go to the nearest appliance store and seek out the dishwasher repair man. He spends a lot of time in restaurant kitchens and usually has strong opinions about them. ~ Bryan Q. Miller

I won't hire someone or date a girl who has not worked in a restaurant, and that's the honest truth. I don't think you know how it is until you've worked in a restaurant. ~ Casey Neistat

( ... ) after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure ( ... ) ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons ... ~ Anne Michaels

I don't think of love in terms of relationships. It happens in terms of seconds, but it goes away like that, too. I pass a nurse, I love her, it ends when I go around a corner; at a restaurant I see a forlorn man at the table next to me, and I love him, and the conversation pulls me back, and it's ended. A patient comes in, and she is sick, and I love her, and then she dies, and I never see her again. This is what I live for. Don't think that it's sad. ~ Patrick Somerville

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. ~ Neel Mukherjee

George Clooney and Fabio apparently got into a scuffle at a restaurant in Los Angeles over the weekend. George thought the women with Fabio were taking pictures of him. How embarrassed is George Clooney to be in a fight with Fabio? Who is he going to call out next, Lorenzo Lamas? ~ Chelsea Handler

So," he said as we turned onto the main road, the muffler rattling, "I've been thinking."
"Yeah?"
He nodded. "You really need to go out with me."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You know. You, me. A restaurant or movie. Together." He glanced over, shifting gears. "Maybe it's a new concept for you? If so, I'll be happy to walk you through it."
"You want to take me to a movie?" I asked.
"Well, not really," he said. "What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I though saying that might scare you off. ~ Sarah Dessen

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth ... How far from here was 34th street? ... All those buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead. ~ Richard Feynman

Usually, whatever's in front of me is what I'm focused on and it's 100% on that and then I kind of move from one thing to the next. Like, if I go to a restaurant and I order food, I always just eat one thing at a time. ~ Adam Young

Everyone watched, wondering if this could be the same lunatic who'd nearly berthed his ornithopter in the restaurant.
I swallowed, for it seemed he was headed straight for my table.
He pulled off his helmet and a mass of dark auburn hair spilled out. Off came the goggles, and I was looking at the beaming face of Kate de Vries. ~ Kenneth Oppel

A few years ago, Dan and a research assistant went to a Toyota dealership and asked people what they would give up if they purchased a new car. None of the shoppers had spent any significant time considering that the thousands of dollars they were about to spend on a car could be spent on other things. ... Most people answered that if they bought a Toyota, then they would not be able to buy a Honda, or some other simple substitution. Few people answered that they wouldn't be able to go to Spain that summer or Hawaii the year after, or that they wouldn't go out to a nice restaurant twice a month for the next few years, or that they would be paying their college loans for five more years. ~ Dan Ariely

America has been very open to immigrants in terms of laws, getting loans - it has been helping immigrants more than it's been helping African Americans in starting a small business. That's key, whether you're starting a restaurant or a laundromat. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

Like That"

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no
moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in
the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty
water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through
the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery's
shut down and the watchman's slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves
slice through
the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can't find
a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you're alone in a glaring
diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are
greasy
and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front
of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one's
driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles
drag
their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and
ducks.
Do it when no one's looking, when the riots begin and the planes
open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the
Kim Addonizio

Weird people follow you in the streets, you can't sit alone in a restaurant or a cafe and read a book in peace, and I think everybody values those moments of being alone. ~ Winona Ryder

Flambé - done beside a table covered in crisp starched linen in a French restaurant: a method to burn food and money simultaneously. ~ Scott Archer Jones

If a restaurant fumbles once I don't have to hold it against them, anyone can have a bad night ... ~ Robert Sietsema

Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked - the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up - and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she's always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she's apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That's my aunt. I also have an uncle. ~ Stephen King

If people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, "Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined that I will get." ~ Nancy Pearcey

Men, if you're traveling with your wife or girlfriend and she mentions that it's time to start looking for a restaurant, you need to sit up and take notice. This means her blood sugar level has dropped and, for you, it ought to be a red alert with flashing lights and sirens. Get that woman fed! ~ John Gray

Why do I regret Chelsea? I'm the boss of the richest club in the world. I have not had much time to adjust myself, but I've found a great restaurant! That is the first thing I did when I arrived! ~ Carlo Ancelotti

Going out to eat is expensive. I was out at one restaurant and they didn't have prices on the menu. Just faces with different expressions of horror. ~ Rita Rudner

Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It's like wearing the crown of 'Restaurant Man' without being 'Restaurant Man.' You're trying to run the business, but you're running the ranch without riding the big horse. ~ Joe Bastianich

The Tower is not a sacred monument, and no taboo can forbid a commonplace life to develop there, but there can be no question, nonetheless, of a trivial phenomenon here; the installation of a restaurant on the Tower, for instance ... The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it its an object wither very old (analogous, for instance, to the Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further, by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there, as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world. ~ Roland Barthes

Listen, kid. This is what happens: Somebody-girl usually-got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just fly away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin', gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it's been pouring coffee in that same dinner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time."
"Yeah, bu-"

"I'm not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk, one way or another, and after awhile a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother and father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can't even see'em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon. ~ John Green

Whether you were talking about Pillsbury, Burger King, Godfather's, the National Restaurant Association, in each one of those situations, I had a daunting problem that I had to solve. And I used the same business principles to approach the problem and, more importantly, solve the problem in every one of the situations. ~ Herman Cain

I come from the restaurant business; you're talking to a guy used to working 12, 14 hours a day. ~ Bobby Schilling

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience. ~ Ruth Reichl