In L.A., it's not on the surface. Everything is in the cracks. The restaurant out front will look like this old, boring place, and you'll go inside, and it's this lush, beautifully designed restaurant.
I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.
A restaurant is a compendium of choices that the owner has made. If you look around a restaurant, everything represents a choice: the kind of salt shaker that's on the table, the art on the walls, the uniforms on the waiters.
When I started at Puma, you had a restaurant that was a Puma restaurant, an Adidas restaurant, a bakery. The town was literally divided. If you were working for the wrong company, you wouldn't be served any food; you couldn't buy anything. So it was kind of an odd experience.
I don't get the animosity when someone tells a joke that you don't like. Whereas if someone made a dish that you don't like if you went to a restaurant, you would either try another dish or you just don't go back to that restaurant. But you don't say like, "I did not like the hamburger here. This restaurant should be shut down. It should be banned from making hamburgers. No one else should have these hamburgers." And everyone else is like, "No, you wouldn't do that."
I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.
I really like the idea of restaurant life, especially in New York where everyone has small apartments - that restaurant culture where you sit at a table for a long time and the afternoon goes by and you're kind of living there. I like that more than nightlife.
I'm a leader at the restaurant. If I do this, the people at the restaurant will try to do better. I believe in that, and that's the way it is.
I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!
Well, I got people that help me with the restaurant. I don't have to be at the restaurant 24 hours a day.
The first floor could be a restaurant. A good restaurant can survive as long as it has easy accessibility.
I'm just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.
The design of a restaurant should embrace the identity of the chef, the nature of the cuisine, and the context of the restaurant itself.
I would sometimes sit in a crowded restaurant, and say, 'You know, I'm the only person in this restaurant who can't draw.'
You have to think of a restaurant as a series of impressions. But what makes my job so great is there's no one answer that's right for every restaurant.
But it's really hard to eat good when you're traveling because you see fast food and you want to go to this restaurant and that restaurant.