Recently, I wrote about the worst food I ever had (pizzaburgers in the Cincinnati Public Schools) and asked people on social media for their worst foods ever.
Now, as night follows day, it is time to pay tribute to the best things we have ever eaten.
Once again, narrowing the choice down to a single spectacular dish or food was not easy. As I mentioned last time, we eat about 1,000 meals a year, give or take, and when you multiply that number by your age you end up with an awful lot of meals to choose from.
For me, it could very easily be the veal cheeks I had at Michel Richard’s restaurant in D.C., or the tempura soft-shell crab leg made by a chef friend, or the fresh green pea soup at Casa Don Alfonso in Clayton, Missouri.
But the dish that stands out the most in my mind and memory, at least at the moment, is the veal chop with a demiglace sauce I had perhaps five years ago at the Firefly Grill in Effingham, Illinois.
It was expensive, and my wife had to persuade me to get it. I’m glad she did. The chop was beautifully seared and seasoned, and the sauce that gilded it was also the consummate accompaniment for whipped potatoes that were at least equal parts potato and butter.
With that memory still fresh, I once again put the question of what was people’s best food ever out onto social media, and once again I was flooded with great answers.
Jimmy praised the “perfect” white truffle risotto at the original Galileo restaurant in Washington, D.C. Jimmy is a chef—he’s the one who served me the tempura crab leg and many other masterpieces—so if he says the risotto was perfect, it was perfect.
Betsy C. says the best food for her in general is a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and sliced bananas, and I won’t dispute that, except maybe the part about the bananas. The best thing Kathy ever ate was her first perfectly ripe fresh fig.
I used to have a fig tree. I miss my fig tree. Sigh.
Betsy L.’s favorite meal is sea scallops on a bed of caramelized Brussels sprouts with shaved parmesan at Boca restaurant in Cincinnati, while Bo’s best meal was a filet mignon served, of all places, in an officers’ dining room at the Pentagon.
One similarity in many of the responses is that they involve meals from far away, invoking a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-ocean kind of vibe. Or maybe the food is just better in France.
Hannah recalls a beef bourguignon on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. Katherine still remembers the goat cheese, Cabécou du Périgord, in southwest/central France she had “way back when.” Amy W. loved a chocolate-filled crepe she had in France. Michelle’s favorite is foie gras she had in Provence.
Gail is still floored by the sea bass en croute served at one of Paul Bocuse’s French restaurants, made even better when the great chef (whose picture adorned the plates and the wall) stopped by to say hello.
Crys submitted three best things she ever ate, and two of them were also in France: chilled, fresh langoustine with homemade mayonnaise and cold white wine served at a private home in Normandy, and flan abricot in a Parisian suburb (her third favorite thing is galakatoboureko—custard and phyllo dough topped with cinnamon and sugar—from a street food cart in Mykonos, Greece).
For a number of the respondents who apparently have not been to France, their best meals came from the next best thing: New Orleans.
Kathy’s most memorable restaurant dish was the crawfish angel hair pasta at Commander’s Palace (I’m guessing she didn’t have their foie gras coffeecake or turtle soup, because those surely would have superseded the pasta). Joel still loves the braised rabbit in mustard sauce with cornbread jalapeño muffins he had at Chez Paul, also in New Orleans.
Chip said his best meal may be the lobster dumplings at GW Fins in the same city—proving that even places with names like GW Fins are great in New Orleans.
Other countries got their mentions too, just not as many. The English delicacy sticky toffee pudding is favored by both Pickle and Judy. Doug counts the beef Wellington—also British—made by his college girlfriend’s stepmother as one of his best-ever meals, and shrimp in a spicy red broth he had in Mexico as the other.
Natalie adored the lardo she had in Tuscany—“just fat on bread,” she said—and Lisa still thinks about the pici (pasta a bit thicker than spaghetti) with truffles she also had in Tuscany. And Yolange, a native of Bolivia, still recalls the iguana her father and uncle hunted when she was 8.
Even Canada gets some love. Mary Louise recently returned from a trip to Toronto, where she ate a “fabulous” saag paneer and “dreamed of it for days.”
My favorite answer, though, came from my wife’s cousin, Deb. The best thing she ever ate, she said, were the crab cakes I made for her.
I can’t argue with that.
