Full Thanksgiving dinner: turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberries, green bean salad, other veggies, rolls, two kinds of pie and ice cream…40 miles from the nearest electric light bulb.
I don’t think about “best meals” as such because I’m not a huge eater so I’m more interested in individual best things I’ve ever eaten.
Two things come to mind immediately.
The chili chicken wings at the Eastern Bamboo chinese restaurant, Darlington, co. Durham.
Tiny sardines, fresh caught, semolina dusted, seasoned and fried in olive oil with a mixed salad and large cold Peroni. This was at a little quayside restaurant in the harbour at Sorrento. The old boy caught them, his daughters cooked and served them. Utterly superb. We had a plate piled high with them for 7 euro and me and my daughter demolished them.
In El Triunfo Ecuador there is a small, open air, restaurant/street vendor that sells the most delicious “cazuela” {which just means a cooking type pot}. Anyways his particular cazuela consists of fresh fish {caught daily and never frozen} slowly cooked in a home made plantain/peanut sauce. This stew is full of chunks of fish and is then served over some lightly seasoned yellow rice. When visiting, I ask for the rice from the bottom of the pot because it is slightly crunchy but never burnt. Of course, it must be washed down with an ice cold litre of beer…
When I visit the in-laws and friends in Ecuador I eat that dish for breakfast everyday. Sounds strange, but he starts serving at sun-up and usually runs out around 10:00am.
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My cousin and I were driving down the Tamiami Trail in Florida and stopped on that crowded street at a little seafood place. We had the most heavenly broiled fresh fish, ethereal onion rings, and home made Key Lime pie. Oh, it was the most delicious meal ever!
We ate at a steak house at the casino and had all the bells and whistles, delicious potatoes, salad, creamed spinach, garlic bread, and enormous steaks cooked to order. Delicious, except there was WAY too much for the two of us, and we were staying overnight, so there was really no way to bring a doggy bag back with us.
One special hot summer day, I heated up 10 lbs. of king crab legs and cracked them open with a hammer and scissors. Little salt potatoes, corn on the cob, garlic bread, and caesar salad on the side. Lemon and melted butter. Unbelievably good, and I actually had crab left over! You’ve seen those recipes, ‘take a cup of leftover, chopped crabmeat’…I had it!
When we lived in Aceh, Indonesia, there was a fisherman on the beach, you’d pick from the fish he just caught, still flapping around in the boat; his brother would grill it on charcoal made from coconut husks while he set up a little plastic table in the surf. You’d sit on the beach, with your feet in the the waves, drinking Tiger beers eating fish with soy sauce and rice. For desert, they’d cut open a coconut, mix in some strawberry syrup and give you a straw. I doubt if the whip thing cost $6.
Don’t know about ‘best’, as I’ve had a lot of good food in my life, but one of the most memorable was having honest-to-god bouillabaisse on the Marseilles waterfront, mopped up with chunks of French bread and washed down with a hefty bottle of Bordeaux.
Huevos Rancheros for breakfast at a little dive restaurant in a not-so-good area of Philadelphia.
Upon finishing, I immediately proclaimed it the best meal I’d ever had.
This was five years ago and I still think about it every once in a while.
mmm
Psst…there is another Amigo’s location on West Road in Woodhaven. 
mmm
I would have to go with dinner at the El Tovar (after a friend and I hiked down to the river and back): green salad, garlic bread, filet mignon, and a loaded baked potato all washed down with a couple glasses of champagne.
Imma leave work to have this exact meal tonight…but replace “a” with “many”.
A friend, who knows how to cook, had a small number of us over for a Beef Burgundy. Heaven have mercy, that was good!
Oh my! That is what I would call LIVING!
In the past year it’d have to be the Pork Wellington and Salmon Wellington I made for Christmas Eve dinner.
Double-roasted potatoes (almost potato-chip like exterior, fluffy and soft on the inside). Orange-glazed carrots.
Crawfish etouffee at a restaurant in New Orleans that I’d have to look up the name of.
Lobster ravioli at a restaurant in NYC, ditto.
Lobster at Alison’s Restaurant in Abingdon, VA.
Dover sole amandine at Les Folies in Annapolis.
Thai pizza at Truby’s in Whitefish, MT, after hiking the Highline Trail in Glacier NP that day. And a Deschutes Black Butte Porter or two to wash it down with.
Boeuf bourguignon at the Blue Bayou Restaurant at Disneyworld. It was on my honeymoon with Madame P. and the special effects of the restaurant added a lot, so it may not actually have been the best food I’ve ever had, but it was the best dining experience.
So far, it has to be my daughter’s wedding supper. As she is not a pretentious sort we had a very nice pulled pork and picnic fixings.
I’ve had some high end meals, but as a young boy my father took me to White Castle for the first time while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my brother. Throughout my youth he would take me there from time to time.
As an adult, I moved to central PA and there are no White Castles nearby. I haven’t had one for more than 20 years. My father passed away in 2010.
Last November the family went to Vegas to visit the In laws, and I saw that a White Castle had opened on the strip.
I took my family for lunch there and it was their first experience of those sliders.
The grey meat buried in onions, those heavenly steamed buns, an orange soda… Though it had been 20 years +, it had also been only yesterday, if you know what I mean. My father was a man of discriminating taste, and had travelled the world and eaten at some of the best restaurants in it. He taught me that transcendently good could be procured at Mercurios or Peter Lugers, but it could just as easily be found at a greasy spoon or a White Castles.
It’s a cliche, but I actually cried a little bit when I bit into that first slider.
One meal I remember was a seafood stew at some restaurant near Faneuil Hall in Boston. Kinda spicy with small mussels in the half shell floating in it. Excellent.
I don’t remember meals as much as individual dishes that were consistently great. There were the juicy, homemade cinnamon rolls at my elementary school. My Mom’s braised/roast beef and candied sweet potatoes made from greenish potatoes my Dad grew. Certain barbeque places in Texas. There’s lot’s of stuff I’d like to re-create if I had more culinary skill.
Best meal objectively was a seven course tasting menu with matching wines we had at Restaurant Martin Wisharts in Leith (Scotland). Out of the world cooking shared with my lovely wife on a significant anniversary.
Most memorable meal was probably a simple dinner in an Agroturismo restaurant we were staying at near Sant’Ageta, outside Sorrento in Italy. Antipasto, pasta, a piece of mountain lamb and a salad.
Eaten in a huge thunderstorm, into which the lady chef ventured to pick us some fresh figs for desert. We asked for some and they had run out but we didn’t expect her to risk her life to pick us some - it was like a scene out of “The 101 Dalmatians”.
I don’t have a best, but right now I would run someone over to have a meal from the now-closed Fred Cotten’s BBQ in downtown Jacksonville. It had been around for 40 years when I first went there, and it was an amazing mix of people (the mayor and cops ate there; local business employees ate there; and street people and hookers ate there). it was damn good BBQ.
Also there was a great Cajun place near my employer’s office for several years – red beans and rice to die for. A great shrimp po-boy. All kinds of good things.
The shacks where we get fresh lobster in Maine. The shack where we’d go in Florida to get fresh-off-the-boat shrimp and $5 pitchers of beer. Good shack seafood places seem to use newspaper and encourage eating like cavemen. 
A country club I used to go to had a great poached salmon topped with some creamy sauce with artichoke hearts. It was lovely.