For food, taste, and sheer insanity, the 17-course tasting menu at the Fat Duck, one of the best restaurants in the world. The most expensive meal I ever ate, and the most intensely bizarre and delicious.
For weeping-with-pleasure “oh thank god for that” return to familiarity, a baguette fresh from the oven, spread with Vache qui Rit cheese, for breakfast in Sa Pa, Vietnam, after having arrived - and not eaten anything the previous day or night - after three months of eating disgusting slop in China.
It was early October and I was in Goreme, the middle of Cappadocia, towards the end of a 5-week journey around Turkey. It’d been a ridiculously busy day capped off with a 2-hour-long horseback ride as the sun set in the rose-coloured sandstone valley. Given that I’d fallen off the horse during the ride I was sore, bruised, and grumpy. It was dark and briskly cold on our walk back from the horse camp to the town, and by the time we reached the restaurant strip we didn’t really care where we were eating.
We picked one at random, a tiny restaurant on the top floor, accessed by wooden stairs on the side of the building. We were the only three people inside, and it was very, incredibly warm. There weren’t any chairs, just pillows on the floor and low tables, and I gingerly eased down into a pile of pillows to let my badly sprained and scraped ankle rest. The owner brought us a complementary platter of zucchini fritters and hot apple tea since we were her first customers of the night.
Since the menu was entirely in Turkish, she chose meals for each of us. Twenty minutes later she delivered to me a small sealed clay vessel supported over a bowl of flaming something. She cracked the vessel with a hammer, breaking it cleanly along a seam in the clay, and lifted off the lid. Inside was a piping hot chicken, tomato, and cubanelle pepper stew. It was the perfect cap to the day, delicious and exactly what I didn’t know I wanted.
The hot chocolate after the meal was amazing, too – it tasted like pure melted chocolate. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that meal.
This is about as mundane as it gets, but… Senior year at U of I. I had just had surgery on my wrist and my Mom had driven up to taxi me to and fro. She gave me a Tylenol 3 w/ codeine and put me to bed. Hours later, I awoke to the smell of her FAMOUSLY FABULOUS potato soup: chunky spuds, onions, plenty of butter and pepper…with Zesta saltines, natch. Heavenly!
It wasn’t an entire meal, but I’ll never forget the crepes I had at a little shop alone Duval Street in Key West. I had a few different varieties in the three days I spent in Key West, but the best had some bananas and Nutella with some carmelized nuts or something in it. So wonderful, I would plan another trip to Key West just for those crepes.
Cassoulet at a NY City French restaurant in the 1980s. It was, for NYC, quite reasonable. Had friends in from California and England. Three of us ordered it, and there were only two servings left. One of us(not me) said they didn’t mind having something else. Their loss. I’d never had it before, and came home determined to make it myself sometime. Maybe a year later, took out my Joy of Cooking, read the recipe, went to store and paid tons of money, spent the whole day cooking it, and it was a pale imitation of what I had in NY.
For presentation, as much as anything else, although there was nothing wrong with the flavors.
Dinner in the hotel restaurant, in a very nice hotel in Cape Town, South Africa-- our last night in town.
I don’t remember the salad course with any degree of certainty, although it might well have consisted of a stack of slices of tomato alternating with slices of eggplant. I’m absolutely certain it was layered, and not particularly remarkable by itself.
The next course, the main course, consisted of a small steak, topped with mashed sweet potato, topped with something else (maybe), topped with whole green beans.
While waiting for our dessert, we speculated on what it might be. Deciding that it must be served in layers.
Sure enough, a little apple tart–apples sliced thinly and stacked on top of each other (or maybe it was apricot, rather than apple), with a scoop of ice cream on top.
I no longer remember all the details of the food, but that layered presentation of the main course is indelibly stuck in my brain.
And it was all delicious.
That wasn’t the only memorable meal on that trip, but if I had to pick just one, that’s the one I’d pick, because of the layered presentation.
Before industrialized food production reached small villages in the Mediterranean countries… I had an oven baked chicken with olive oil, garlic and oregano, fried potatoes and a watermelon, that is imprinted in my memory forever.
The oven was a stone oven, outside the main house, kept hot by burning wood.
The chicken was farm grown and raised of course, and it was cooked over hot coals buried in a hole in the ground, very similar to many other cultures around the world. Even in Hawaii I’ve seen people cook a whole pig like that.
The potatoes were from the farm and fried over olive oil from the farm too, over a slow cooking gas burner and an iron cast frying pan.
The watermelon was farm grown and cooled for a few hours by placing it in a stream that was coming out from an ice cold spring in the same farm.
All the above “farms” were the same farm that my relatives lived in. Their house was choked with greenery and vines and all kinds of plants and flowers and in the hot, humid Mediterranean August, their yard outside their kitchen was so shady and so cool and breezy…