So what on Earth there isn’t to like about New York? I don’t know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn’t go to New York for the food.
GILES CORENI was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.
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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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As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
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I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.
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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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It doesn’t matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.
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Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.
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Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
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Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.
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The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
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My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
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Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
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I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there’s all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
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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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Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
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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 had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
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At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens – maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.
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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.
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I always say what I think to be amusing.
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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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I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.
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