I grew up in a country with few packaged foods (at the time, they are now awash in it). When I emigrated to the US, I thought all the packaged foods I had seen in advertising would be great.
One by one they disappointed me. Ragu spaghetti sauce, Totino’s pizza rolls, Campbell’s soups, Rice a Roni, Twinkies, on and on.
I learned recently that most smoked cheese is made with artificial smoke flavoring. How to smoke cheese at home
I’m also not a fan.
Was thrilled that I would finally get to try a Flake bar. Not all that great. And Aero mint bar? No, never again.
I never had Stove Top stuffing while growing, so I made it for our first Thanksgiving after we got married. That was also the last time.
Yeah, that’s the thing about In-N-Out. Their regular burgers are fine but unremarkable. You have to know that’s there’s Animal Style to get the special burger that can’t be had anywhere else. (And yes, the fries are terrible.)
Though animal-style fries are tasty.
Can’t say I always wanted to try it but Dubai Chocolate wasn’t anything to write home about.
Hearing a nightingale sing.
I had always read of nightingale song as this entrancing melody, the sweetest of all birdsong. Having now listened to a bunch of recordings, I’m very underwhelmed. I mean, all birdsong is nice, but the nightingale is nothing special, just a sequence of birdy-sounding chirps, trills and rattles.
Okay, fine? Maybe nightingale fans just found it refreshingly delightful to listen to complex birdsong in the dark, since most songbirds are diurnal? Maybe the nightingale is the birding equivalent of Turkish Delight.
For melodic charm I’ll take the NZ bellbird, and for mysterious poignant night music, a distant whippoorwill or a loon on a lake.
Which seems smug and pretentious. How can I try it if I don’t know about it? Borders on stupid.
You also have to know somehow to ask for the fries “Well-Done.” They are hand-cut thin & that extra cooking time makes them crispy & delightful. To me all that extra stuff on Animal Style Fries ruins them.
Twenty years ago, half of the posts in this thread would have involved something sexual. Are we evolving or just old?
One big disappointment for me was Laphroaig Scotch whisky. I can’t remember how it got so hyped up…I think an author I liked kept touting its charms in multiple books. I finally bought a bottle and damn near spit it out. It’s utterly disgusting, and I like Scotch. I know somebody reading this loves Islay single malts and you are welcome to them, my friend. Blecchh.
The first time I really tried scotch was at some whisky festival where dozens of distilleries all had booths and gave out free samples. I knew nothing about scotch, but after the 3rd islay that I hated I decided it wasn’t for me for about a decade. Now I love heavily peated scotch. Lagavulin, IMO, gets the most hype because of Ron Swanson, but the 3 big ones are all delicious. Smokey mescal too!
The first time I had high end bourbon was Pappy 20 in ~2008 and thought it was the most delicious alcohol I’d ever had. Years later I had the Rip Van Winkle 12 year and only thought it was fine if it was a $75 bottle. I’m not sure if the difference is 1) my ratings has changed as I’ve had more/better whiskey 2) Pappy is just plain better than the base van Winkle line 3) 2008 Pappy would have been Stitzel-Weller and so the nectar is lost forever.
Current community and hence moderation standards would not be amused.
Everything sexual I always wanted to try lived up to the hype.
There’s also that. 
Islay Scotch is unlike any other whisky, from Scotland, or anywhere else. An old friend who was a Scotch aficionado explained to me once that it had to do with the aging, the barrels, and where and how they were stored during aging. I don’t know about that, but having sampled many Scotches, both Islay and non-Islay, I’ll stand by my “unlike any other whisky” remark.
The end result is that you either really, really like it; or you really, really don’t. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground whan it comes to Islays. I like it, myself, but I also realize that it is not to everybody’s taste. That’s okay; it just means that there’s more for me. 
Perfectly said. 
People love it or hate it.
I’m on Team Islay.
Yes, and I might add that they were real and they were spectacular.
I actually want to quote on this, though not the board or the moderation (ya’ll know where ATMB is).
I was born in 1974 - so I was 13 (!) when Ronald Reagan finally started a very public dialog on AIDS (early days yet in understanding, but acknowledging it wasn’t JUST a problem for THOSE people). Thus my formative years were not puritanical, but also very unadventurous.
So, yeah, we’re evolving. We’re ALWAYS evolving our sexual mores, as the pendulum springs and biology, culture, scientific advances et al offer freedoms or risks that were previously unknown.
Back to the thread:
I asked my wife about her similar experiences - she mentioned one from several years back. Now, this is tropetastic, because we always talk about “Oh, you just haven’t had XYZ the right way” or “poor quality XYZ” in Cafe Society. So now 20ish years ago, a friend wanted her to try some “good” fish, because she always loathed it (and of course, these days she doesn’t eat meat at all, because she doesn’t like the taste).
So he (a quite good amateur cook) made some lovely handmade tuna nigiri. He has all the right skills, and it was exquisite (should be, since we paid around $40/lb for the fish), so it was quite fresh, well grained, and not at all fishy smelling.
She (being a good sport) tried it. And in her words, while it was absolutely perfect and lovely in terms of texture, smooth and buttery, it still tasted like catfood to her.
[ no harm, more for the two of us ]
But it’s right back to the taste component. Something can be of the highest quality, perfect freshness, and spoken of it hushed tones. But if it isn’t to your tastes, it’s always going to be a disappointment.
I enjoyed the Head, Hands and Feet album Old Soldiers Never Die so much that I wanted to get ahold of their other recordings.
I haunted eBay for months, bidding in auctions for other albums but never succeeding. Finally after long last I acquired two additional albums, which were pedestrian at best.
Very disappointing.
Wait - is that Kürtőskalács? With ice cream?
The first time I became aware of durian, I was visiting Ho Chi Minh City and was passing by an open market. The smell made me honestly wonder if there was an undiscovered dead body nearby. And I was over a hundred feet from the market, never actually saw what was on display.
In spite of that I did try durian, because I was told that the taste was exquisite if you could get past the smell. But it was not. Indeed it was sweet and reminded me of a strawberry custard. So, point in its favor. But its texture was very fibrous/stringy and watery. Strike 1. The fruit itself didn’t have the dead-corpse odor, but it did smell and taste very oniony. Strike 2. Not a fresh onion, either - strike 3. I’m not interested in a “dessert” that tastes like an old, wet, stringy onion, even if it’s a bit sweet.
All these factors are manageable individually, but combined, it just doesn’t work in a fruit that’s supposed to be like a dessert delicacy. That’s my opinion, the Vietnamese feel very differently about it.
I don’t think this is a fair characterization.
If someone comes in and says they always wanted to try anal sex and then when it happened, they didn’t enjoy it much, that’s not going to trigger any kind of mod action.
Get into the raw, gritty Penthouse-like details, and then we’ll intercede. There are better boards for it than this one.