For me it was paella at a hole in the wall restaurant in Valencia, Spain. The rice all by itself was incredible (it was yellow–saffron I think), but the seafood took it to a whole other level. Then there was the freshly baked bread they served with it–best meal ever!!
Runner up was a truffle ravioli at a restaurant in Rome. Simply divine! No recipe has ever allowed me to duplicate either of these dishes.
So what was your best dining experience?
Char-broiled halibut steak somewhere west of Portland, Maine. I have no idea what else was served with it.
A slice of triple chocolate cake from some bakery in St. Louis. 1" thick but took two days to eat.
Steak au poivre and raspberry chocolate mousse at a Kansas City restaurant named Le Fou Frog. Absolutely divine.
Honestly? It’s a toss-up between these two…
A Monte Cristo sandwich at Bennigan’s. They’re pretty good anyway, but I’ve had a couple (with the requisite raspberry jam on the side) that were absolutely outstanding.
A bread pudding at Applebee’s. Yes, I’m serious. Little cubes of bread pudding deep fried and then dumped in a tall dessert glass. Put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top and then drizzle caramel sauce over the whole thing. The bread pudding is still hot and the whole thing just came together. Sadly, no longer available.
King crab legs - American, not Russian! - right off the Time Bandit! So big we had to use mallets and nutcrackers to open them. Plus, little salt potatoes, garlic bread, corn on the cob, all drenched in melted butter. And caesar salad. Oh, my. Oh, my. I can’t eat like that any more, alas, but we might give it another try. It’s on our admittedly pathetic bucket list.
Possibly the bouillabaisse I had on the waterfront in Marseilles, France. The real deal. I’ve also swooned over the steak au poivre a la creme with frites in a Brussels pub on many occasions.
Probably the most satisfying meal, though, was in boot camp. We went out to the firefighting training place, which was off the base. After an exhausting, sweaty morning of manhandling fire hoses in a smoke-filled building, we were presented with a long table piled with cold cuts, cheese, rolls, potato salad, and beans. By any standard of such things, this was pretty crappy food, but sitting under the trees in the sun, it tasted like heaven to us.
No way I could accurately identify all the fantastic meals I’ve had over the past 5 decades. Thankfully, amazing food can be found in many places (or I’m easy to please)
However, three that stick out:
Kahlua pork nachos in Hawaii. Amazing
Ribs at the Rendezvous in Memphis Amazing
Salmon cooked on a river bank fire in Alaska 30 minutes after catching
Huevos Rancheros at a small restaurant in Philadelphia. It was an ordinary meal, but everything about it came together beautifully and unexpectedly, enough so that it crosses my mind from time to time 6 years later.
I have a similar memory of the best drink I’ve ever experienced. It was a perfect bloody Mary at a Kansas City restaurant. This was around 10 years ago and I still think of it now and then.
mmm
It’s hard to narrow it down to just one dish, but I can think of a few meals in terms of general experiences, and the top two that come to mind were both Japanese. One was an omakase (multi-course tasting menu) of what was probably at least two dozen courses, each one an absolutely incredible experience, and each one served on a different piece of chinaware or pottery. There was of course sushi, but most of it was exotic Japanese cooking unlike anything I’d ever had before. It’s helped shape my impressions to the point that every time I see the word “Japanese”, I immediately think “fantastic food”!
I once had dinner at Lutèce in NYC as the guest of someone who knew chef André Soltner personally, so he just told him to bring us whatever he thought was best. That was around the time that Julia Child, a panel of food critics, and Zagat had declared Lutèce to be the best restaurant in the United States. It was certainly a fantastic dinner but in all honesty if I had a choice between a repeat of that and of either of the top Japanese omakase dinners, it would absolutely be the omakase. 
I mentioned this is another thread.
A center cut of a rib roast that I accidentally severely undercooked. Well below rare, as in raw, but melted in my mouth and tasted like a cross between beef and tuna sashimi! I literally moaned to myself as I ate it! :eek:
I tried to recreate the experience the next day with the leftovers, but the was unable to. Good, but not great. 
A fruit curry soup I had in Bremerhaufen Germany.
So completely different from anything I’ve ever had in my life, and so wonderful.
It’s a little weird, but one of my strongest meal memories was eating at the Pueblo Cultural Center in New Mexico. I ordered a bean burrito, and my god but that meal nearly brought me to tears of joy.
Food is so connected to emotions and circumstances, and I think Chefguy nails it when he talks about the context in which he ate. I’ve been to far fancier restaurants and had far more complex dishes than that bean burrito, but the combination of where I was, and the fact that I was young and traveling cross-country by myself for the first time, elevated it to sublimity.
You just jogged my memory. Had dinner at a German restaurant a while back and I remember I had a bowl of soup that made me involuntarily go “mmmm” and damn near swoon after every spoonful. GF told me to stop it, but I couldn’t help it. Forgot the exact ingredients but apples and curry were among them. Best bowl of soup I’ve ever had in my life ( so far ).
Crawfish etouffée at a restaurant in New Orleans in 2008. We went back a couple nights later because it had been so good, and it was that good a second time. 
Lobster ravioli at a restaurant in NYC in 2002.
I’m jealous of all the people who’ve had meals so outstanding they can remember them so well.
I"ve had variety of very good meals, but never had any truly great ones.
Maybe it was the same soup, if not the same restaurant. Was it a warm soup? Mine was, but a lot of fruit soups are served cold. I don’t remember apples in mine, but there could have been. It was a puree based soup, but not completely smooth.
Yeah, I can’t remember any. To me food is a mediocre and mundane experience. It holds no interest for me beyond satisfying hunger.
I have been fortunate to have had lots of great meals but the experience that stands out is a simple lamb gyro, while sitting in a cafe high on the cliff-side in Santorini overlooking the bright blue ocean. The flavor was a revelation. I have no idea what was different about it, but ISTM that all the food we had in that part of the world was much more natural and flavorful, in contrast with American factory farmed processed and packaged food.
Oysters on the half shell while sitting on a dock in Monterey. Taste of the sea.