The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts ‘fringe elements’, people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.
Bigfoot understood – as I came to understand – that character is far more important than skills or employment history.
The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so – and I realised that, my God... I’ve been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!
I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.
I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them – and in a very personal, fundamental way.
After level of skills, it’s how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult – and how well you can give it right back – that determines your place in the food chain.
As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc., an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” “healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin’” has never been truer. Like breaking a guy’s leg – so you can be there to sell him a crutch.
Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park.
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade.
Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.
It’s a little more, but not much. And, you get conversation, which is something to be savored in Ireland. If you’ve got any kind of a heart, a soul, an appreciation for your fellow man, or any kind of appreciation for the written word, or simply a love of a perfectly poured beverage, then there’s no way you could avoid loving this city.
What do they do here better than any other place on earth? Answer: Guinness. This delicious, some say magical, probably nutritious, unparalleled beverage. This divine brew is so tasty, creamy, so near chocolatey in its rich, satisfying, buzz-giving qualities, that the difference between the stuff here, and the indifferently poured swill you get where you come from, is like night and day. One is beer, the other, angels sing celestial trombones.
There is an undercurrent of almost hysterical glee in his descriptions of Mary as a menacing and infectious brute – as if by calling her dangerous and unstable he was mitigating his own failure and fears.
She doesn’t try to have dignity or refinement. She wants to affect men by what she says, not what she doesn’t say.
Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!
This sounds like positive social change, right? Anything the revs are against is surely a good thing. Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!
The American woman’s interest does not lie in the man; she wants to be alone, and she can’t be alone without dabbling, today in chemistry, to-morrow in physiology and the day after in Buddhism.
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
They’d been running households for years, of course – seeing to the finances, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and in general, doing all those things which men couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t, do.
In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness.