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 CORENOf course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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.
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I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.
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Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
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Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
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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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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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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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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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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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My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.
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I always say what I think to be amusing.
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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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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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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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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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