A Quote by Michael Tolkin

I went to Spago once, eight years ago. I had just closed a deal. I thought it would be fun to go to Spago and it wasn't. I got a bad table and nobody paid any attention to me.
When I'm in L.A., I go to Spago because the chef is a friend of mine.
If you're in a major city, there's a 25-year cycle. In Vegas, it's probably 10 or 15 years, except for those landmark places like Spago or Nobu. In Vegas, you have to reinvent yourself once in a while.
I had a phase where I had a mustache. There was several times where I had a mustache. I had a mustache in high school because South Asian men can potentially have a great deal of facial hair. So I had a mustache at 14, and then I grew a proper mustache a few years ago. I just thought it would be fun to just have a mustache.
Today, I am wondering what would have happened to me by now, if, fifty years ago, some fluent talker had converted me to the theory of the eight-hour day and convinced me that it was not fair to my fellow-workers to put forth my best efforts in my work? I am glad that the eight-hour day had not been invented when I was a young man. If my life had been made up of eight-hour days, I don't believe I could have accomplished a great deal.
Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, put we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.
A chiropractor wishes he were a doctor, just like those people outside Spago wish they were actors.
I didn't decide to start to playing piano until I was almost 13 years old when my friends and I thought it would be fun to start a band. None of us actually played any instruments so the band never quite got off the ground, BUT it made me go home and ask my parents for piano lessons. That was really the beginning for me. Once I started, it was all I wanted to do.
When I dine with CEOs at Michael's in New York or Spago in L.A., we score the best tables. On my own, I wind up seated near the kitchen doors.
Television in the '80s was very limited. There was no Food Network. When I opened Spago, I had the kitchen in the dining hall. It was probably the first restaurant to do so. The dining scene became more casual. All these cooking shows have transformed our profession one-hundred percent.
One hundred years ago, if someone said, 'damn,' people would take notice. Now, you can say almost anything. Secrets are the same way. Once upon a time when a secret was revealed, people paid an enormous amount of attention to it.
If I had been Terry Pratchett the farmer, or Terry Pratchett the dentist, nobody would have paid any attention if I had announced I had Alzheimer's. But there is something fascinating about an author losing the power over words.
I ain't got no problem in Boston, I especially like the attention. I know that I'm one of the top guys in this game and all the attention is on me, I got a lot of people on my shoulder but I'm human. I like to go. I like to have fun. I like to do this and that but I gotta represent Boston and the Red Sox in every way that I do outside this game. ... Like I said I get paid to play baseball no [matter] where I go to play I still gotta go and perform even if I like it or not.
At Spago, we make all of our pasta from scratch with egg yolks, so I'm always looking for new ways to play with egg whites.
Jean-Luc didn't like me to say any bad words in real life, and I would always do it on purpose, just for fun. And he would go crazy! Then he had Brigitte Bardot do just that in 'Contempt.' And in that film she also has this line - 'I want red velvet curtains, or nothing at all in the apartment' - which was something I would always say.
I gave up on the national team - I thought to myself, 'Well, that's just not something that's going to happen for me.' The national team was in residency camp; I was 6,000 miles away. Nobody was watching, nobody cared... I'm just going to go play for myself and my team and try to be great... and I had more fun than I'd have ever had.
Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.
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