Quotations from Chairman Pete

Well, I've been writing this blog for four years now.  I was reluctant to start it, and I never imagined it would last more than a year, but here I am, here we are.  So, as long I've been indulging in the narcissism of "personal nonfiction" all this time, I figure I might as well bring together some of my personal favorite quotes from my own posts (with links to their source), my little red book you might say.  Here goes:

Sometimes a stranger is as good as a friend.

He looked closely, but the name Peter Cherches was nowhere to be found on the little porker’s skin.

I secretly suspect [Rick] Steves’ popularity has something to do with a strange fetish–that there’s an entire class of people who get off on being told where to go by a nerdy white guy.

Despite the sweet dessert the dinner left a sour taste in my mouth, and to the owners of i Trulli I say fuck you and your codfish and fishbait shrimp.

Fish and chickens may not be smart, but they’re not vegetables.

Of course I want to enter the site, dammit. That's why I typed the url or followed a search-engine link. I thought I was turning the key to the door, or at least knocking, but I'm left standing in the cold. Knock, knock, please let me in.

Our silver-haired waitress was a sweetheart. Attentive and chatty, she was like the "nice" Jewish mother I never had.

It’s amazing how many idiots are out there. All right, it’s not amazing.

The restaurant we mostly patronized was Joy Fong, on Avenue J, a now-defunct place that retains an almost holy status in the memories of Brooklyn Jews of a certain age. I wouldn’t be surprised if people visit the site of the former restaurant and wail against the wall.

"Did you hear about the white man who makes dosa?" asked my Indian coworker. This was not the beginning of a bad joke.

To the shocked counter girl I ranted, “No pistachio! I can’t believe this. When I was a kid pistachio was one of the standard flavors. There was always chocolate and vanilla and strawberry. Sometimes mint chip. Sometimes chocolate chip. Sometimes chocolate fudge. Sometimes butter pecan. But always pistachio! What’s this world coming to? No pistachio? You have dulce de leche, but no pistachio?”

One thing is certain about the pork shoulder: they really need to work on the visual presentation. I'm sure it doesn't have to look like a lump of shit on a plate.

On the menu they list their meat suppliers, but also the designer of their stools. They were nice enough stools, I guess, as far as backless stools go, but give me a break.

I think I'll consult the Mets' schedule before I plan another outing on the 7 line.

My impression was that it was food worthy, at best, of a Croatian high school cafeteria.

A peacock has no business on a men's room door.

If the large servings of excellent, dirt-cheap food weren't enough, our waiter and George, the owner, were extremely friendly. Who do they think they are?

My fellow passengers must have thought I was nuts when I started laughing out loud, but I could have sworn she said, "Your seat cushion may be used as a flirtation device."

The diet was tough going, but I discovered a survival mechanism that worked for me: sniffing.

"That wasn't just a scream, you know," Harold said. "It was a blood-curdling, other-worldly shriek."

When the driver pulled over, a dwarf in a tuxedo came over to the cab and opened the door for me. I stepped outside. I didn't notice a restaurant. I was confused. I showed the dwarf, who bore a slight resemblance to Herve Villechaize in "Fantasy Island," the piece of paper. "Is this the right place?" I asked.

Was Milan trying to kill us?

Here's to the temporary, honorary ladies who lunch!

I know nothing about makeup, but I'm guessing that at the very least we're talking about foundation, blush, powder, eyeliner, mascara and lipstick. Have I left anything out and have they no shame?

It was during my bar mitzvah lessons with Mrs. Goldstein, the gonzo haftorah coach, that I realized that all that bible and god stuff was a load of hooey, but I went through the motions nonetheless, in my rented tuxedo from Zeller's Formals, a black brocaded number reminiscent of tacky wallpaper.

He writes like Bozo the Clown on nitrous oxide chanelling the likes of Tristan Tzara, Luis Bunuel, Steven Wright, and a mischievous eight-year-old with ADD.

There was a time in New York when the mention of a rolled beef sandwich would not elicit a blank stare.

The sheer luxuriance of these beauteous bivalves, along with the supporting flavors, sent most of my fellow diners into paroxysms of ecstasy.

I think the Una Pizza Napoletana phenomenon is similar to the Momofuku phenomenon: the chef a darling of the press who can do no wrong and the clientele a flock of trendy sheep who delight in being fleeced.

"It is? Then I'm not eating it!" she said, adamantly. My conservationist friend had obviously taken my words literally and assumed that the butterfly shrimp was an exotic sea creature facing imminent extinction.

Shmendrik, unlike schmuck, schmeckle and schlong, has no penile connotations.

Back in the 'seventies, when Ford was telling New York to drop dead, thousands of sad, quiet old men and rowdy young men, and more than a few women too, were tanking up at these establishments on cheap beer and booze, and occasionally supplementing those drinks with solid, cheap eats.

Idiot escalated to asshole. I started shouting a string of invective at him. My adrenaline was pumping. It was great! Almost as much fun as shouting down an evangelist. "You'll hear from me online," I told him.

Fifty-two years as a nominal Jew and I just found out about shatnez--sometimes spelled shatnes, sometimes shaatnez.

This time he didn't ask me if I knew what lox was. This time he said, "An eighth of lox! Are you havin' a party?"

Back in the paranoid, science fiction cold war sixties some people feared that our enemies, or our own government, were developing technologies that one day might be able to read our minds. If Twitter tweets and Facebook walls are any indication, we had nothing to fear. It turns out there's precious little on our minds worth reading.

I certainly wasn't going to visit Peru and not try guinea pig at least once. As it turned out, I had it three times, three different ways.

"I should have drank more and eaten less" was Donna's verdict after our dinner at King Yum, on Union Turnpike in Queens, one of New York's last bastions of classic old-school Chinese-American food. Considering how bad the food was, I decided that would make a good motto for the restaurant.

OBAO's bun bo Hue is sort of a pho tai timidly trying to be a faux bun bo Hue for timid American palates . . . but worse!

So if I could eat grasshoppers, why not tarantula?

For me the chance to shoot stinking, fermenting prahok fish is much more interesting than taking photos of some old temples.

If you're looking for entrecote you don't go for prick.

If some of the quotes look like they're in a different font or a different size, your eyes aren't fooling you.  Going back and forth on a Mac and a PC, with Firefox and Safari, seems to be the source of the problem, and I can't figure out how to fix it without laboriously tweaking the HTML.