Gentile 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.
GILES CORENWhen 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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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.
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But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.
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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.
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A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.
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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 quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.
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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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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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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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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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We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.
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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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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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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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My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.
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I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.
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I 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.
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