A twist on the Food Network The Best Thing You Ever Ate. It’s well known that who you’re eating with and where you’re eating have a huge impact on your eating experience. These are my memories of foods I’ve never been able to experience again.
Half a hoagie my Dad gave me when he returned home from an extended business stay in the 60’s. I don’t know exactly what was in it, but it was half of the sandwich he got on the plane. Squished and warm from being in the inner pocket of his suit, it was pure love after not seeing him for weeks or possibly months. Thanks Dad!
Vanilla ice cream from a Japanese restaurant in the 80’s. It was the creamiest, not overly sweet ice cream I ever had and it’s a Holy Grail that I’ve never been able to find again or recreate. I asked and was told it was just ice cream from a local dairy that could be found in the 5 gallon tubs anywhere that serves ice cream, but it was somehow angelic. I suspect it was partly because I had just finished eating a meal that probably included tempura which is slightly oily, but it’s an experience that I’ll never forget.
Forty years ago as a college student I worked one summer at a YWCA camp in Western Massachusetts. With children in our care, that basically meant being on duty 24/7. I forget what our day off allotment was, but I know it was parsimonious - something like one day every two weeks. And since the days off were staggered, you generally had to spend them on your own; any friends you might have made among the camp staff were almost certainly working.
So I spent one day off in a solitary wander around Amherst, MA. As the day ended, it was a bit rainy and chilly and I was tired. I stopped into a Friendly’s and had a cup of coffee as a last little luxury before returning to camp.
I suppose it was just an ordinary cup, but something about it was almost magically delicious - the flavor, aroma, and heat were exactly right, and it was the most wonderful thing I ever consumed. No coffee has matched it since.
I was having a very peculiar on-again, off-again relationship with a lady far more cultured than I. I was a disreputable punk (literally!) and she was about as far away from that as you can get.
After the end of one of her trips, when we were back together again, she decided we needed to go to some place she thought was classy (since my idea of “classy” at the time was going to pubs). It was a Moroccan restaurant modelled after the bar in the movie “Casablanca” and we had random starters and a pastilla.
The random starter had fresh olives and harissa. I hated olives until that point. I became a true believer in olives after that. The pastilla? Words defy me. I’ve been chasing that figurative high ever since and went from pie-and-pint to being annoyingly foodie.
And in that same vein, my mother used to do all the cooking when I was growing up. She was indisposed for some reason-or-other, which left my father to try his hand at it. Up until that point, the only thing he could cook were “stimés”: steamed hotdogs. This time, he fried slices of cheap bologna and put them on toasted bread to make a sandwich. It had no business being that good.
(And I generally dislike bologna and, by extension, mortadella. Myrtle just tastes off to me.)
I was on a business trip to San Francisco and changes to spot a Japanese restaurant in the hotel. I was a little skeptical until I realized that the entire clientele was Japanese. So I tried their special meal.
It was amazing. I loved everything in it, most notably a soup that you poured over a wedge of lime before drinking.
When I finished, the waitress was impressed that I had eaten everything with chopstick; I guess Americans usually ask for forks.
In Rome we ate at a little restaurant not far from our hotel. I got the grilled chicken breast. It was amazing. As far as I could tell there was no seasoning except salt and pepper and the lemon I spritzed across it. I took one bite and told dad “this is the best chicken I’ve had in my life.”
Venezuelan beef. A different flavor than here and so good.
Year ago, I went for a bike ride with a friend. We kept riding, farther and farther, and finally got stuck in Fountain Hills, when he got six thorn punctures in his tire, and I only had five patches. We called a friend with a truck to come and get us, and he reluctantly agreed, but said it would take a few hours. We were starving, after all of that riding, and said that it was ok, and went to find a restaurant. We ended up at this pizza place, and ordered a pizza. It took them ages to bring it, and by the time they did we were ravenous.
The pizza was indescribably delicious.
I went back to the restaurant a few years later, just to see if the pizza was as good as I remembered. It was good, but not even in my top 5. So, it was truly an “of the moment” experience.
Offshore north sea , I was an engineer for a service company and there was a bit of a situation (stuck drilling assembly and we were fishing for recovering a radioactive source for what its worth). Anyway that involved being up for 60 hours with 1 to 2 hour naps in the unit , copious cups of bad coffee and cold sandwiches the crew brought me ( the unit is basically a shipping container with air conditioning and computers in it on the deck of the rig) .
After that epic of getting what we needed out of the well I made it to the galley prior to collapsing and had possible the best bowl of potato and leak soup ever made. The galley chef even brought me out some fresh bread rolls, which is about the highest form of recognition I ever had as a service hand.
Other than that, my wife and I went to Uchi, a good sushi restaurant in Houston for an anniversary dinner.
Between the event and the sushi ( no soy sauce or wasabi) it may have been the best meal, although the sushi at the top of the Snowbird hotel when we were dating is also up there
When I was twelve, we were vacationing in Las Vegas. At the Sahara Hotel’s coffee shop they served a chocolate layer cake with filling that tasted like the cream filling in Hostess cupcakes. It was heavenly. I also got the best roast beef sandwich ever there; the meat was piled exceptionally high.
The best food I ever ate was at a weird little basement kitchen cafeteria in a hotel in rural northern China, near Mongolia. It was just stir-fried spinach and fried chicken, but it was somehow fried in the most delicious way possible. It was just my brothers, mom and I and a friendly cook who kept stir-frying stuff for us.
While in New Zealand back in 2013, my wife’s cousin and her husband took us to visit some friends of theirs. They live in a place called Lees Valley. It is only accessible by a skinny shale mountain road. Only 20 or so people live in this valley, sheep and cattle are the reason anyone lives here. After a tour of their farm and playing with some baby sheep, we were served one of the best meals I have ever had. We were served venison that was taken just the day before. Beef from a cow that was butchered that morning. Fresh greens and vegetables grown by the farm owners. And a dish called whitefish. I didn’t think I would like it, it was fantastic. The meal and experience of that day will forever be one of the most fond memories of my life.
Ham & cheese with mayo sandwich on a plane (airline food) after eating nothing but Bengali food for a few months. I couldn’t believe how good it tasted.
Best “bread” might have been some large sesame-topped crackers I remember eating with my family while waiting for our food to arrive at several Midwest restaurants around 1970. The brand name on the plastic packaging was Euphrates, and they were in the bread baskets on all the tables. Of course, I enjoyed them so much because I was a hungry child and had no idea when we were going to be served.
One of the best “steaks” was at the diner of a small hotel where a girlfriend and I stayed on a trip to Portugal. The owner, a rather large and matronly woman who also took the orders and cooked the meals, came to our table and said something like “Um beefie?” I asked about a few things on the menu, and her response was the same: “Um beefie?” So, two beefies it was. Now that I’ve learned a little more about cooking, I think they were relatively cheap cuts that had been marinated, tenderized with a mallet and cooked in wine and parsley. Incredibly tender and tasty.
Best Asian food so far was probably at a place where I tried Thai cuisine for the first time. The combination of spicy heat and crisp vegetables was a big surprise, and I went back often. An even bigger surprise was when a hot-pepper seed got stuck in my throat.
The best-looking food might be the coffee and sandwiches that Tom Hanks’ character is seen eyeing in Saving Private Ryan. Clearly, a testimony to Spielberg’s talent and my imagination.
In 1994, on my first solo trip cross-country, I stopped at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After touring the museum, I ate at their restaurant and had a gourmet meal that, I’m not exaggerating, brought tears to my eyes it was so exquisitely prepared.
It was a bean burrito.
Looking back I don’t know how much of the joy of the meal was the experience and how much it was really cooking expertise–but I have never before or since had such a perfect burrito.
Yeah, I had perfect tacos about 9 days ago from a food truck at an art fair. pulled pork with kimchee, chipotle mayo and cilantro. Best tacos I’d ever had!
Best family dining experience is a tie: one was at a 5 star dim sum place in San Francisco for lunch, but the other was at Olive Garden, of all places. We’d just come off of a hike in Sedona, AZ where we were enchanted with the scenery, weather, and the desire to do the full trail. So we hiked thru lunch, subsisting on some glucose tabs we had along. once done, we were starving, then it took 45 minutes to find a restaurant of any kind, which was the OG. Ordinarily not something we’d tend to stop at, but their food never tasted better, far superior to times before and times since at OG.
Vacationing in Charleston, SC. Got the shrimp and grits at a place called High Cotton. Sunday brunch if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know if it was the slight hangover or just being on vacation in a fun place but, damn, that was good!
I can think of two situational “Best Thing I Ever Ate” personal episodes.
The first was when I became horribly ill with food poisoning. I made a very bad decision involving a company refrigerator (opened at least 200 times per day) and a Lean Cuisine I stored in it for about 4 days before consuming it. Sick as a dog from both ends for a long weekend, couldn’t eat anything. I struggled to keep water down and for the first time in my life, became acquainted with the phrase, “loss of bowel function.”
When the grip of illness finally abated, I was hungry. My poor neglected fridge offered only a lonely cantaloupe. But what a cantaloupe!! It was perfect. I chunked it up and ate the whole thing in one go. I will never forget how fantastic it was!
The second instance was on a scuba dive excursion I made with a friend in the early 80s. She was a dive instructor and I sometimes accompanied her on her trips to Catalina Island as an extra to help with arrangements and tasks. Plus free diving!
On this occasion, we set our lobster traps early in the day and went off to do dive things with our charges. After a long day, we retrieved our clawless lobsters from the Deep and returned to the hotel. On the way, we bought a bottle of fine wine, some butter and a can of mixed nuts. We wheedled a hot plate and a pot from the hotel staff, boiled up our catch, poured out the wine and enjoyed a fabulous lobster dinner (all lobster!) on the patio of our hotel room. Nuts for dessert. I can hardly remember a finer meal.
Lightning stuck twice for me concerning salmon consumption: first time was at a restaurant near the Public Market in Seattle (I can’t remember which restaurant). The second experience was in Paris about 10 years ago. I had just arrived for my vacation, and I stopped at a café named Les Ondes (Waves) for lunch. The salmon was equal to the Seattle experience. No other salmon I’ve ever had before or since tasted nearly as good as these two meals. I just checked Les Ondes online, and it’s still there. The online reviews for it aren’t even that great, but maybe the magic of being in Paris for the first time had something to do with it.