Sweet & blue cheese is actually a classic pairing – whether fruit, honey, or a sweet wine. (Though I’ve never had gorgonzola dolce. It looks to me like it’s just a young, soft, mild gorgonzola rather than anything actually sweet.)
Blueberries. Never had one that didn’t taste a little bland and chalky. I think they’re only good when cooked into jam or pie filling, and even then I find it underwhelming compared to other fruits.
Lobster. Meh. Gimme crab any time.
Of course, I now live in the middle of Blueberry/Lobster land and there’s nary a boysenberry to be seen, nor crab at any reasonable price.
Pasta. The sauce cooking makes some pretty good smells, but put it on top of a plate full of bland noodly noodles… yuck. Noodles should always be used in moderation. They’re not a dish in and of themselves, no matter what sauce you pour on top to pretend they have actual flavor.
Where did you get your chestnuts? Did you gather them yourself? When roasted, they should taste like baked potato, only sweeter. I love them!
I’m assuming you know there’s more than one kind? Horse chestnuts are, as you describe, inedible. Back in 1991, when I was living in a town in Czechoslovakia where the streets were littered with the damned things in November, I did not know this. So I collected a bagful and took them home to roast, thinking I’d struck the mother lode. Imagine how I felt when I took a great big bite and immediately spit it out. Yeccch! Revolting!
A couple of years ago, I bought another bag full of chestnuts at a supermarket here in Toronto. These were the edible kind, but when I got them home and started peeling them, I found the whole lot was moldy. Again, yeccch!
With regard to my own personal dislikes, number one on my list is that horrid French Roast coffee restaurants were pushing back in the '90s. Tastes like moldy vanilla, if you ask me. Again, yeccch! How anyone can drink that crap is beyond me!
I’m sure a lot of people think Scotch tastes sublime. But I can’t get over the word association that it should taste like butterscotch. It don’t.
Actually, I’ll side with Shagnasty on this. Roasted chestnuts smell like they should be the greatest thing in the world but they end up tasting like, as you described it, slightly sweeter (and vaguely nutty) baked potatoes. Not my thing at all. I’ve eaten them at the Christmas markets in Europe (mostly Budapest) where they are ubiquitous, so it’s not the quality of chestnuts that’s the problem. They’re just bland. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten ones that match Shagnasty’s description, but I just didn’t get their appeal. Of course, I’m also not a fan of baked potatoes, so maybe that has something to do with it. And every year I would try them again, enticed by the smell, and every year I wonder why I bothered.
Have you ever tried a good single malt, neat? They may not taste like butterscotch, but they can indeed be sublime. Glenfiddich is the best brand I’ve tried. Definitely not to be wasted by mixing.
I always hated hotdogs as a child, and my mother always bought the most expensive ones from the kosher butcher. Once in high school, I ate one that was probably pig lips and anuses. I threw up.
However, I LOVE soy dogs. Go figure. I also hate turkey, but I love Tofurky so much it literally* makes my mouth water just to type the word “Tofurky.”
*I do NOT use the word “literally” figuratively.
Are you talking actual French Roast coffee, which is a wide range of coffees that is roasted to a particular level that is darker than your standard roast, or are you talking about the French vanilla flavored coffee which, I agree, was terrible and sounds like it matches your description more than French roast coffee.
All-beef franks are infinitely better. And kosher all-beef are the best of the best. Right now, I’d do just about anything for a Chicago-style kosher hot dog with a few drops of Tabasco. Mmmmmmmmmmmm! :o
That would be the coffee flogged by pricey restaurants in the '90s, yes. I’m sure genuine French coffee roasted a la mode is delightful, but the last time I might have had it was 1975. 
Wow. One of my favorite pizzas ever was the bacon cheeseburger pizza at Pizza Inn, Poplar Bluff, Missouri, back when I lived there in the 1990s. Of course, it had mustard instead of tomato sauce, cheddar cheese mixed in with the parmesan, dill pickle slices, and, as I mentioned, bacon chunks as well as the hamburger. Maybe a half-assed version of that wouldn’t taste very good.
For me, it’s caviar. The first time I had it, back when my dad was in the Air Force Reserve and my family occasionally ate with him at the officer’s club on base, it was just amazingly salty. Salt overload. I always figured “that couldn’t have been good caviar, nobody would spread salt paste on crackers and call it high-class” so, when I saw some at Albertsons, I bought a tiny little jar. Well… I was right about the saltiness, but I still don’t like it, because it’s too fishy. Oh, well. Maybe when I’m richer and stupider I’ll buy some of the truly high-class stuff and give it one last whirl.
Then I don’t know. I’ve never had a French roast in a coffeeshop that tasted anything of moldy vanilla. I’m honestly perplexed. There’s nothing really mysterious or hard-to-find about genuine French roast. Every coffee roaster has a French roast.
I used to buy them from street vendors in England, and always asked for the ones that were charred a bit from roasting. That added a lot of flavor.
The best baked potatoes I’ve ever had, BTW, were roasted in the coals of a campfire on the Isle of Man. Not only were they charred, you actually had to dust the ash off them. :o
Caviar is only considered “high-class” because it is hard to produce so therefore expensive. I like it just fine in moderation but I am not going to pay for it myself.
There are a number of exclusive foods like that. Fugu (poisonous pufferfish) is really bland. Foie gras (fattened goose liver) is sometimes tolerable but usually tastes like licking a newborn baby’s diaper.
My ex-wife is one of the most foremost cheese experts in the world responsible for importing the most exotic ones to the U.S. and there are even some that she thinks are disgusting regardless of their history and backstory. I have taste tested some exotic cheeses that made me actively furious. You won’t see those in the U.S. because they didn’t make it but someone is making and eating them somewhere.
Just because something exists and expensive, doesn’t mean that it is good.
Oh, they were definitely charred. I guess I just don’t like chestnuts, but love they way they smell. The Hungarians were big on their chestnut puree desserts, too, and I had the same reaction.
Try it on bliny with sour cream. Delicious! :o
Oh, man, I dunno. A nice goose foie gras is one of my gustatory pleasures. I don’t have it very often, but, along with the chestnuts I mentioned before, the Hungarians were big on their goose liver (France and Hungary are the two largest foie gras producers in the world), and that’s one delight I did develop a taste for. Just sublime.
Well, you probably like it a bit more than I do, but the existence of cheap caviar indicates people who don’t treat it as a Giffen good.
I’ll never eat fugu, but I love foie gras, which I’ve eaten often enough to say that confidently.
I’ve never been enraged by cheese (band name!) but I do enjoy the stinky cheeses I’ve had and the cheeses with rinds and the extremely hard cheeses and… well, I’ve had my share of the cheese board, and I’ve never had one I’ve considered actively bad, as opposed to merely not as good as others.
The software world proves this many, many times over.
There shouldn’t be any qualitative difference between kosher and non-kosher hot dogs. “Kosher” just means that the animals were slaughtered in a particular way.
I have lived in Russia, where caviar is on every table like ketchup in the US. I also happen to think it is disgusting, but I think anything that was an animal is disgusting, so I’m not much of a judge.
Anyway, the way Russians eat caviar is to slice bread thick, spread a pretty thick layer of UNSALTED butter on it (you have to ask if you want salt on your table), and then spread a layer of caviar on the butter. The caviar is not usually spread quite as thick as the butter. Or, at least it was that way for years up until the 1970s, when I was there, and the Russians who visited us in the 80s still did it.
If you are determined to keep trying caviar, try it like that. Use a farmer’s white bread, or a light rye bread. A marble rye would probably also work, although I don’t recall ever seeing marble rye in Russia.