What is your best restaurant experience?

Mine probably a tiny Vietnamese restaurant in Beaverton, Oregon around 1982, with a gifted cook/owner, making the best curry I've ever had, a lush creamy yellow stew with all kinds of different flavors emanating - hints of mustard, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, fennel, turmeric all intermingling and large chunks of boneless white chicken meat, potatoes, carrots... white rice on the side, perfectly prepared spring rolls, large, crispy without any greasiness, salad rolls with hoisin sauce, chopped peanuts and shredded carrots, lychee and longan fruit dessert, coffee dripping into the condensed milk, then stirred together and served over ice... that was a fantastic place. What was yours?

Alabama. BBQ was ok, but the pie is the BEST ever... Hell, I didn't even like banana cream pie before I had this.

I forget the name but they've changed owners and names since. Some kind of trouble with the law I think.

I don't enjoy eating steak often. This was the greatest one I've ever had. I won't even try to describe it. Just spectacular.

It was an authentic Irish restaurant. The owners were immigrants and the waitress had a beautiful accent that drove me wild. The place was classy without being stuffy. A great meal and experience in every way.

and it was my birthday.
The menu had a few salmon dishes but they were very dressed up.
I asked if there was any way the chef could make a piece of poached salmon.
It was the loveliest piece of thick salmon that was poached perfectly.
Best ever!

:popcorn:

a chinese restaurant in west springfield, ma on christmas day. a buddy and i went there for a drink and ended up spending two or three hours drinking, and eating food that ended up being on the house because of what we spent on drink. everything was outstanding and the people that worked there were great.

in the near-distance. Best meal PER SE ever, also!

Here is where my husband and I sat:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_pJ_hAi8EYWw/RsHIja-umUI/AAAAAAAAAcM/NujDBAjViB0/Eze,+Chateau+Eza.JPG

we used to take each other out to dinner
once a month.

We gagged down "magic" mushrooms with peanut butter
before dinner and headed to the local
St. Regis Hotel, dressed to the nines.

TWO bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape,
Steak Diane prepared table-side,
perfect service.

We laughed for 4 hours straight.

Easily the most enjoyable meal I
have ever had.

I'll have to look up the name, but man did it EVER kick ass.

A very small Italian restaurant owned by a couple from Sicily who can really cook. Great food, best Itaalian food I have ever had and inexpensive because it's here in PA, not in NYC or SF.

Also, a gigantic Jumbo Chinese Buffet, $9 for all you can eat of a huge and changing number of dishes of all kinds, not just Chinese. Amazing variety, all good, been there several times and have not even sampled a fraction of it.

Both these are within 5 minutes of home.

mark

I went to on a stopover there. It was only $8 or $9 and had a wide selection and everything was very fresh and perfectly cooked. The food was the saving grace of Hong Kong - otherwise it was a very unpleasant place.

Tulsa,OK. You haven't really lived until you've had a "Badwich" :thumbsup:

edit to add link: http://www.elmersbbq.net/

it's a combo of all the different meats they serve,chopped beef, pulled pork, smoked bologna, your choice of a hot link or smoked sausage and a big 'ol rib on the side :)

I think it was Laconia - it was in the Lakes Region. In the early 80's.

Great meal, great place, nice people, family owned and the best Mississippi Mud Pie I ever tasted. :9

You sit outside on a vine-covered patio, there's a water channel about 3 ft wide running around the place with trout in it. You point out the one you want and the guy scoops it up in a net. It's baked on what looked like a red clay roofing tile with butter and herbs. Side veggies and rice and fresh baked pita bread-still warm. Some kind of Baklava type dessert. Total bill including wine was under $5.

My best meal was at Aquatini cooked by Chef Alec Maxon. A roasted pork shank (and I'm not even into pork much) with veggies and mashed potato. Incredible meal.

Most fun would be at the Mt. Fuji restaurants in New Jersey

:D

Actually, one of my favorite dinners out used to be at a now-defunct restaurant in Bloomington, MN, called Eddie Webster's. I'd get a New York steak, the best au gratin potatoes on the PLANET, French onion soup, and cheesecake for dessert. Great atmosphere, excellent staff (they had longtime career servers there), terrific food. I miss that place.

Beautiful Five-Star Resturant, the one and only time I've ever been to a 5 star since it's so expensive. The service was great, they even did the whole thing where 5 waiters came out each holding a covered dish, lifted the cover a little bit so you could check to make sure it was alright, then uncovered all the dishes at the same time. The food was excellent, the wine was great, deserts were great. An excellent resturant all around.

but the one that comes to mind as one of the absolute best, was at LeRuth's in Gretna LA. it was a stunning culinary and sensory experience.

link below is cached since the site itself seems to require membership. it's a history of LeRuth's written by NOLA food critic Tom Fitzmorris:

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:Mi8vVvTeOQEJ:www.nomenu.com/Subscriber/Archives/LeRuth.html+leruth%27s&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

Montanas, the real american restaurant with real american food.

All by myself on a summer evening.
Room service.
Fettucine Alfredo with a Caesar salad and a bottle of nice wine.
Served outside on the balcony overlooking the city.
Heaven.

I went there on my birthday and ordered a burger and mooched off of other people's ribs. Damn, that was a good meal. Not to mention the fact that we sat in a booth with a framed and autographed Cal Ripken jersey on the wall, because apparently Cal was known to frequent this restaraunt when he was down in Florida.

Sadly, this place has since changed their menu and their burgers are no longer nearly as tasty as they used to be. But damn, that was a good meal.

Best restaurant atmosphere of my life. Pretty damn good food too.

Kinda that molecular gastronomy thing.

Another was a big slab of ribs in Duluth after ten days in Quetico State Park. Fish and dried food. Mind you I like fresh fish but ten days of it...

and Charles Heston. Mostly GP because I dreamed the night before that I would see him there and he was with CH and the Roman Catholic leader in Los Angeles.

I was in the USAF, assigned to a base in Turkey. On my way to the base, there was an overnight stay in Ankara. I had a meal voucher for the hotel, so I put on my class A's and went down to have dinner about 7 P.M. I gave the meal voucher to the Maitre D', who led me to a table. I was to have the Prix Fixe dinner for that night, apparently.

I didn't expect a six course meal, with a different wine for each course. I didn't expect there to be a waiter standing nearby behind my chair, filling my wine glass and briskly removing a finished course and bringing the next course.

I don't remember the whole menu, but it included trout, nicely done lamb chops, and perfect asparagus spears.

It was my first experience in a Michelin one star restaurant. And all on a military meal voucher.

A wonderful memory.

back in 2005 at a restaurant in Little Italy (NYC). Since that was my favorite show at the time and there was some mess going on with Uncle Jr. and Tony, it was sooo awesome!

At the time (35 years ago), the fancy-schmancy travel magazines rated it as one of the ten best restaurants in the world. I was in Vienna for several months on business, and one night my boss, his wife, and I went there for dinner.

They brought carts of very nice appetizers around, the way they bring dim sun, and you picked out what you wanted. We got several each. Don't remember what we got for main courses, but they were good. Dessert carts, the same as the appetizers, and we got multiples. A couple bottles of very nice wine.

We never asked how much anything was, although I think prices were on the main course menu and the wine list. Total for the three of us came to $100, which at that time was a good bit for dinner but considering how much we got at one of the best restaurants in the world, we thought it was a bargain.

We had another very nice dinner in a restaurant inside one of the old historical palaces there (the Belvedere, I think, was the palace. Don't remember the restaurant's name).