I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
GILES CORENGentile smoked salmon is all… muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand – smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
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We’ve got rid of subeditors because we don’t need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.
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When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.
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The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
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How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
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I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word’, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.
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I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.
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My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.
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There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.
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When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.
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The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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All I care about is that people who like me think I’m funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.
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I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
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