What Makes a Memorable Meal?

Remembering the good ones

We have written here numerous times about what we call “memorable meals”. We had lunch at the drive-in where Barack Obama hung out as a teenager.  We took a food tour in Rome where we ate at four different restaurants and tasted €165 a bottle balsamic vinegar.  We had tapas in Asheville and Thanksgiving turkey in Porto.  We ate ants in a garden in Lisbon. 

Some of these meals were in restaurants.  Others we made at home.  Many were with friends and family.

But what made these meals “memorable”?

We believe there’s a kind of alchemy involved in the experience of dining out. It involves four main ingredients:  the food, the service, the ambience, and the people you’re with.  When three or four of these elements are exceptional, the dining out experience becomes a memorable meal.  

When we remember one of these meals, it sounds something like this:

Those are the meals we live for.  The ones we travel hundreds or thousands of miles to eat.  Cost is not a consideration – we’ve had memorable meals for $20 and forgettable ones for hundreds.

Back to reality

It’s probably a good thing that we only get a few of those experiences, because if they happened too often, the magic and the mystery would be gone, replaced by a dull sense of entitlement and expectations that could never be met.

We all know what the reality is:  Most of the time when we go out to eat, we’re lucky if we get two of the four elements delivered in a satisfactory manner.  Maybe the food is really good, but the service is slow and disinterested.  Or you have a great server whose personality shines, in a place with a great vibe, and that makes you overlook the so-so meal you get.  Then again, maybe you’re out with an old friend or a new lover, and nothing is more important than the conversation and the look in their eyes.

Then there are the times when nothing seems to click.  The food is average, the service is just capable, the ambience is lacking, and you and your companions are out of sorts.  It’s just a meh kind of meal.  Lunch is just, well… lunch.  The best you can hope for is a little taste of something good that stands out.

We’ve been thinking about these things this week, because we had one of those lackluster meals in Cascais recently.  The restaurant had been featured in a list of “The 15 Best Restaurants in Cascais”, so we had high expectations. 

But the food we were served didn’t compare to the photos in the article.  The dining room was dark and noisy.  And Mike was grumpy. 

On the plus side, the service was very good.  Our server even checked in with us to see how the food tasted.  Along with that, we got some ideas for a burrata cheese and tomato salad that we’ll try to recreate and improve on at home.  

Sometimes it just doesn’t work out

There have been times when we were able – or more correctly, Mary was able – to make something at home that matched what we had eaten during a memorable meal out.  But we have also learned, the hard way, that the alchemy isn’t always portable.  Here’s one example:

Three years ago, in pre-pandemic times, we took a food and wine tour in Sicily.  There were about a dozen of us in the group, including several friends with whom we had traveled in Europe before.  We were a boisterous group, ready to eat and drink our way around the island.

On our first day in Sicily, we took a tour of a winery a few miles east of Palermo. We walked through the cellars, between the rows of barrels holding wine being aged, and listened to our guide tell us about the history of the winery. 

The highlight of the tour was the wine tasting.  It was conducted in a large, very modern room with a wall of windows that looked out over the Mediterranean.

We tasted three wines. First a white, then a red. Each was accompanied by a small bite of food that complemented and even changed the taste of the wine.  

The third wine was a marsala – a sweet dessert wine – that tasted so good that we bought a bottle to bring home.  It cost more than two or three bottles of our regular wines, and we don’t really like dessert wine.  But in that bright, airy room, surrounded by our friends, and paired with a delicious little pastry, it was completely memorable.

Back in Indiana, we waited several months for the right occasion to share the wine with some friends.  We had talked it up when we invited them to dinner, and raved about how great it tasted.

But it fell flat. That night, the wine was nothing special.

We were with good friends, having a good meal, looking out over the farmland outside our house.  But it just wasn’t the same.  

Maybe it’s like golf

Until we moved to Portugal, Mike was an enthusiastic – and terrible – golfer. (He would still be, but his clubs didn’t make the cut for the move.) Someone asked him once how he could enjoy a game that he didn’t excel at. He replied that most of the time, his shots never went where he intended. He would spend most of his round looking for balls in the rough or replacing ones that went into the lake. He quit keeping score, since triple digits were nothing to brag about.

But once or twice every outing, he would hit a near-perfect shot. The club would hit the ball with a satisfying “smack!”. The ball would fly in a beautiful arc, straight to where he had aimed. In those rare moments, he got all the satisfaction he needed from the game, and the motivation to try again. Every next shot held the promise, and the pursuit was enough.

We know that every meal we eat out won’t be memorable. But the possibility is there. And that’s enough to keep us coming back for more.

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What memorable meal have you enjoyed lately? Tell us your tasty tale in the comments below or by using the Contact Us form.

Until next week / Até a próxima semana

Mary and Mike

The Cook and The Writer

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