A cup of coffee in the central lobby area of the Hilton Hotel in Bogota, Colombia in 1980. There was almost a … thickness (?) to it? So naturally sweet, no sugar needed to be added. A 6 oz cup…and it was neither too little nor too much.
Many other cups of coffee have tried, but all have failed.
I think it was his first year of college so maybe 18? My mother worked in retail so she had a lot of younger co-workers.
That’s very sad.
Hmm I can think of three that really stand out.
I was probably about 17 or so and I got mono which brought on a really bad case of strep throat. For about a week I couldn’t consume anything and had to go to the hospital to get an IV just to get fluids into my body. When I could finally eat solid food my Mom told me she would make anything I wanted. I chose a homemade hamburger, and wow was it tasty.
For just one of the best tasting meals I have had, I’ll go with a salmon stuffed with strawberries and feta cheese that I had in Halifax Nova Scotia. I have tried to recreate it many time to no success.
Well actually after writing those two I have forgotten what the third was. So by default it’s off the list.
Moved MPSIMS – Cafe Society.
Leonardo’s in San Francisco. I’m not sure if it’s still there, as this was about 10 years ago.
As I recall, it was a family style restaurant, as in, you sat at one long table with a bunch of other people all sharing the salt and pepper and the huge chunks of parmesan the waiters walked around with to carve you off a hunk.
I had a dish, that I can’t remember the name of (something Italian, and the only thing coming to mind is Cosi Fan Tuti, but I think that’s an opera), but it was a seafood/pasta dish with clams, mussels and scallops over linguini with some sort of creamy, spicy tomato sauce. It came in a huge pasta bowl bigger than my head. It was so effing delicious that I couldn’t stop myself from shoveling every last bite down. I was severly uncomfortably full for a good 2 or 3 hours, but it was worth it.
I’ve ordered the same dish in other restaurants since then but it never matched the quality at Leonardo’s.
I think I can answer for a good friend of mine, a hunting buddy passionate about the sport. He broke his jaw, cracked it right down the middle and was reduced to protein shakes, infant formula and the like for about 6 weeks while it was wired shut. He’s a big guy and had lost a lot of weight doing this. So we went duck hunting and brought them home to cook. We chicken-fried the duck breasts, had a bunch of Texmati rice, homemade gravy, fresh green beans, buttered drop biscuits, etc. So desparate for real food, he put all that in a blender, added a little milk, got a giant straw and enjoyed the hunger-buster shake of a lifetime. That managed to put a giant smile on his broken face.
One of my most memorable:
I was about 8 or 9 years old and at my Great-Aunt’s convent visiting. I was an extremely picky eater as a kid (I’d take forever to finish my dinner every night), but that evening the cook made spaghetti (which I had always hated) and I loved it so much that I had seconds.
I remember getting to the bottom of my plate and finding a whole, intact bay leaf and wondering what to do with it.
Anyway, that meal has always stuck with me. Man, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.
I’m gonna guess frutti di mare.
I’ve never had it with a creamy sauce but like everything else in the world there are probably dozens of variations on the core theme.
My memorable ones have less to do with the food than the circumstances surrounding usually.
One that has stuck with me though, for the moment. Maybe I’ll come back with more later.
I couldn’t have been more than 7ish, and my Grandfather took us all out to a fancy place for a brunch buffet (we had to dress up, and it had multiple forks and knives etc). I still remember the crepes, I wasn’t allowed to have the flambé fruit on top (alcohol you know) but I stacked mine with fruit and chocolate banana sauce and watched the chef flambé fruit at the buffet table. One of these days I will go to that buffet again and be horribly disappointed it doesn’t live up to my childish memory.
Ooh, I remembered the third one.
I was on vacation in Peru and we had been told to avoid raw vegetables to avoid getting sick. Well near the end of week two all I wanted was a salad. We stumbled across a restaurant that catered to tourists and in big bold letters across the menu it said they used bottled water to clean their vegetables. Man that was a great salad.
That’s the ticket. Mmmm. It was goooood.
Two come immediately to mind. The first was here in WV, years before we lived here. We were having a long weekend in Elkins, WV, and the lodge we were staying at had a restaurant attached. The restaurant was billed as ‘gourmet’, but you wouldn’t have known by looking at it! Anyway, the evening we ate there, the special was broiled sea scallops with a hibiscus reduction sauce. I love sea scallops, and had never had hibiscus sauce before, so I ordered that. Man, it was awesome. The scallops were as sweet and tender as could be, and the sauce was so light but still rich, and you definitely got the floral notes as you inhaled with it in your mouth!
The second was much more a matter of circumstances surrounding the meal. I’d been having a bad kidney stone attack, and hadn’t eaten in probably three days when my doctor decided to hospitalize me. In the hospital, I was on clear liquids for two more days, then he decided to just go in and remove the stone. When I woke up following the procedure, I was starving. My doc said I could eat, but dinner time had already passed, so I was stuck with whatever the floor nurse could scare up for me. Turned out to be some chicken noodle soup (probably out of a can) and a peanut butter on white bread sandwich. Completely awesome meal!
What a great story! Did You have dessert or wine?
Were you talking to me? 
When we had dinner in WV, I had a Pinot Gris with my meal (goes really well with the scallops), and we shared a piece of cheesecake with freshly made local berry sauce for dessert. At the hospital, no wine. I may have had some Jell-O afterward. 
I’ve told this story many times here, but as no meal has come along that can eclipse it: one summer I bought king crab legs. Like ten pounds. Sweet corn, little new potatoes. Italian bread. Caesar salad. I cooked what needed to be cooked, steamed the already cooked crab legs in a pot, and cracked them open with a hammer (wearing oven mitts) Melted a whole package of butter, sliced some lemons in half, opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio. That meal was better than any sex I’ve ever had in my life!
Runner-up: I was invited to a man’s log cabin out in the country, and he fried up sliced potatoes in a cast iron skillet, asparagus cut from the asparagus bed out in his back yard, and enormous venison burgers. And red wine. The burgers weren’t at all ‘gamey’. He also gave me a package of venison chops to take home, with a recipe calling for green peppers, bacon, butter, onion, and I forgot what else, I lost the recipe, but I made it in the crockpot and THAT was excellent, too.
I was eleven and it was my first camping trip with the Boy Scouts. we were told to bring a sack dinner for the first night, and my mom made me a PBJ sandwich with an apple and a few cookies. When we got to the camp site, there was a man named Leo who had come out early and had made a huge batch of venison stew so everyone would have something hot with their cold dinner.
It was delicious. I can remember just how it tasted. This was in the fall of 1964.
There’s the opening scene for your novel/voice-over for your film…
Something remarkable pedestrian. When I was a kid we all got up early one Christmas Day, opened presents and the my mother started her Christmas cooking. For the one and only time ever she cooked a duck. After browning it in the electric frypan she put it in the oven. She then cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast in the rendered duck fat.
I had no idea at the time that it was any different to everyday bacon and eggs but it tasted like absolute ambrosia. I asked what was so good about it and she explained. I think that was when I first learned how cooking actually works - the big stuff is straight forward, it’s attention to details that makes things stand out.
That would be the bison burgers we had after being up in the Wyoming mountains backpacking for two weeks. Freshly slaughtered, white cheddar, homemade fries. After living wild greens, Clif bars, filtered water and hummus it was a cheeseburger of paradise.