Ruth Reichl

“...I was not prepared for the feel of the noodles in my mouth, or the purity of the taste. I had been in Japan for almost a month, but I had never experiences anything like this. The noodles quivered as if they were alive, and leapt into my mouth where they vibrated as if playing inaudible music.”

“The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.”

“Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.”

“I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.”

“I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they've read my books. It's a great shortcut.”

“If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.”

“Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.”

“M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.”

“I think it's hard, when you're someone who likes to please people, as I am, to be a boss. I had to learn how to rein myself in and not terrify people.”

“You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.”

“One of the things I really love about restaurants is that in many ways, they are the ultimate democratic institutions, where you get to walk in the door, plunk down your money, and for however long that you're there, you can be anyone you want to be.”

“What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.”

“I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.”

“What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.”

“A great meal is an experience that nourishes more than your body.”

“I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.”

“If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.”

“I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.”

“There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.”

“My yogurt was nestled into a bag, waiting to turn into aushak, and all around us were sausages and pastry, lollipops and spices, chicken and cheese. Any world that contained all this, I thought surveying our loot, was a very fine place. I felt reinvigorated, alive, optimistic. The though of getting back to work suddenly seemed like fun.”