I have heard that the French like to say, "Nobody grows old during a happy occasion at the dining table." With such wonderful family and friends all around us for Mitchell's and Stacie's wedding, I know their love will always stay young and true to one another, because of the love and happiness we all have in this room today!

Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]

To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat.

But if you're gonna dine with them cannibalsSooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten . . .

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

The trouble with eating Italian is that 5 or 6 days later, you're hungry again.

Michelin Star? I’d rather chew a French rubber tyre.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF GASTRONOMY There's a rule for proper dosesin the dinner-eaters lore:one should stop the filling processwhile one still has room for more. And if someone at the tablehad reminded me before -Hallelujah! I'd be ableto absorb a little more.

Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.