A Chipotle burrito: steak, pintos, white rice. That’s all. Seems pretty small and uninteresting, but across the table from me was the woman I would end up marrying. We were friends-of-friends and I’d been to her house a couple weeks earlier, and one afternoon she asked if I wanted to grab lunch. Chick-fil-a was busy so we went next door to Chipotle and got burritos. That turned into going to the park to feed ducks, then she tagged along that night while I covered an elementary school musical for the newspaper where I worked and we wandered the aisles at Walmart to kill time. It was love at first sight, all because of a simple burrito.
That was 15 years ago last month, and now that she’s gone, Duck Day is going to be one of the lasting memories I hold on to.
My father had passed away days before Thanksgiving a few years ago. Very early in the grieving process we decided we still wanted to celebrate the holiday; even a stripped down version of Thanksgiving would have been better than just skipping it. My older brother to his everlasting credit was the one who made all the calls to tell family and friends what had happened.
My dad was a member of a golf club nearby and when my brother called, they offered to cook our Thanksgiving dinner for us. So, Thanksgiving morning my brother and I drove to pick it up and we were embraced by the warmest people who shared their genuine love for my dad with us. Whether the food was good or not was irrelevant (it was very, very good). The circumstances around that particular Thanksgiving were less than ideal – but the memory of a simple kindness tethered to the meal itself puts it over the top for me…. and the pie.
A Pizza Hut somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. I was out on a big week long camping trip with the centerpiece being the Grand Canyon of PA. We planned on a little 4 mile hike good for young Boy Scouts. It turned into a 15 mile slog due to some poor planning. After it was done we found the first place that could feed 15 exhausted kids and their dads. Pizza has never tasted as good as those slices. I've had tons of pizzas from places that are objectively better but none of them ever taste quite as good as that Pizza Hut all those years ago
Oh, man, Scott. I could answer this question a hundred times and not run out of stories -- because as you've sussed out, the connection between food and community is what drives these memories. But to take just one, imagine the longest workday you can think of with more than usual amounts of bullshit through the day before dashing out to Dulles to take a cross-country flight to Seattle. (Yeah, I really know how to treat myself well.) Barely making the flight, I subsisted on a couple of bags of pretzels before making it out west to my hotel after 10:00 PM Pacific.
I tried grabbing dinner at the hotel restaurant only to find out that it was closed. I must have looked tired, hungry, and desperate because the bartender waved me over and said, "hey, we've got this." Ten minutes later, I was set up with a huge hunk of sourdough bread, a local beer, and the best salmon chowder I've ever eaten. Was it the best meal I've ever had? No. But it may have been the most appreciated in the moment.
Like everyone else I've got dozens of answers but I think my favorite ones to juxtapose are two very different meals on my honeymoon - the first at celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli's Butter restaurant in Manhattan. We had been looking forward to that reservation for months and it lived up to the hype we built up in every way.
And then a few days later, during the "too many people, we're gonna hide in a yurt for a few days" portion of our honeymoon, we hiked down several hundred stairs at Cloudland Canyon State Park in Georgia and ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on rocks at the base of a waterfall.
The most memorable meal I ever had took place in Greece some 50 years ago. I wrote a short story about it that got honourable mention in a nonfiction writing contest (not to brag). It's a bit long (275 words) for your comment section, but here goes:
Lost and Found
My partner and I strode through the saloon door side by side and paused just inside. The buzz of conversation died like air escaping from a balloon, and dozens of weather-hardened faces turned to stare. But this wasn’t Dodge City in 1883. This was a village perched on a Peloponnesus mountain in the fall of 1966.
Blonde and blue, North American girls from head to open-toed shoes, we had taken them by surprise. Silence filled the taverna, as thick as the steam billowing above the stove across the room. The only sound was the hiss and bubble from the cauldrons on its surface, but the fragrances that filled the air were so moist and luscious that they were almost tangible.
A woman in white stood frozen beside the stove, as startled as the men. At last she moved, calling to us through the hush, one plump arm waving us forward. She lifted the pot lids one at a time, pointing with her wooden spoon at each simmering stew, asking, so we thought, what we would like to have.
Potato chunks bubbled in tomato sauce, fragrant with rosemary. Cubes of meat danced in a thick broth. One dish held green runner beans, and in another, onions and aubergine slices hissed in olive oil. And there was more. We tried it all, a bit of everything, ladled into stoneware bowls.
We sat and ate until we forgot the terror of the mountain road, the fog, the missed turns of the long night before and the confusion that came with dawn. We rested in the taverna, warm and content, off-course in Greece but no longer lost.
Multiple course meal with dessert and drinks in Albania at a high end farm to table restaurant , all of it very good especially the cheesecake. 6 of us and my uncle was going to a big shot and pay for it... total was 80 dollars. Also on that trip, one person always ordered beef at every restaurant. We all knew it was not going to be very good but each time a different person would think, THIS time it will be good... it was always shoe leather.
The shared bucket of popcorn for the family at minor league hockey games
Dad made Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner one time, working on it all day. The meal is still talked about for how good it was
Tiny apartment in Wheaton, MD - making dinner for the first time for my then girlfriend, now wife. Real simple Italian sausage and peppers over penne pasta and a simple tossed salad. Everything was perfect until I went to get salad dressing and everything was expired and I had to come up with some sort of homemade dressing on the spot. I don't remember all the ingredients but she said it was the best she ever had. I married her 3 years later.
After the Little One was born, our neighbors stopped by with this tomato, pasta, feta cheese dish. The wife is not the worlds greatest cook, but that dish might have been the best thing we have ever had following a week of sleepless nights as new parents.
Most memorable? Well, there's a whole gamut to run here.
There's the time I got to eat at Osteria Francescana and meet Massimo Bottura. It was a multi-course tasting menu with wine pairing. Each course was thoughtfully prepared and plated, wholly delicious, and service was impeccable throughout. The dining rooms there are relatively small, so the experience is very unique and very intimate: the service starts out hushed, but by the time you're done with lunch, it's possible you've made some vacation friends at another table.
Then there's the first time I made James Beard's Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic recipe. A very simple recipe, peeling so much garlic notwithstanding, with only a handful of ingredients. But the way the ingredients come together in 90 minutes of cooking in the oven to create a delightfully tender meal with powerful, but not overwhelming flavors, is just amazing and experiencing that for the first time was eye-opening.
Of course there's also the many times I'd visit my grandparents and have homemade pasta and a basic red sauce. My brother and I would help my grandfather out by cutting the pasta while my grandmother made the sauce and meatballs. What would result was a quite simple meal, but one that's imprinted in my memories for a long time.
One also involves beans. After flying to Athens for a Mediterranean cruise, we went to this well reviewed restaurant not far from the hotel. This was the first day there, so I felt folded, spindled and mutilated by the jet lag and the whole deal. We were the first people there, and the kitchen took pity on the 4 of us, and brought out dish after dish of wonder. Their gigantes plaki was so good I later emailed them for the recipe.
Second? A simple banh mi and coffee that I'd bought from a vendor on the street, eaten at 6 in the morning while watching the sunrise come over Angkor Wat in the summer of 1995. I was alone on the top of another temple with my coffee and sandwich.
When I was growing up, I was a club swimmer. We’d have these, like, five day meets every summer where my dumb ass would race around 5000 meters across 7 events and relays (prelims/finals). The meet was always in some middle of nowhere shit pool in Southern California. On the way home, my mom and I would stop by the local grocery store for a cake (the amped up sugary frosting that most likely gave me instant cavities) and that was dinner. It didn’t matter how I swam; that cake was perfection.
God I miss being 16 and able to eat my body weight in cake…or pizza. Dammit, now I want cake for breakfast.
A bowl of onion soup in a cheap basement bistro in Philadelphia--a bunch of 17-year-old girls wander in because we truly believe French food will make us very worldly and, more importantly, the bistro is rumored to serve underaged drinkers. After ordering a carafe of red wine (the only kind available to steal in our parents' liquor cabinets), we could only afford the onion soup. For the next several years, until I finally skedaddled away from home, we went to the bistro every weekend. Onion soup and a glass of red wine still makes me feel very sophisticated and worldly even when I know I'm not.
Apr 20, 2022·edited Apr 20, 2022Liked by Scott Hines
Best burger I ever ate was after heart of TX regatta when a local gave a few of us burgers cooked over mesquite as we were packing up camp to head back north. Best might have something to do with needing a bunch of calories.
Memorable meal was taking friends out to eat after my grandma died, local restaurant that is sadly no more.
I cooked mom Thanksgiving dinner in 2020, with my sister providing some of the sides via delivery. This was mom’s last Thanksgiving and my first time cooking pecan pie and dressing. Unfortunately quarantine limited it to her and I. Unless something changes in my life, probably my last traditional Thanksgiving.
1. Both of the meals I had at a Georgian restaurant called Guria while studying in Moscow. I was there with large groups of friends, I discovered a new favorite dish and favorite cuisine, and the restaurant’s staff and owners were incredibly welcoming and kind. Guria sadly seems to have closed, but I’ll never forget their khachapuri.
2. Dinner at the Texas Embassy (also, sadly, now closed) in London on the way home from one of those same Russia trips. Jalapeños seem like a gift from God when you’ve just spent six weeks in a country whose favorite seasoning is dill.
3. Baklava at the Mufti of Tetovo’s office. I was an intern at the embassy in Skopje, I was the note-taker on a trip with some embassy staff to Tetovo for meetings, and one of the staff in the Mufti’s office had brought in walnut baklava that his mom made for his birthday. They decided to share it with us, and I still tear up a little bit thinking about what a kind gesture that was.
Like everyone else, I can think of a few great meals.
The first time I went to Mother’s in New Orleans and had the debris po’boy, it changed my life. There’s a picture of me with the sandwich in hand, part of it on my face, and this look of a man tasting pure heaven for a brief moment.
My wife and I went skiing in upstate NY a few years ago. The skiing was fine, I had more fun than she did, but what we remember most is going out to an Italian restaurant for dinner after a day on the slopes. We’re cold and tired and sore and just want a hot meal and some wine. They had an osso buco special that night that just blew me away. I want to go back to that town just for that restaurant.
Many years ago, my first wife and I were in Buffalo, NY, visiting a work friend of hers for the weekend. This friend and her husband were kind of well-off and lived in what must be a wealthy suburb of Buffalo, just off a golf course. One of the neighbors had a dinner party and their whole family was there. I met their daughter and her fiancé, who was a man named Geoffrey. I was made aware that Geoffrey had something to do with restaurants in New York City. I don’t remember the food that night, but my wife’s friends must have provided something for the party (maybe wine? They were big wine drinkers). Anyway, the next day, Geoffrey shows up in the afternoon with a huge bowl of homemade pasta in tomato sauce and presents it to us as a thank-you for whatever our hosts had done the night before. And that’s how I had a homemade pasta dinner made for me by Geoffrey Zakarian.
a) Paella valenciana at Casa Carmela, in Valencia, during the honeymoon. Not only was the dish perfectly executed, but the meal is also a memory of the few truly happy and optimist-about-the future months my wife and I had, sandwiched between my depression and everything that came after coming back from the honeymoon (losing her sister to cancer, her parents losing their jobs, my parents getting a messy divorce among other unfortunate things). Still, I would choose going through all this again with her than having lived an easier life with anyone else.
b) cheese and salami when I visited my father during the worst stretches of COVID. It was obviously not about the food. It was about missing my father and about realizing that night that our father-son relationship had evolved into a true friendship.
A Chipotle burrito: steak, pintos, white rice. That’s all. Seems pretty small and uninteresting, but across the table from me was the woman I would end up marrying. We were friends-of-friends and I’d been to her house a couple weeks earlier, and one afternoon she asked if I wanted to grab lunch. Chick-fil-a was busy so we went next door to Chipotle and got burritos. That turned into going to the park to feed ducks, then she tagged along that night while I covered an elementary school musical for the newspaper where I worked and we wandered the aisles at Walmart to kill time. It was love at first sight, all because of a simple burrito.
That was 15 years ago last month, and now that she’s gone, Duck Day is going to be one of the lasting memories I hold on to.
My father had passed away days before Thanksgiving a few years ago. Very early in the grieving process we decided we still wanted to celebrate the holiday; even a stripped down version of Thanksgiving would have been better than just skipping it. My older brother to his everlasting credit was the one who made all the calls to tell family and friends what had happened.
My dad was a member of a golf club nearby and when my brother called, they offered to cook our Thanksgiving dinner for us. So, Thanksgiving morning my brother and I drove to pick it up and we were embraced by the warmest people who shared their genuine love for my dad with us. Whether the food was good or not was irrelevant (it was very, very good). The circumstances around that particular Thanksgiving were less than ideal – but the memory of a simple kindness tethered to the meal itself puts it over the top for me…. and the pie.
A Pizza Hut somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. I was out on a big week long camping trip with the centerpiece being the Grand Canyon of PA. We planned on a little 4 mile hike good for young Boy Scouts. It turned into a 15 mile slog due to some poor planning. After it was done we found the first place that could feed 15 exhausted kids and their dads. Pizza has never tasted as good as those slices. I've had tons of pizzas from places that are objectively better but none of them ever taste quite as good as that Pizza Hut all those years ago
Oh, man, Scott. I could answer this question a hundred times and not run out of stories -- because as you've sussed out, the connection between food and community is what drives these memories. But to take just one, imagine the longest workday you can think of with more than usual amounts of bullshit through the day before dashing out to Dulles to take a cross-country flight to Seattle. (Yeah, I really know how to treat myself well.) Barely making the flight, I subsisted on a couple of bags of pretzels before making it out west to my hotel after 10:00 PM Pacific.
I tried grabbing dinner at the hotel restaurant only to find out that it was closed. I must have looked tired, hungry, and desperate because the bartender waved me over and said, "hey, we've got this." Ten minutes later, I was set up with a huge hunk of sourdough bread, a local beer, and the best salmon chowder I've ever eaten. Was it the best meal I've ever had? No. But it may have been the most appreciated in the moment.
Like everyone else I've got dozens of answers but I think my favorite ones to juxtapose are two very different meals on my honeymoon - the first at celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli's Butter restaurant in Manhattan. We had been looking forward to that reservation for months and it lived up to the hype we built up in every way.
And then a few days later, during the "too many people, we're gonna hide in a yurt for a few days" portion of our honeymoon, we hiked down several hundred stairs at Cloudland Canyon State Park in Georgia and ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on rocks at the base of a waterfall.
The most memorable meal I ever had took place in Greece some 50 years ago. I wrote a short story about it that got honourable mention in a nonfiction writing contest (not to brag). It's a bit long (275 words) for your comment section, but here goes:
Lost and Found
My partner and I strode through the saloon door side by side and paused just inside. The buzz of conversation died like air escaping from a balloon, and dozens of weather-hardened faces turned to stare. But this wasn’t Dodge City in 1883. This was a village perched on a Peloponnesus mountain in the fall of 1966.
Blonde and blue, North American girls from head to open-toed shoes, we had taken them by surprise. Silence filled the taverna, as thick as the steam billowing above the stove across the room. The only sound was the hiss and bubble from the cauldrons on its surface, but the fragrances that filled the air were so moist and luscious that they were almost tangible.
A woman in white stood frozen beside the stove, as startled as the men. At last she moved, calling to us through the hush, one plump arm waving us forward. She lifted the pot lids one at a time, pointing with her wooden spoon at each simmering stew, asking, so we thought, what we would like to have.
Potato chunks bubbled in tomato sauce, fragrant with rosemary. Cubes of meat danced in a thick broth. One dish held green runner beans, and in another, onions and aubergine slices hissed in olive oil. And there was more. We tried it all, a bit of everything, ladled into stoneware bowls.
We sat and ate until we forgot the terror of the mountain road, the fog, the missed turns of the long night before and the confusion that came with dawn. We rested in the taverna, warm and content, off-course in Greece but no longer lost.
Multiple course meal with dessert and drinks in Albania at a high end farm to table restaurant , all of it very good especially the cheesecake. 6 of us and my uncle was going to a big shot and pay for it... total was 80 dollars. Also on that trip, one person always ordered beef at every restaurant. We all knew it was not going to be very good but each time a different person would think, THIS time it will be good... it was always shoe leather.
The shared bucket of popcorn for the family at minor league hockey games
Dad made Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner one time, working on it all day. The meal is still talked about for how good it was
Tiny apartment in Wheaton, MD - making dinner for the first time for my then girlfriend, now wife. Real simple Italian sausage and peppers over penne pasta and a simple tossed salad. Everything was perfect until I went to get salad dressing and everything was expired and I had to come up with some sort of homemade dressing on the spot. I don't remember all the ingredients but she said it was the best she ever had. I married her 3 years later.
After the Little One was born, our neighbors stopped by with this tomato, pasta, feta cheese dish. The wife is not the worlds greatest cook, but that dish might have been the best thing we have ever had following a week of sleepless nights as new parents.
Most memorable? Well, there's a whole gamut to run here.
There's the time I got to eat at Osteria Francescana and meet Massimo Bottura. It was a multi-course tasting menu with wine pairing. Each course was thoughtfully prepared and plated, wholly delicious, and service was impeccable throughout. The dining rooms there are relatively small, so the experience is very unique and very intimate: the service starts out hushed, but by the time you're done with lunch, it's possible you've made some vacation friends at another table.
Then there's the first time I made James Beard's Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic recipe. A very simple recipe, peeling so much garlic notwithstanding, with only a handful of ingredients. But the way the ingredients come together in 90 minutes of cooking in the oven to create a delightfully tender meal with powerful, but not overwhelming flavors, is just amazing and experiencing that for the first time was eye-opening.
Of course there's also the many times I'd visit my grandparents and have homemade pasta and a basic red sauce. My brother and I would help my grandfather out by cutting the pasta while my grandmother made the sauce and meatballs. What would result was a quite simple meal, but one that's imprinted in my memories for a long time.
Two spring to mind:
One also involves beans. After flying to Athens for a Mediterranean cruise, we went to this well reviewed restaurant not far from the hotel. This was the first day there, so I felt folded, spindled and mutilated by the jet lag and the whole deal. We were the first people there, and the kitchen took pity on the 4 of us, and brought out dish after dish of wonder. Their gigantes plaki was so good I later emailed them for the recipe.
Second? A simple banh mi and coffee that I'd bought from a vendor on the street, eaten at 6 in the morning while watching the sunrise come over Angkor Wat in the summer of 1995. I was alone on the top of another temple with my coffee and sandwich.
When I was growing up, I was a club swimmer. We’d have these, like, five day meets every summer where my dumb ass would race around 5000 meters across 7 events and relays (prelims/finals). The meet was always in some middle of nowhere shit pool in Southern California. On the way home, my mom and I would stop by the local grocery store for a cake (the amped up sugary frosting that most likely gave me instant cavities) and that was dinner. It didn’t matter how I swam; that cake was perfection.
God I miss being 16 and able to eat my body weight in cake…or pizza. Dammit, now I want cake for breakfast.
A bowl of onion soup in a cheap basement bistro in Philadelphia--a bunch of 17-year-old girls wander in because we truly believe French food will make us very worldly and, more importantly, the bistro is rumored to serve underaged drinkers. After ordering a carafe of red wine (the only kind available to steal in our parents' liquor cabinets), we could only afford the onion soup. For the next several years, until I finally skedaddled away from home, we went to the bistro every weekend. Onion soup and a glass of red wine still makes me feel very sophisticated and worldly even when I know I'm not.
Best burger I ever ate was after heart of TX regatta when a local gave a few of us burgers cooked over mesquite as we were packing up camp to head back north. Best might have something to do with needing a bunch of calories.
Memorable meal was taking friends out to eat after my grandma died, local restaurant that is sadly no more.
I cooked mom Thanksgiving dinner in 2020, with my sister providing some of the sides via delivery. This was mom’s last Thanksgiving and my first time cooking pecan pie and dressing. Unfortunately quarantine limited it to her and I. Unless something changes in my life, probably my last traditional Thanksgiving.
1. Both of the meals I had at a Georgian restaurant called Guria while studying in Moscow. I was there with large groups of friends, I discovered a new favorite dish and favorite cuisine, and the restaurant’s staff and owners were incredibly welcoming and kind. Guria sadly seems to have closed, but I’ll never forget their khachapuri.
2. Dinner at the Texas Embassy (also, sadly, now closed) in London on the way home from one of those same Russia trips. Jalapeños seem like a gift from God when you’ve just spent six weeks in a country whose favorite seasoning is dill.
3. Baklava at the Mufti of Tetovo’s office. I was an intern at the embassy in Skopje, I was the note-taker on a trip with some embassy staff to Tetovo for meetings, and one of the staff in the Mufti’s office had brought in walnut baklava that his mom made for his birthday. They decided to share it with us, and I still tear up a little bit thinking about what a kind gesture that was.
Like everyone else, I can think of a few great meals.
The first time I went to Mother’s in New Orleans and had the debris po’boy, it changed my life. There’s a picture of me with the sandwich in hand, part of it on my face, and this look of a man tasting pure heaven for a brief moment.
My wife and I went skiing in upstate NY a few years ago. The skiing was fine, I had more fun than she did, but what we remember most is going out to an Italian restaurant for dinner after a day on the slopes. We’re cold and tired and sore and just want a hot meal and some wine. They had an osso buco special that night that just blew me away. I want to go back to that town just for that restaurant.
Many years ago, my first wife and I were in Buffalo, NY, visiting a work friend of hers for the weekend. This friend and her husband were kind of well-off and lived in what must be a wealthy suburb of Buffalo, just off a golf course. One of the neighbors had a dinner party and their whole family was there. I met their daughter and her fiancé, who was a man named Geoffrey. I was made aware that Geoffrey had something to do with restaurants in New York City. I don’t remember the food that night, but my wife’s friends must have provided something for the party (maybe wine? They were big wine drinkers). Anyway, the next day, Geoffrey shows up in the afternoon with a huge bowl of homemade pasta in tomato sauce and presents it to us as a thank-you for whatever our hosts had done the night before. And that’s how I had a homemade pasta dinner made for me by Geoffrey Zakarian.
a) Paella valenciana at Casa Carmela, in Valencia, during the honeymoon. Not only was the dish perfectly executed, but the meal is also a memory of the few truly happy and optimist-about-the future months my wife and I had, sandwiched between my depression and everything that came after coming back from the honeymoon (losing her sister to cancer, her parents losing their jobs, my parents getting a messy divorce among other unfortunate things). Still, I would choose going through all this again with her than having lived an easier life with anyone else.
b) cheese and salami when I visited my father during the worst stretches of COVID. It was obviously not about the food. It was about missing my father and about realizing that night that our father-son relationship had evolved into a true friendship.