The phrase "a certain penchant for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe someone's specific liking or inclination towards something.
Example: "She has a certain penchant for vintage clothing, often wearing pieces from the 1970s."
Alternatives: "a particular fondness for" or "a distinct liking for".
The Italian menu hews to tradition — along the lines of arancini and chicken scarpariello — but most of what we sampled had a certain flair and penchant for authenticity (the kitchen is overseen by Carmine Paglia, formerly of Polpo, in Greenwich, Conn).. To start came a little antipasti trio, on the house: a swirl of milky ricotta, fat green olives and fiery, full-bodied caponata.
It also has certain disadvantages — a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking.
2 Regent's Park Road NW1, +44 (0)20-7485 2206, efdss.org Aiming to dispel the myth that jazz is only for people of a certain age with a penchant for saying "nice", The Vortex brings contemporary jazz to Dalston with seven evening performances a week.
Only Ghana were able to carry the torch, before they came across a certain Uruguayan with a penchant for controversy in the quarter-finals.
Kathryn Dance is a widow with a penchant for expensive shoes.
The background: See the name Mountain Man and you think immediately of those burly check-shirted back-porch Americana types with beards that you read about in certain monthly magazines with a penchant for alt country.
Japan sure has a penchant for extraordinary piggy banks.
Along with the excessive use of traditional rhetorical devices such as metaphor and simile, the most banal mainstream poetry also suffers from certain visual quirks, such as a penchant for italicizing words and phrases to emphasize for readers how particularly precious, portentous, and poetic they are--as though the fact that they appear in a poem is insufficient to make the point.
He's written more pages of Batman than nearly any other person on the planet and is even responsible for creating a certain villain who has a penchant for breaking Bruce Wayne's back (and was recently featured in the latest Bat-flick, The Dark Knight Rises).
Among the targets of the pope's admonition, it seems, were certain bishops in Germany, who had a penchant for top-of-the-range BMWs or Mercedes.Richard Chartres, the Anglican bishop of London, once described large, gas-guzzling cars, as well as unnecessary flying, as a "symptom of sin".
