The first was a ham and cheese sandwich at a highway rest stop in northern France. The ham and cheese were really, really good, but the real key was the baguette – not too airy, crispy but not too thick crust, and perfectly seasoned. When assembled this simple concoction was perhaps still the single, best sandwich I’ve eaten in my life.
The second one is a hamburger (actually “lamb-burger”, given the country) at the Marriott Hotel restaurant in Ahmedabad, India. It surprised me because (a) India, where presumably a hamburger is a rarity, and (b) hotel food isn’t usually very good (unless you go to the “fine dining” restaurant inside hotels). I’d been living in China at the time, and in my five years there I’ve never had a good hamburger, and so this wonderful, awesome, lamb-burger was even doubly delicious. If only beer has been legal, it would have been a perfect meal.
Amin threw out everyone who wasn’t African, including the Indian and British folks. After he was deposed, the Indian families who had lived there for generations began returning to reclaim their property, much of which was the lucrative tea plantations. By the time we were posted there in 1997, life had returned to normal, or as normal as things can ever get in that part of the world.
nearwildheaven: To my chagrin, I was not aware of the large Indian population prior to our arrival, and was pleasantly surprised to find wonderful restaurants. I was impressed enough with the food to pursue learning to cook it myself. I guess the real oddity there was a superb Italian restaurant, run by a former WHO employee and his British wife.
$60 for a 10 oz filet meal? That’s quite pricey. At a decent steakhouse, I’d expect it closer to $40. The popular one around in the suburbs south of me has a 12 oz for $32.95. (Edit: sorry, apparently it went up to $35.95 for 12 oz, and 26.95 for 8 oz.) At a non-steakhouse, you can definitely find them at the $20 price point. Here’s one delicious 8-10oz Cajun filet at one of my favorite local joints for $18.99 last year.
If you shop right, you can find sales where filet goes down to about $12/lb. Typically, it is closer to $16-18/lb (that’s what I paid for last on a trimmed choice tenderloin at Costco.) And that’s for choice prices. Even select grade filet is quite tender, and I’m sure it can be found for even less, especially if you’re a restaurant buying in bulk.
Ha! Food in a strip club - a crock pot! - always strikes me as hilarious. Instead of watching the hard-working ladies - “Holy cow, look at the udders on that one!” it’s “Holy cow, what a great buffet, oooo, are those meatballs? Is there any swiss cheese on the cold cut platter?” And how can they eat while looking at rectums and vaginas?
…anyway, at the garage where I took my car, there was a gas station next door run by a really nice East Indian and he sold pizza from a glass case (I think he said his relatives made it but I don’t know if that’s allowed) that had the lightest, crunchiest crust. Just a little sauce and cheese on the wonderful crust. Never had any pizza like it since.
Best clam chowder I ever had was at a Lake Tahoe casino buffet. I’ve been all kinds of places famed for their chowdah (including all over Nwingland, here) and nothing has ever compared to that bowl.
Absolutely astounding savory crepes from a tiny mobile cart in a neighborhood above London. Our guide (a native and very slightly famous) whipped us around the city in a day and ended up there, in his neighborhood, for a crepe and a pint. Just outstanding.
Thanks. I recall there was a big ruckus at the timeof the expulsion of Uganda’s Indians in. Many of them held British passports, so went to settle in the UK; which was resented by some illiberally-inclined Britons. I’d really hardly given any thought to this business, since then.
Uganda seems a pretty hapless place: it’s uncommon, and thus nice, to hear anything positive concerning it – in this case, the excellent Indian food !
I used to work at a bowling alley here in S. GA. It was well known that our snack bar had the best hamburgers, hot dogs, onion rings, and French fries in town, particularly when I was cooking. The prices were even with the fast food joints.
R & R Taqueria, which is hidden behind a convenience store which is hidden behind a gas station, serves some of the best Mexican food in the Baltimore-Washington area:
At Nicollet and Lake, before they redeveloped it in the '70s, there was another place next to the Vogue cinema called La Pizzeria, where the pizza was just as good and also had chunks of homemade Italian sausage. One of the soft drinks they served was Bubble-Up, which was like Seven-Up but gassier.
By the time I was in high school, we had to move to The Pizza Shack on Lake near Cedar. Also excellent, and more variety. Their spaghetti was (and as of January 2000, still is) wonderful.
So, where did you find the best beer you’ve ever had? Germany? The Czech Republic? Alamogordo, New Mexico? The Pacific Northw-
Wait, what? Back up a second, there.
Yes, the best beer I ever tasted was back in the late '90’s, an offering from the Compass Rose, a small, short-lived brew pub in Alamogordo. (The desert southwest being known for its beer, of course.) It was their bock. Even with beer I really like, I find I can take a couple of swallows and then need to take a brief pause from the bitterness. This stuff I felt I could drink like it was chocolate milk- bock beer taste, somehow without triggering the bitterness reaction, and smooth as silk. It was only money and the need to occasionally breathe that kept me from drinking it straight down by the pitcherful.
I was amazed the place closed. (Their food was very good, too.) I remember it fondly and hope it only closed because the people running it moved to a bigger city and found bigger success. They certainly deserved it.
I had a BLT at the Oasis Good Time Emporium (strip club) in Atlanta. I admit that having a naked girl bent over 3 feet away was a bit off-putting. Never ate at a strip club again.
My best unexpected meal was a place called Chicken Chicken in Grand Cayman. They served… wait for it… chicken! It had a Jamaican Jerk spice and was cooked on a rotisserie. My wife and I at there twice in the week we were on the island.
I had some sublime Italian food in Budapest one night when my wife and I were looking for somewhere to eat and stumbled into this place. It was a bit more high-end than we were looking for, but absolutely stellar.
As in, my wife’s been to Italy something like 4 times, including a study-abroad summer, and she claims that Budapest meal was the best Italian food she’s ever had.
The best pho in my area comes from a place in a run-down strip mall. It’s so run-down, some of the businesses pressure wash their facades and some just let green slime grow unchecked. (This is the Pacific NW after all). The paint is some kind of bluish-gray; hard to tell because it’s faded at different rates. The inside is little better - torn seat cushions, scuffed table surfaces, walls that could have used a fresh coat of paint ten years ago.
But the pho there… its just so good. It’s the kind of good that ruins every other pho joint because they’re just not doing it right. And it’s about a dollar cheaper than everywhere, too.
I can’t say this was the best food I’ve ever encountered but this was something very good and unexpected.
I had driven down to northern New Jersey for a SDMB meet-up. I had said I was going to make some ice cream so when I got in the area, I stopped at a local supermarket to buy some milk and cream.
I found something in the store I’ve never seen anywhere else. I often see stores that have serve yourself buffet bars with things like salad makings, Asian food, chicken wings, and olives. But this store had a shrimp buffet bar; they had about ten different kinds of shrimp and you could dish up as much as you wanted and pay based on how much it weighed.
I love shrimp and I love ten different kinds of shrimp ten times as much. I loaded up a tray with all the choices they had and then I ate it all in the parking lot.
Recently my mother was hospitalized for a hip replacement. The hospital is a smallish one in a suburb. While we were waiting during the surgery, my husband and I decided to have a meal in the hospital’s cafeteria. The beef stroganoff was truly excellent, and two meals with drinks cost us less than seven dollars.
My mother has been out of the hospital for several weeks, but my husband and I are seriously considering going back to that cafeteria for lunch.
Not quite what the OP was looking for, but I was at Whole Foods the other morning and was surprised to see biscuits and gravy in the hot food section. The gravy was a little thin, but the cheddar biscuits more than made up for it. Yum!
When I was a kid I learned to cook Indian food from my mother who was English. This was back in the 60s when you couldn’t buy Indian sauces but had to make everything from scratch. I was quite a novelty back then when I started sharing homes with friends as most Aussies had no idea what a real curry was or how to make one. I assumed all English mothers cooked Indian food.
My mother in turn had learned to cook Indian from her family’s cooks while her father was posted in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika after WWII. Apparently all the kitchen staff where always Indian.
Some of the best restaurants are in what apparently had been someone’s home at one point. This place had the best dill pickles I ever tasted! Been torn down to make way for a Walgreens, unfortunately.
