This seems so mundane and pointless next to the other posts, but there is a truck that comes to my office serving the best goddam soft ice cream on the planet. Every day we wax poetic about this stuff. It is unbelievably amazing.
- In Luxembourg, on the outskirts of Luxembourg City, is a family-run restaurant with a bar attached. It didn’t look too proimising, but we were starving, so we went in. The vegetable of the day was peas – I hate peas. There was a choice of potatoes, and we all elected to have French fries – very pedestrian. I barely remember my entree – it was something with veal. This was a heavenly meal? Yes.
Because the peas were so tiny, so sweet, so perfect, that I realized why people eat peas. Because the potatoes were so golden, so crisp, so flavorful, that no French fry will ever measure up. Because that ill-remembered veal was so tender that I barely touched it with my knife, yet not so mushy that I didn’t need a knife.
We still talk about that place.
- in San Francisco, on Green Street, there is a steak house. We picked this restaurant as the place to enjoy a $100 dinner for two that I won in a company raffle. Just a steak and a baked potato, with veg. and a glass of wine (and my wife had something similar). The baked potato was acompanied by a formally-dressed flunky who carried a small rack of condiments: chives, sour cream, the usual. The vegetables were, well, vegetables. Fully cooked, not overcooked, and fresh and young. All that you could ask for, really, but you can’t ask for much from a carrot.
But the steak… ah, the steak. You want to talk about perfectly cooked? We got what we asked for – my wife likes a medium rare steak, I like a medium. There were good grill marks, a pleasing degree of char, and plenty o’ juice throughout. You want to talk about tender? Hell, let’s not talk about tender – let’s talk about confidence; specifically, the restaurant’s confidence in the tenderness of their steak.
They do not have steak knives.
The defense rests.
I have had some amazing meals in some amazing restaurants in my life but all my most memorable dishes seem to be very simple but very fresh and high quality:
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Mackerel caught from the back of my dads catamaran off the Cornish coast and put straight under the grill with nothing added at all - the most orgasmically fresh fish ever.
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Dover Sole fresh from the dockside in Trouville in Normandy that was grilled and served with foaming butter and a squeeze of lemon, cooked by my mums boyfriends exceptionally talented mother.
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A simple tomato salad, I never really knew what tomatoes tasted like until this point, prepared by the aforementioned French grandmother.
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The steak pie that is sold at ‘The Maids of Honour’ in Kew. This place is an old-fashioned tearoom that sells amazing pastries but also sells these delicious steak pies; top quality steak, the best gravy ever and the shortest pastry in existence.
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Oranges picked from the tree in Portugal, you could eat the skin as well and it tasted delicious.
These are my favourite dishes I have ever had, for some reason all the ultra swanky, squeeze bottle sauced, high end restaurant food I have had never
Oops, missed the end of my post!
… seems to live up to these simple, mind blowingly delicious examples of perfection.
I’ve been privileged to have some really yummy meals in my life, and I’m sure I’m forgetting about a bunch of them right this minute. But the one that springs to mind was my oldest childhood friend Sara’s rehearsal dinner, the night before her wedding.
Sara got married in her husband’s hometown, a tiny village of a few hundred, in rural Maine in August, during lobster season. We were all not long out of college, so most of us were working at our first real jobs and were pretty broke, so we’d borrowed a friend’s car and driven 30+ hours straight from Chicago, arriving just in time to shower, change, and go to dinner.
Dinner was a very casual affair; it was a lobster boil in the groom’s parent’s backyard, overlooking a pond. They hired a couple of guys, who set up a 55-gallon drum on sawhorses above a huge pile of dry wood. Then they piled in several dozen lobsters, buckets of clams and mussles, pails of potatoes and onions, and covered it all with seaweed and sea water, and tied it all up with butcher paper and twine so that the lobsters (which were still very much alive) couldn’t crawl away.
Then they lit the fire, and the lobster massacre began. After the slaughter, they dished out a whole lobster with accoutrements to each guest, and we all spread around the backyard at picnic tables and whacked the hell out of the ill-fated crustaceans with mallets, dunking them in melted butter and lemon. And what crustaceans they were…nothng can compare to the flavor of a lobster that was just hauled up from the sea bed a few hours before. We ate and ate, and after the lobsters ran out, we started on the buckets of clams and mussels, with an ear of corn or two for variety. I lost track of my boyfriend for a while, and came upon him later, surrounded by piles of empty shells and lemon peels, face covered in melted butter and clam juice, gasping Ït’s sooo good! But I can’t eat any more! But it’s sooo good!" (He was the one who always insisted he could never keep Kosher, because a just and merciful God would never tell him he couldn’t eat shellfish. That lobster bake was the best damn wedding-related idea anyone ever had.
Years ago on a vacation throughout Italy, I stopped at a harbor restaurant. Everything I tasted and thoroughly enjoyed had come in from the wharf that day, literally hours out of the sea. Baked, fried, stewed, salad-ed, everything was unarguably fresh, and spoiled me for any future fish dishes I’ve had. Liberal uses of EVOO, garlic, fresh herbs,etc. and obviously years of experience. Fish I never heard of, and shellfish seemingly designed by Salvador Dali, presented simply, well and in abundance. Great bread to mop it up with, and the best white wine ever. Prices you would’ve killed for then, I hope they’re still treating their customers to similar Lucullan delights.
Heavenly meals…
The most heavenly meal I had was the first solid meal I ate after geetting over appendicitis, it is amazing what such an experience is like after several weeks on a drip. The meal was simple Chicken Mash potatoes and Asparagus (thanks BUPA), it was the first time I had tried Asparagus, and made a lasting impression that means Asparagus is still my favorite green vegatable.
Heavenly because it was unexpected, is how good Michael Angello’s Frozen Meat Lasagnia is, at $2.00 discount price I was nocked out by a Lasagnea better than most restaurant’s.
Heavenly ‘just because’ would be good sausages Chips and Heinz baked beens after too long times eating more refined (poncy 
) food.
The first time I had lobster was at a sea-side shack in Maine when I was 12. Off the boat - in the pot - on my plate. Wow. I love lobster, but I’ve been searching for that amazing taste again my whole life. Amazing.