I’m not sure it’s ethical to state this in a publicly accessible online forum, but my students at Goucher this year are an extraordinary group. I’m also not sure I should single out a recent story, which had an enormous effect on me. In part, I realize now, because I have lived it. It centers on a middle-age woman’s memory of the best peach she ever ate. But, of course, its true subject is memory, how delectable the peach seems in hindsight.
There was much discussion if the peach was, in fact, the best the woman had ever eaten or if memory had shaped it that way. I’d vote for both, and I invite people here to name the “best” foods they’ve ever eaten, defined not by objective criteria (execution, ingredients, taste, etc.) but by emotional experiences. For example, the best slice of pizza I’ve ever eaten by objective standards was on Jan. 1 at DiFara’s in Brooklyn. But my memory would insist on a Mexican pizza ordered from Al Pacino’s after a long trip home from Pittsburgh, when I was weary and very, very hungry. I can date that pizza almost to the day; Sujata Massey and I had driven up to Pittsburgh together and, on the way back, we listed to the S.J. Rozan novella “A Tiger’s Tale” on audiotape. It was a lovely fall day in 1998. Or maybe early summer. I remember how the sun looked, going down over Western Maryland, how relaxing it was to listen to Patricia Kalember deliver S.J.’s well-crafted story.
So, to begin:
Best Mashed Potatoes: At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, when I was 13 and rode a mule to the bottom and back, with my intrepid mom.
Best cheeseburger: A quarter-pounder in McDonald’s in Knoxville, Tenn., 1993. Yeah, I said McDonald’s.
Best ice cream: Wherever locals insisted we go in Milwaukee, circa 1981.
Best peanut clusters: A quarter-pound purchased at Eddie’s grocery store and consumed with a martini on the eve of a long-awaited vacation, 1997 or 1998.
Best green chile-cheeseburger: New Mexico, circa summer 1985, and I didn’t even mind it made me sick later.
Best fajitas: The first I ever had, at La Margarita, May 1982. “The borracho beans are key,” my companion said. And, as luck would have it, we ran into a local who explained the origins of fajita to us.
Best Thai food: Galway, Ireland, 2003.
Best oysters: Ditto. Actually, outside Galway, on a cool-to-us summer day. We had been driving for quite a bit when we stopped and we were famished. But the oysters would have been astonishing under any circumstances, so fresh they tasted as if they had been taken from the bay after we ordered.
Best (and so far only) strawberry mojito: Bank, New Orleans, this year. It was better than morphine for my travel-tortured soul. Consumed with roasted oysters.
Best meal: Some cantina outside Cuernavaca, Mexico, where a group of us were taken by a Mexican journalist who had spent the day giving us a tour of sewage problems in the area. Our appetites were surprisingly robust.
Best meal: the first and so far only time this lapsed Catholic/Jewish wannabe/practicing Buddhist broke the fast after actually not eating the whole of Yom Kippur. My boyfriend at the time – Jewish, not observant, thought I was nuts – picked me up after services and took me to an Outback Steak House and it was the best meal I ever, ever ate.
A hot lemon gelee cr�pe, a few blocks from the Centre Pompidou in Paris after it closed, standing in the cold, in the dark, on the sidewalk, sharing with my wife.
An apple I took from a basket on the Brossard Comfort Inn’s front desk, outside Montr�al. Provisions for the 30-mile bike ride to the Montr�al train station. I ate it on the bike path along the St. Lawrence river after I’d done a few miles and warmed up. Cold day, cold river, cold bike, cold beautiful apple.
An insanely expensive sweet saffron liquid-and-frozen-stuff thing in a dish the size of a shot glass, at Tribute in Farmington Hills, Michigan last year. Blake and I were there to see our short film SELL IN HELL at a small film festival, and I had twins on the way, and his second child was on the way, so it was the last time we’d be able to do that for a few decades.
Hold on–I actually have the menu in my backpack, here at Starbucks. It was a Yogurt Panna Cotta with berry water, Indian spiced sorbet, and saffron foam. (This says they served that course with a 2001 Sauvignon Blanc from Burgenland, Australia, but all I remember, not being a wine connoisseur, is lots and lots of wine and how happy the sommelier was that we were interested in his art.)
And the only time I ever liked beer: a bottle of Abita with a lot of bread and spicy shrimp someplace in the French Quarter when SESSION 52 got into the New Orleans International Film Festival.
Best meal: In Yueyang, Hunan province, China, March 4, 1998, right after we signed my daughter’s adoption papers. We had some sort of whole fish, a weird sort of green vegetable that looked like a spinach/broccoli mix but tasted like neither, and all sorts of dumplings and rice. Our daughter smiled at us for the first time during that meal.
Best fruit: Three pounds of cherries consumed by myself, my grandfather and my mother in 1973 as we drove into the mountains just outside Tuscon, Arizona.
Best cocktail: A Sidecar at Ludal Restaurant in North Haven, Conn., Nov. 3, 2004, the night I found out I won the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award.
Best leftovers: Chinese food from Jimmy Dip’s in Ft. Worth. My grandmother had taken us out to dinner, then the next day my husband and I drove to Lake Catherine State Park (I think in Arkansas) and heated up the food after setting up our campsite. This was summer inthe mid-70s.
Laura, I LOVE that your best Thai food was in Galway. I remember not the best but DAMN good Mexican food in Racine; not as odd a contrast but still a fave.
Best creme brulee – Commander’s Palace, New Orleans. 1995, I think it was. October.
Best ice cream – the chocolate/orange from Herrell’s in Harvard Square or the cinnamon/nutmeg or grapefruit sorbet from Toscanini’s in Central Square.
Best Chinese food in America – Mary Chung, Mary Chung, Mary Chung. The Dan Dan Noodles and Suan La Chow Show. Last visit back there, I went twice, two days i a row and still didn’t get my fill. I still miss that place.
Audi:
You said “good Mexican food in Racine.” Where? My brother lives there and I have yet to find good, much less damn good, Mexican food there. In fact, I have yet to find good food of any ethnicity there.
(Don’t tell my brother.)
An Indian restaurant in Laredo, Texas, December 1987. A lovely surprise after a day of shopping in Nuevo Laredo. I was with my then-boyfriend and his aunts and while the physical plant was less than inspiring, the food was wonderful.
(One theme that seems to be emerging here is juxtaposition.)
Barbara – sorry, don’t remember. It was well over 15 years ago. We were at a very small s.f. convention and found this place – run by a Mexican family. But beyond that, no recall.
Andi
Best snack food (healthy): a slice of coconut from an open-air market in Venice, Italy. I had ridden the overnight train from Vienna into Venice and was just so darn hungry. Just when I needed that little fructose carb charge, the coconut man appeared. I remember it so strongly because, while I love coconut, it’s always in or on things and never by itself. Pity.
Best snack food (less healthy): fresh cut fries with Old Bay at Red Fish in Canton (B-more). Being a vegetarian, Old Bay eluded me for an almost unforgiveably long time. I washed dishes at Red Fish for a summer once, and the Old Bay fries were offered freely and unceasingly to the kitchen staff to help pass the long nights. There’s just nothing like them.
Best meal: Bucatini alla grappa at Limoncello (777 7th Ave in the Michelangelo Hotel in Manhattan), June something, 2003. This is the closest thing to perfection I have ever consumed. It goes like this: the waiter rolls out a Coleman stove, a skillet, and a 90 pound wheel of cheese. Grappa (Italian brandy) is heated until flaming in the skillet, and then, yes folks, it’s poured into the wheel of cheese. Then, as the brandy melts a groove into the cheese, bucatini pasta is added, along with cracked black pepper. Finally, it is all stirred around and served. This is such a unique and fabulous dish, that I can actually taste every nuance at any time in my mind.
I’ve been to almost NO foreign countries – my entire travels outside the US include Canada and Bermuda. C’est tout. But personal details she wants? Often, the people I was with. Often during a science fiction convention.
Like that dinner many years ago, like ’78, in Vancouver at what WAS the Mukamuk restaurant (changed names, the one now called that is a “bistro/lounge” and it wasn’t then). At a s.f. convention, a number of us descended on this “first nations” restaurant. One of the best, most memorable meals I still have stashed in my brain. With my, hmm, was he my husband then? Probably. Dining on salmon (not my favorite food) and fiddlehead ferns for hte first time. Gorgeous place. There was one annoyance – a shall we not name him s.f. writer who was VERY loud (and is obnoxious when he’s NOT very loud, so this was worse). And no it wasn’t Harlan, who’s someone I like.
Another s.f. convention great meal was in Minneapolis at Tejas. Company great, wonderful “nouveau” food but it was GOOD nouveau and plentiful.
Miss Pearl’s Jam House in San Francisco with a bunch of fans at the SF Worldcon in the 90s; good food, silly drinks (the blue one with the gummy shark and the diver and the little red trail in the “water” which was served to Jeanne – my stomach hurt we all laughed so hard at that dinner.)
New Orleans – a 4 hour Worldcon dinner at what was I think “The Vieux Carre”. A weekend of amazing huge group dinners during a Norwescon – one for like 18, one for 30. The restaurants coped, we had a blast.
First time at Siam Cuisine in San Francisco with food maven Bob Silverberg. Oh, wow. Discovery.
Wait! One more. I have lots to say about food.
Best pear: Every night from a fruit stand in the 11th arrondissement in Paris, where my family and friends had sent me to finish THE NIGHT MEN. I can no longer see pears stacked for sale without feeling wistful and deeply nostalgic.
Laura’s chicken fried steak after her wisdom teeth extraction extracted another memory: the best piece of pizza was from Sally’s Apizza in New Haven two days after my own wisdom teeth extraction. I wasn’t losing a boyfriend and I was starving. Which leads to the banana daiquiri made for me by friends at Roanoke College when I returned from Christmas break after having my tonsils out. I’d eaten nothing but scrambled eggs and bananas for four days, so they spiked up the bananas and damn it was good!
The best meal I’ve ever had was at a restaurant in Boyne City Michigan around March in 2001. I took a friend of mine there for a last hoorah before his wedding and I dropped a ton of money on him for drinks and skiing the week previous and this was the last day we were there and he had been an inconsiderate, ungrateful bastard the entire week and this was our last meal before we left the next day.
The restaurant was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. It was right on the water and it was casual but elegant. We both ordered steaks and baked potatoes and I threw caution (and my hatred of gree vegetables) to the wind and ordered asparagus.
The bread came and it was luscious and golden and pure ecstacy. When the meal came, the steaks were big and perfectly cooked and the fork just melted into the meat. We had several rounds of beers and the conversation was great and it clicked with me why we were just good friends.
After the meal we sat and talked some more and drank some more fabulous beers and then walked around the town reminiscing about our wild adventures together and smoking the best cigars to be had in northern Michigan in March. That meal and that conversation were worth all of the money I’d spent that week.
Best mexican meal was with my cousin in Mesa, Arizona at Christmas in 1998. I had never been able to spend much time with him even though we were the same age and had much in common because when he come up to Michigan my other more agressive and irritating cousins took all of his time. So this was my chance to just be with him and enjoy the time.
The food was pure, greasy gold and the one thing I remember was that it was all you could eat and when you wanted the waitress to come refill your plate you would raise a little Mexican flag on the edge of the table. I remember that meal was so special because two years later he was killed in a car accident and I was so happy I had been able to spend a little bit of quality time with him before he was gone.
Oh–Lois just reminded me of this. Best chicken: with mushrooms, marinated overnight in wine or something, and cooked in heavy-duty aluminum foil on my car engine whenever we drove out to go camping in Anza Borrego. We were always tired by the time we’d gotten there, cleared rocks, set up the tent… and the stuff always tasted amazing, eaten outdoors under the August stars.
One more:
The best nanaimo bar I have ever eaten was from a local sandwich and dessert place called Thyme and Again. After I ate it (pretty big, almost cake-size, really) I never, ever, ever wanted to eat one of those store-bought crap ones again.
Best anything: the banana split I ate at some tiny restaurant in Quebec City. I hadn’t eaten supper b/c I’d really, really wanted to eat a banana split, and my parents said yes. God, it was great.
Best sushi: I’m still looking, but top vote at the moment is Damo Damo in midtown Manhattan.
Best Mexican: Azteca (I think?) in Milwaukee.
Best pizza: the hazelnut pesto and three cheese concoction at what used to be called La Favorita (now something else), a Little Italy restaurant here in Ottawa. I still taste the sauce in my dreams.
Best fries: In the middle of winter, at a drive by burger place at the top of a hill on the way out of Pullman, WA. They made them with their skins on; since that was the early ’60s, fries with skins were very unusual. Oh, yes, with a guy I was madly in love with in my junior year at WSU – where is he now?
Best pizza: On the back side of Posilippo in Naples, Italy, at a tiny pizzaria with a wood fired oven in mid-winter. The place was not heated, so all warmth came from the oven and so did the most scrumptious pizzas ever — especially the stagioni di quartro.
Hmmm, I see a pattern here. Warm food in cold weather!
I’m greedy folks, longing for some of the personal details that makes these foods so memorable.
Then again, given the recent brouhaha in the blogosphere (see Sarah’s site if you need an update) I know I’m feeling pretty stingy about background info these days.
On a tangent: I always remember eating a slice of chocolate cake at the Liberty Cafe while a couple was breaking up a table away. The so-called Virginia Green cake was rich and dense, and I felt guilty, consuming something so lovely inches away from a painful, awkward conversation.
Which leads me to my worst meal ever: Chicken fried steak, the first solid food I’d consumed since a painful wisdom teeth extraction three days earlier, gnawed while my then-boyfriend announced he was leaving the country. Alone.
<i>Hmmm, I see a pattern here. Warm food in cold weather!</i>
Warm food in cold weather in a foreign country!
More detail for Larua:
Best pizza: On the back side of Posilippo in Naples, Italy, at a tiny pizzaria with a wood fired oven in mid-winter. The place was not heated, so all warmth came from the oven and so did the most scrumptious pizzas ever — especially the stagioni di quartro.
I was with my new husband and very much in love (not the WSU guy) and delighted to be reminded that we were both food freaks!
It’s so hard for me to say “best” to anything. I eat so much, and am so absurdly pleased by most of it, that I could never attach a superlative to any of it, but since you asked…
Best Meal, Overall.
Chez Panisse, May 18, 1993, three days after my wedding. Yes, our honeymoon. It was a Tuesday, and I was dying to make a pilgrimage to the famous foodie Mecca in Berkeley. We took the BART train from San Francisco in our fancy clothes (which we didn’t need to wear). We were very early, so we walked down Telegraph Avenue, a place famed in story and song. Browsed a record store, and recall being astounded by the sub-niches in the heavy-metal section — death, speed, goth, etc. Janet Jackson had a new record out, the first one where she showed her killer abs, which I’m sure are ENTIRELY NATURAL.
Tuesday is early in the week, and Chez Panisse gathers steam as it goes along. The earlier in the week, the less expensive, but it’s always three or four courses, prix fixe. We arrived in this very California place, all wood and flowers, elegant-but-not, had a drink, ordered wine and settled in. First course: Salmon cooked in fig leaves with salsa verde. Wonderful. Next was new garlic soup a la James Beard, and it was a revelation, as smooth as milk and so, so mellow. The entree was a grilled duck leg and breast, served with a garden salad and something called a straw potato cake with morels. Imagine a little puck of eensy-weensy French fries, simultaneously crispy and soft, studded with earthy little bits of morel, nature’s great gourmet treat.
Dessert was a cherry savarin. I had to look up savarin in the dictionary. It’s a sponge cake, which is pretty much what I thought.
Then coffee, the rest of the wine, and a slow amble back to the BART. I got a Chez Panisse cookbook after we came home and have tried to duplicate the straw potato cake without success. If you wonder why I’m so precise on the details, it’s because I kept the menu and carried it around in my purse for years, taking it out every few months to relive it. So I can also tell you what it cost: Dinner, $45; service, 15 percent, outrageous Berkeley taxes, 8.25 percent. Memories: Oh, priceless.
<i> I kept the menu and carried it around in my purse for years</i>
Aha–another recurring theme.
Best strawberry pie (or cake?) with a glass of white wine: outdoor patio in a restaurant next to Rideau Canal (spelling, I’m sorry to get wrong) in Ottawa with David, wonderfully in synch and everyone around us beaming.
Best fried chicken and strawberry pie (love them ‘berries): in a Shoney’s somewhere in NC about 40 so yrs ago.
Best iced coffee: in a bakery/cafe in Ottawa — it was on a block of expensive boutiques. Never had one better since.
Worst meal: a shrimp oregano-something dish at a small neighborhood Italian restaurant when David proposed (well there goes the personal thing on blogs). Why worst meal? we couldn’t figure out why we were so miserable …
Worst fried chicken: here at an historic inn/restaurant. Their alledged fried chicken absolutely tasted to me like Shake ‘n Bake oven-baked.
Best ice cream soda: somewhere in North Florida we stopped at a small roadside place mid-afternoon and had sinfully delicious pecan ice cream sodas.
Jeanne
now watch, for the rest of this day I’ll be thinking about food, food, food and fun, food and breakups, food and friends, food in obscure places …