Michelin dining for cheapskates: Shoddy Goods 073

The very best meal I ever had was over 40 years ago when we stopped in a Village Inn on the way home from the hospital after my daughter was born. I was terrified and incredulous that they let us walk out of the hospital carrying this tiny human being. I mean, we didn’t have to sign anything or get checked out or anything!

We had coffee, beef and mushroom omelets, hashbrowns, and biscuits and gravy.

It felt like the first meal of the rest of my life and it was. In all that confusion and apprehension, it was a touch of the familiar and comfort and for that reason it was the best meal in my life.

Best meal, hmmm. That’s a tough one. What was awesomesauce 50 years ago might not spark my fancy today.

I’m a relatively simple cook. I look at some of these fancy presentations and think, yeah, right, no. However sometimes what a creative chef does tastes really good no matter how it looks.

But the best thing I ate in November was this simple sandwich at the Anaheim Hilton (pre LACon meeting for staff) at Poppys

Route 66 Chicken Club
garlic-brined chicken breast, smoky bacon, avocado, arugula, tomato jam, balsamic aioli, potato bun

It all just fit together into a yumtastic but simple fair.

I think K.I.S.S. is the best way to keep food good

While living in Tokyo a dear friend invited me to a traditional Kaiseki-ryōri (Japanese multi-course haute cuisine). It was run by a husband and wife team. Not only delicious but exquisitely presented. Will never forget!

BEST restaurant meal?
…
The most elaborate is probably a Cantonese honey-walnut style shrimp (which uses giant butterflied shrimp, smothered in sesame-honey sauce and walnuts, usually atop sauteed garlic broccoli) at some family banquet hall that’s long since closed. It was luxurious and decadent (because it was for a wedding) and along with typical Chinese dishes like braised duck or honey short ribs, there was a long line of desserts: fried sweet-paste sesame balls, white sugar sponge cake soaked in wine, almond jelly tofu with canned syrup, and the old glass bottles of orange Fanta. I’m sure it was expensive, but I sure didn’t pay for it.

These days, I actually have great fondness for a little “pastry sandwich”. It’s a French(?) bakery’s lunch menu: cold marinated roast beef slices wedged with some crisp onion sprouts between two fresh beignets and doused with some A1/BBQ sauce (it’s thick like BBQ but bitter and smoky like A1; the beignets provide the sweetness). It’s quite refreshing and I indulge whenever I can (with an onion soup on the side). Actually, the soup is about as expensive as the sandwich (which is to say not much; they’re a combined $15 with tax and a 25% tip), but the sandwich (as of this year) has also shrunk since I initially started eating it (possibly so has the soup). Typically, the more popular lunch items are the cutlet or schnitzel sandos. (And fried cronuts.)

An even cheaper meal would be out-of-USA Burger King or Pizza Hut – where in some countries, these franchises are treated as sit-down restaurants and have a really higher quality of product for roughly the same domestic price (though relative to that country’s market, it would be the cost of a sit-down restaurant meal).

If we’re really going cheap-o without cooking at home – Red Baron frozen deep-dish pizza. Very tasty, very filling, but only because the crust is probably infused with lard.

My son was doing his externship for the Culinary Institute of America, at The Brown Derby restaurant at Disney World, in the MGM park. There were 14 of us at dinner that night…and we were treated like royalty! Amazing service and stellar food. I think we ended up with just about everything they had to offer!! Sadly that restaurant isn’t there any longer. He went on to graduate however, and is an incredible chef! (Yup- proud mom here)

I live near Fort Worth, TX. Barbecue restaurants have come a long way if they’re getting Michellin stars! They all tend to be kind of expensive, star or not. My husband is a barbecue fanatic and frequently looks for different restaurants to try. I have not heard of any of these. Austin is about 3-4 hours away, but Spring isn’t too far. Might have to check it out!

A bunch of years back, I went with friends to Japan, and we stayed at a ryokan in Miyajima. The whole experience was pretty amazing, but the food! Miyajima is apparently known for its oysters, so our meals featured them deliciously.

I love oysters.

One of my fellow travelers? Did not.

Over the years I’ve had many stellar dining experiences in restaurants all over the place. Ranging from rabbit in Quebec to Lionfish in Montgomery, trout in Colorado to calamari in Aruba, Ethiopian in Nashville to crawfish etouffee in LA, a 7 course wild game meal (with wine pairings) in Montreal to raclette in Dahlonega GA, and many more that don’t pop into my mind immediately.
All were fantastic and made even better by being shared with my wife of 48 years.

Hands down, the very best restaurant meal I ever had was at a steakhouse by the side of the road outside of a smallish town in Utah. The fancy steak joint in Kansas City (that I could not have afforded if my brother hadn’t been paying) was not up to the same level, though it came reasonably close. Just barely behind the Utah steakhouse was a side-of-the-road café in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island. Sadly, that establishment closed last year. Nearly all of the restaurant meals I had in NZ were at a level that exceeded what I’ve had here in the US.