Enjoying our first dinner during a group tour of Sicily, I turned to our guide and told him that the meal was excellent. This being Sicily, the reply was not all that surprising. "You can steal my money but don't touch my food," Alessio remarked. He followed that remark by claiming: "If lunch or dinner doesn't have at least five courses, it's just a snack." I suspect the largesse ahead of us was a paltry morsel.

“I am probably one of the few people around who saw the real Caesar Cardini making his salad. I was about 9 when my parents took me to his restaurant in Tijuana, just the other side of the border from San Diego. They were so excited when big jolly Caesar himself came to the table to make the salad, which had already been written up and talked about everywhere. And it was dramatic: I remember most clearly the eggs going in, and how he tossed the leaves so that it looked like a wave turning over.

The late stand-up comedian-slash-social critic George Carlin once observed, “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.”