Gould was a teetotaller and did not smoke. He did not cook; instead he would frequently eat at restaurants and relied upon room service. He ate one meal a day which was supplemented with arrowroot biscuits and coffee. In his later years he claimed to be vegetarian—in a letter to the cellist Virginia Katims of 20 January 1973, Gould said he had been vegetarian for about ten years—but his private notepads reveal that he ate chicken, Dover sole, roast beef and veal. Fran's Restaurant in Toronto was a regular haunt of Gould's. A CBC profile noted, "sometime between two and three every morning, Gould would go to Fran's, a 24-hour diner a block away from his Toronto apartment, sit in the same booth, and order the same meal of scrambled eggs."