The dirty rice at Brigtsen’s on Dante Street in New Orleans. It was served on the side of half a roasted duck, but I would have given the duck back to the cook for another dish of that rice.
Charlotte Jenkins’s fried chicken at her Gullah Kitchen roadhouse in Mt. Pleasant, just north of Charleston, SC. I’m not a fan of most restaurant fried chicken, which is never as good as homemade, but my god, this woman has the magic hands. Sorry to say the place is closed now, and she only does local catering. You can buy her cookbook, though.
On the simpler side, a few years ago my wife, our best friend and I dropped over $150 at lunch in a raw bar in Seattle where we could walk past the locally-raised oyster basins and choose a dozen of these, a dozen of those, then do it all over again. Along with glass after glass of local beers and Washington State white wines. For the first time in my life, I got ENOUGH oysters.
We were on a all-inclusive scuba diving vacation at Roatan, Honduras and one day after our morning dive they took us by boat to an isolated beach for a picnic. Not that I’ve been to every beach in the world but this one was still the best one I’ve ever seen and there was nobody else to share it with. Then they brought out the food and it was fabulous. Breaded grouper and fried chicken plus various forms of potatoes and other vegetables. I don’t know if the surroundings enhanced the flavor of the food somehow but it was without a doubt the best tasting meal I’ve ever had.
As has already been said, so much of what makes food “good” is context.
Five or six years ago I ran a half marathon, which I had never done. It was the longest physical endeavor I’ve ever put my body through. The last two miles were really tough, and I had definitely driven my body to a place it’s never been by the time I was through. At the end there were some stations with fruit, milk, and some other snacks. I ate a banana, and I have never had an immediate physical reaction to food like I had in that moment. That banana was the best thing I have ever eaten, and I’m sure that “dish” will stick with me the rest of my life.
In my teens I was fortunate enough to go on a culinary tour of Sicily with my family (a sort of “last hurrah” travel experience/gift from my grandparents, who wanted to travel with family before they became too old to do such things). We had a lot of great meals, but the dish that stands out in my memory was a fried sardine dish. I don’t think it was particularly more complicated than that, but at that point in my life I’d never had a sardine that wasn’t from a tin. Fresh fish in a quiet, beautiful, coastal/mountain-top town in a rustic yet elegant setting, with good family, good wine, and in the middle of countless new experiences . . . it was excellent.
This past summer we spent part of our honeymoon in Paris, and I had one of the best fish preparations I’ve ever eaten at the restaurant Frenchie. I don’t really remember exactly what it was, but I do remember saying “this is the best fish I’ve ever eaten.”
Crabmeat stuffed whole red snapper made by my mother and me. My Dad brought the fish home that morning, and my mom and I had fresh crabmeat on hand. We stuffed it full of a mixture of crabmeat, celery, bell pepper and just a few dry breadcrumbs with egg. Lined the interior with lemon slices, too. Mom even took a picture!
It was a feast for all of us. It’s a lovely memory from the late seventies.
We went on a boat in Antigua some years ago to a beach picnic, too! Rum punch by the gallon, fresh seafood, and the most delectable pineapple that they cut up. It was lovely!
I’m not sure I could pick one. There’s just so many to choose from. I’ve had a good number of meals that have given me that endorphin rush of it being so good that it made me feel like everything was just right in the world.
Two that stick out: a simple chicken stew in the Hungarian countryside, served with crusty, fresh Hungarian white bread, some pickled yellow-green almapaprika (“apple peppers”) on the side, and some cheap kadarka red wine. The stew (*csirekpörkölt) itself was simple: just onions, paprika, and chicken, salt, pepper stewed in water and mostly its own juices. Basically, chicken paprikash without the sour cream.Maybe it was the freshness of the just-killed chicken coupled with the lack of expectations, but I remember that meal to this day.
The other one would be the pulled pork sandwich in the now-shuttered Morris Grocery in Eads, TN. Unfortunately, the owner passed away a few years back, but I came into this place with high expectations, and those expectations were met and surpassed. Everything about that pork sandwich was perfect: great clean smoke flavor, a sauce that hit the sweet, sour, and spicy notes perfectly, a good bit of bark in the sandwich, just the right amount of creamy slaw. It’s actually a lot of stuff I normally don’t like in my pulled pork (usually I get sauce and slaw on the side, as the places I go to typically overdo it) but all the components were just expertly balanced here. We ate here as the last stop of the Memphis section of our BBQ tour, after visiting six places or so in two days, and even though I thought I was already BBQ-ed out, this place helped me catch my second wind.
Another great place-plus-food situation: Having a cheese fondue while sitting on the outdoor deck of a restaurant looking at the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland. Years later, I saw that same deck and scene on a box of muesli.
Different restaurant; it’s in the US. It was served hot and I guess had a puree consistency, similar to something like pea soup I guess. Beige-ish green. Never had anything like it: and I have a very adventurous palate.
My greatest meals are all related to the particular circumstances. Ten years ago we were in St Martin on my gf’s 50th birthday. We rented a kayak and paddled to Pinel Island, a small island off the northeast coast of the mainland. There is a restaurant there that is exquisite, especially considering that they serve gourmet food without benefit of electricity. They boat over dozens of coolers with their ingredients, supplies, booze, etc each day There is a ferry that shuttles folks to the island and back.
On that particular day we arrived before the first ferry, so other than the workers we were alone on the island. A beach attendant came over and told us they were just informed that the ferry was down for maintenance, so the restaurant’s crew were breaking down and leaving. We told him about our birthday plans for the day and that we would just relax on the island for a bit.
He came back 15 minutes later with an ice bucket and 12 Carib beers, and a cooler with a huge Salade de la mer (various raw and smoked fish on a bed of greens), ribs, bread, fruit, etc. He wished my gf a happy bd, kissed us both (a French thing), and showed me where to leave our trash. He wouldn’t take any money, insisting that it would ruin the gift. What a great lunch, enjoyed on our own island!
This January we were on St Martin on my gf’s 60th birthday. We had made reservations weeks earlier for dinner at Loterie Farm, a beautiful nature preserve in the interior of the island, where you dine in the rainforest. It’s one of the places we visit each year.
Through some sort of erie serendipity, we were the only dinner reservations that night (my gf actually initially thought that maybe I’d booked the place just for us that night for her birthday). We offered to come back some other night during our vacation because we felt bad keeping everyone there just for us, but the waitress told us they were on the clock, so they’d be there till closing no matter what.
We ordered a bottle of wine to start and the waitress returned with the chef, a Canadian ex pat who has been there for the past 15 years. We’ve talked with her before and she remembered us. We talked politics for a while (she HATES Trump, so all was good there). My gf suggested that rather than ordering, maybe she could just make us a meal. She was happy to do that.
Many, many courses later (one in particular was fresh fish wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf) we shared after dinner drinks with everyone there. I held my breath when the check arrived, but it was written up as just an average dinner. I managed to convince the waitress to take some cash to share with everybody. Oh what a night!
Sauteed octopus with melted butter. In 1989 I was working on a Russian fishing boat in the Bering Sea. The food was not good. I had lost 10 lbs over the previous 6 weeks. This octopus somehow got caught up in the nets and a couple of us paid one of the cooks to cut it up and prepare it. Heavenly!
A seven-pepper NY Strip steak at some restaurant in Grand Cayman. The owner/chef was from Pennsylvania and he imported the beef from his hometown. Crusty/peppery sear on the outside and meltingly tender in the middle.
Cafe Arazu in Newburgh, Indiana has these little fried potato’s that we nicknamed “little bites of heaven”. One woman I worked with went “Mmmmm” with every bite.
I had a great Omakase Japanese meal, there’s no way to describe how good it was. The problem is that I can’t begin to make any of it at home. But it is easily the best meal I’ve ever eaten.
I do think that there is a difference between fine dining meals and simple and delicious. We frequently have Brotzeit for a meal. There are a few requirements, a hard cheese, a soft cheese, some sort of deli meat, crackers, great bread and beer. However, there are a few combinations that just stop the show:
Sap sago cheese (a very hard swiss cheese that is grated to a dust then mixed with butter) spread on bread and covered with a slice of roast beef.
Gorgonzola with thin apple slices on bread or rye crisp type crackers.
Both of these are heavenly…
Lobsters which we cooked at home. Killed them, split them in two lengthwise, and grilled them on the 'cue, while brushing them with butter into which I had stirred sauteed shallots and minced tarragon. Served them up with toasted sourdough and lemon wedges. Mmmmmm.
Frutti-di-mari at an Italian restaurant that now I can’t remember the name of in San Francisco. Leonardo’s? Michaelangelo’s? Something like that. I’ve written of this meal on these very boards before, I’m certain of it. A fantastic meal at a family-style place with waiters walking around with giant blocks of Parmesan to carve you off a hunk. I remember loving that dish so much that I ate every last bite to my detriment. I was so full it was a struggle to stroll through the city afterward, but it was worth it. Damn, that was good.
A meal at Volt during ramps season. I love ramps, but it’s so rare to have them really done well. I think it was paired with a house-smoked river trout. I also remember that they brought just a touch of the smokiness into the dessert. Truly outstanding. I’m surprised to note that the details now escape me.
Also a pile of steamed lobsters on the newspaper-covered picnic table at my Great-Aunt’s NH lake house. The butter was from a local Shaker community; I don’t know why it was different, but it was. Picking the lobsters and dipping them into shared butter bowls with all my cousins, that was fantastic!
I’ve had many wonderful, memorable meals. Far from the only ones, but a couple of standouts:
In the 1980s I lived on the island of Pohnpei, in Micronesia. There was a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near our house with a talented Japanese sushi chef (no idea why he’d holed up on Pohnpei, probably running from the law or an angry ex or something). The fish was all locally caught and sublime. I had endless perfect sushi dinners there.
In Sydney there is (or was) a world-class dim sum restaurant that we stumbled on by accident. (I later read up on it and discovered it was well known for being authentic and superb.) The selection was staggering - barely would we choose some delicious morsels from one cart when the next one would roll up to the table with an array of novel and enticing treats to choose from. Best dim sum EVER - and I say that having had a hell of a lot of great dim sum in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian countries.
