The cheapest gadget - and you don't even have to spend a dime - is chopsticks from a Chinese restaurant. I use them for everything: to toss salads, to turn a piece of meat in the pan, to flip croquettes in the Fryolator, to whisk eggs for omelets, to stir eggs into fried rice when I make that for my daughters.
Tip your drag queens, bartenders, and don't rub your chopsticks together at the sushi restaurant. Also, just in general, don't be a dirtbag human.
Ruth's Chris is my favorite restaurant, and I always order the rib eye, medium-rare.
There's only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing. Sometimes you can avoid a traffic violation. But the only time it really matters is in the emergency room with your kids. That's when you want to be noticed, because it's very easy to get forgotten in an ER.
I started doing little amateur nights at the comedy club that was right next to the restaurant that I waitressed in when I was in university. I was probably 22 years old. I didn't do it with any intention of making a career out of it; I had just always valued comedy.
I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.
Five years before 'Kitchen Confidential' - and before then, the 'New Yorker' essay that led to the book - Bourdain published 'A Bone in the Throat,' a crime novel set in the restaurant world he lived and breathed.
Christopher Plummer once told me that he never orders a wine without first confirming that the restaurant has a second bottle in case he loves it.
In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.
He was a manager, one of the singers, I guess talent coordinator for the local talent in Harlem. His name was Lover Patterson. He was living right across the street from where my dad had his restaurant. I guess he saw a lot of kids come in, a lot of my buddies.
I don't understand people who travel purely gastronomically, who book a Michelin-starred restaurant three months in advance and suddenly find themselves in Copenhagen or Barcelona with a zeitgeist plate of snail porridge.
A child did approach me in a restaurant in Cornwall, but he thought I was Gandalf.
I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.
I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get 'Okaaaaaay, honey.' I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.
I can judge a restaurant by its bread: it winds me up that a lot of places buy pre-packed ones in and don't bother putting them in the oven to crisp them up again. And you shouldn't put bread on a side-plate: it needs to be pushed back into the centre of the table.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.
I would sometimes sit in a crowded restaurant, and say, 'You know, I'm the only person in this restaurant who can't draw.'
Cuisine Nouvelle was just a concept, and one which, crucially, the English managed to get wrong. I mean, if you run a restaurant, you've got to feed people, not make pretty little pictures on plates to make up for your lack of ability.
Traditional British desserts with lots of custard are my biggest weakness - I particularly love the puds at St. John restaurant in East London.
Sodium is an important mineral that is essential for proper functioning of the human body - however, the American diet contains dangerously high amounts of sodium, almost 80 percent of which comes from processed and restaurant foods.