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Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You notice it only when something goes wrong.

You have to think of a restaurant as a series of impressions. But what makes my job so great is there's no one answer that's right for every restaurant.

There's always room to improve in a restaurant. A restaurant is better or worse every day than it was the day before. It's impossible not to be, because it's human.

Every restaurant needs to have a point of view.

I learned more from the one restaurant that didn't work than from all the ones that were successes.

Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.

No one knows restaurants like a New Yorker - they're incredibly discerning and restaurant savvy.

It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they'll keep coming back.

I hate to say 'chain restaurant,' but we're sort of a corporation now. How do we defy that concept, where people assume each restaurant can't be good?

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.