Revolving Restaurant Quotes

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H." It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets.

If you dine at SkyCity, revolving just beneath the 520-foot-high observation deck, the elevator ride is free (otherwise it’s $18), but be forewarned that the restaurant is one of Seattle’s priciest (you’re paying for the million-dollar view).

One courageous person raising awareness is Amy Kubal, “the Paleo Dietitian,” a licensed dietitian who has worked in the Paleo community for more than a decade. In February 2014, Amy came out on a prominent Paleo website as anorexic. “In my case,” she wrote, “Paleo was a convenient way to justify restriction. I entered the eating disorder world with an intense fear of fat, a fear that didn’t go away with Paleo—it let up a little but it also villainized many of the foods that were once ‘safe’ to me. Now carbs, dairy, beans, grains, and fat were evil and my list kept getting longer.” Amy spoke candidly with me about her own experience and her impression of the Paleo community in general. “You know, it works for some people,” she says. “But for 60 to 70 percent, it turns into a religion. Following this is like their commandment—does that have gluten? Does this? Their lives revolve around it, thinking constantly about what foods are at the places they’re going to be. I have more and more clients who bring their own food to restaurants and family gatherings.

The main problem facing immigrant communities was to change the sort of sociability they practiced from an ascriptive to a voluntary form. That is, the traditional social structures they brought with them were based on family, ethnicity, geographic origin, or some other characteristic with which they were born. For the first generation that landed in the United States, they created the trust necessary for revolving credit associations, family restaurants, laundries, and grocery stores. But in subsequent generations they could become a constraint, narrowing the range of business opportunities and keeping descendants in ethnic ghettoes. For the most successful ethnic groups, the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants had to learn a broader kind of sociability that would get them jobs in the mainstream business world or in the professions. The speed with which immigrants could make the transition from a member of an ethnic enclave to assimilated mainstream American explains how the United States could be both ethnically diverse and strongly disposed to community at the same time. In many other societies, the descendants of immigrants were never permitted to leave their ethnic ghetto. Although solidarity within the ethnic enclave remained high, the society as a whole was balkanized and conflicted. Diversity can have clear benefits for a society, but is better taken in small sips than in large gulps. It is easily possible to have too diverse a society, in which people not only fail to share higher values and aspirations but even fail to speak the same language. The possibilities for spontaneous sociability then begin to flow only within the cleavage lines established by race, ethnicity, language, and the like. Assimilation through language policy and education must balance ethnicity if broader community is to be possible. The United States presents a mixed and changing picture. If we take into account factors like America’s religious culture and ethnicity, there are ample grounds for categorizing it simultaneously as both an individualistic and a group-oriented society. Those who see only the individualism are ignoring a critical part of American social history. “Yet the balance has been shifting toward individualism rapidly in the last couple of decades, so it is perhaps no accident that Asians and others see it as the epitome of an individualistic society. This shift has created numerous problems for the United States, many of which will play themselves out in the economic sphere.