Is it true that food is better in the home of a good cook than restaurants with professional chefs and premium ingredients?
I think there are two different questions here. The first is about your ‘best’ meal, the second is your most memorable meal.
Quoting the article you link:
Our emotions about what goes in our mouth are intertwined with our feelings about the person preparing the food, the conversation at the table, the cultural rituals around a dish’s consumption. When dining, the social context matters perhaps even more than the quality of the food.
So it fully acknowledges that the quality of the food is secondary, and thus from a more or less objective POV, it’s not the ‘best’, but the emotional content of such meals make them more important and impactful overall.
For me, I have more memories that combine the two - exceptional meals eaten with good friends/family are more impactful than ones that only include one or the other.
But if I was saying best meal, I’d be evaluating it on the basis of the food, not some gestalt of food or experience. For example, you can have truly lousy food at some locations, but the meal is impressive because of where you had it. An example for myself would be the Sandia Tram Restaurant in NM). Quality-wise, it was probably about the level of Applebees, but the ride to and from, and the views made it immensely memorable.
Or meals at dinner theatre, or any other event-stye foods. Heck I had a friend who said their favorite meal was at a freakin’ Medieval Times location, and their food objectively sucked the one time I went. But they considered it the best ever.
So enjoy what you want, it’ll all pretty darn subjective - because often what makes a meal best for you is matching your desires perfectly. And by that standard, a close friend who is a good cook and knows what you like most, may be able to deliver a meals perfectly suited to you, while a Michelin starred chef serving his perfect vision may be unimpressive to your palate.
I only know I have rarified last memories of my Mom eating with Gusto at “The Original Pancake House” with an Gisnt Apple Pancake and Banansa Crepes (zith orange and sour cream and Grand Marnier). It was her favorite and last meal.
The reality is thst her last meal was a sausage and egg mcgriddl3.
My dad’s first meal at Jack in the box was his last meal, literally. He passed two hours after we got jack in the box for the first time ever in Vegas, was belching it up as they performed CPR, to no avail.
My daughter claims my chicken noodle soup is superior to any she’s had in a restaurant (and she’d had it in a LOT of restaurants). I’m pretty sure that by any objective measures this cannot be true.
Similarly she has claimed that some of the breakfasts I’ve put out have been superior to any she’s had in restaurants. She’s breakfasted in many a four-star restaurant.
The social aspects of preparing, serving and eating food make any comparison of “objective” quality a pointless exercise.
Depends on the restaurant vs the cook. I’ve had better meals at McDonald’s than ones served by friends who were lousy cooks.
But, there is no magic in a restaurant, even a high end one. “Premium” ingredients just means they cost more, not that they are better. A professional chef just means that they get paid for it. If you go to a high end restaurant, your meal was almost certainly not prepared by that highly trained chef, but more likely by a low paid line cook fresh out of or still in culinary school.
Does saffron and truffle oil actually make a dish better, or do they just add the flavor of saffron and truffle oil? Not saying that they aren’t pleasant flavors, but the difference in how an onion is caramelized makes far more of a difference in the pleasure of a dish than expensive ingredients.
IMO, the only ingredient that makes a large difference in the end product is the meat. There is a quality difference between say a select grade cut and a prime grade cut that will hold up in the end dish. That said, unless it is actually a steak dinner, it still doesn’t make that much of a difference. Using prime cuts in say a beef stew isn’t going to help it much.
And if you are willing to pay 5 star restaurant prices, then you can get the same ingredients they use, while paying substantially less.
After that it comes down to the skill and diligence of the cook. I don’t mean to brag, but I am a really good cook, and most people I cook for do tell me that what I make is better than they’ve ever had in a restaurant, even if I’m using pretty cheap ingredients.
I’m not cooking for some random person that’s sitting at a table, I’m cooking for a friend I care about, and so I care about the effort I put into the dish I create.
As far as equipement, you need a knife, a cutting board, a pan, a baking sheet, a few utensils, a stove, oven, and grill. Unless you are playing with Molecular Gastronomy, fancy equipment is a labor and time saver, and does little to improve the food. Using a planetary mixer to make meringue is easier than using a whisk, but it doesn’t actually make it any better.
OTOH, not to contradict everything I just said, if you had come to the hotel restaurant I was a chef at, I probably could have made a better dish there than I could at home.
I’d have to say my best meal was the signature dish from Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant in Miami Beach. But, that’s mainly because stone crab is not only my favorite crab, but also my favorite seafood—and seafood is my favorite genre of food.
And, making the meal even more memorable, I ate the crab claws knowing the crabs were still alive and well, scampering around in the ocean (stone crab is catch, harvest a claw, and release).
My second favorite meal was at my house. Rack of lamb with all the trimmings. But, this was prepared by my nephew, a culinary school-trained chef. So, it was like a fine-dining restaurant-quality home-cooked meal…but I made the mint sauce! 
My nephew lived with us for a year. That was my fat year.
If we’re talking strictly about the food, I’d say at least five or six restaurant meals were better, by far, than any home cooked meal I’ve had. But, then, as said above, the social experience is what makes a meal memorable. You’d have to specify what your criteria are.
Also, when you grow up with certain tastes and flavors, those tend to be ones you favor in the future. So, for example, if some restaurant’s Bolognese sauce is not like your childhood memories of your mom’s, you might not like it as much. Maybe the restaurant version uses fresh basil, and that tastes “weird” to you.
Although you can interpret the question as you wish, my thoughts were just about the food. Of course, this is influenced by other things - psychological studies show people rate the same food in a fancy restaurant served on china far more highly than the exact same thing served in a bog standard cafeteria.
It probably depends on the dish. Some things are simply impractical to make in small quantities, or without highly-specialized equipment. Those will be better in a restaurant. Some things require a great deal of individualized attention, that a restaurant can’t afford to give for all of their customers. Those will be better at home.
There are also variations in taste in the details of many dishes. Maybe you like things a little more browned than most people, or a little more runny, or with a little less salt, or whatever. Likely, you like it that way because that’s the way you grew up eating it in your family. A restaurant might make that dish in a way that most people would prefer over your style, but you like it better at home, because the restaurant’s style isn’t quite your style.
I am a good cook but not top restaurant good. My pet peeve is cookbooks that say things like ”just ask your butcher to save veal and venison bones and cut them to expose the marrow”. It is not true average people have access to every great ingredient.
My other pet peeve is sh*t food from a can served by waiters on fine china. This sometimes happens at conferences and rubber chicken dinners, more so than restaurants. I think I am less affected by surroundings than some, many of my favourite places have always been holes in the wall.
Or you know, just pick up one of these
Little secret, most likely your high scale restaurant has this behind the counter somewhere.
I alwas think of these as “qualified” dishes. I csn try to prepare at home, but will ever be that deepfryer grease and flattop “wok-hei” from my fsvorite high volume Diner or Greasy Spoon. Can’t go Home. The Culinary version. They are still trying to compete, but McDonald’s Hamburger is atonal.
The best meal I ever had was at Mama’s Fish House on Maui. The restaurant has their own fishing boats and their menu changes depending on what their fishermen caught that day. So whatever you get there, you can be certain it was caught fresh that way. Pretty much the only way a friend could replicate that level of freshness is if they were a fisherman themselves.
I once had one of those meals where an acclaimed chef makes twenty imaginative courses, all delicious, some no more than a bite of exquisite food. That wasn’t as good as the restaurant where the steak and fixings were so good, we each ordered a second 32 ounces after devouring the first. I don’t know how to compare that to the shack on the beach where they cooked freshly caught fish over the fire with coconut rice and escovitch vegetables. It would be hard for me to pick my ten best meals, they are so different. But homemade, though often good, is not in that league.
I could sit here and tell you about the first time I really enjoyed seafood. Never.enjoyed Fish. But eating Sardines, Squid, and gigantes plakis, and tzatziki and greek salad and homemade, fluffy, white bread (almost american wonderbread like), with greek evoo, and dried greek oregano, at the first Taverna I went to in the Pelopponese on the beach. But it was nearly 40 years Ago, and I don’t remember its name or even where it was, exactly. Can’t go home, but it was mythical. The owner was no professional chef, he took us into the kitchen and had us point out the various premade mezza thst we wanted.
About the clisest thing I can point to is this video with Mike Chen (Strictly Dumpling).
We very rarely eat dinner at anyone’s house anymore. Maybe 4 or 5 times in the last 15 years? Is it still a thing? Two of those were holidays at our kids’ house.
We are friends with one couple, from India, who have made us two meals better than any Indian restaurant we’ve ever been to. Other than that, there have been countless exceptional restaurant meals I can recall. Including one a few nights ago in Manhattan.
Ha i’m remembering the first and only time I went to Joe’s Stone Crab. I was a deathly poor graduate student in Miami for a conference. My boss and his friends wanted to go there and invited me along. I went but was wary because my boss had a habit of not paying for his students - “You’ll get reimbursed!”.
Reimbursement was irrelevant, I didn’t have the cash to float at the time.
Anyway, we went. The doorman was nice to us but was a real douchebag to other folk waiting to get in.
We sat down. I looked at the menu. The cheapest crab claw dish was like $50 bucks. I ordered a bowl of crab soup and a coke.
My boss and his buddies ordered appetizers, tons of crab, drinks (boss didn’t drink but the others did), dessert.
End of the night, boss says “lets just split the bill evenly!” Would have come to about $90 bucks a person. My dishes cost $6.
I threw down a tenner and left. Boss apologized to me the next day, said student money issues hadn’t occurred to him.
Next conference he suggested going out to dinner as a group again. I said “No thank you, have fun!”
So I never got to try the crab claws at Joe’s Stone Crab. The soup was decent though.
I was a dirt-poor first-year resident at the time. The residency director took all us new residents to Joe’s as a meet & greet. He was a hard-ass taskmaster in the OR, but he did pick up the tabs when he took us out.
So, delicious stone crab claws prepared to perfection, catch-and-release clear conscience, all free—it don’t get much better than that!
You should give Joe’s another chance if you’re ever in Miami again (assuming you have more money now than before). The crabs are snapping their claws in anticipation. 