Best Meal you ever ate in the United States

[Tearsinheavens]

Reminiscing about My food adventures there, had so many great (and some awful) meals but if I had to pick one it would be the chicken and andouille sausage Jambalaya Pasta dish at cafe Amelie in New Orleans.

Tell me yours please 😊

A sliced meatball pizza in New York TriBeCa in 1998
It felt so American!! I was buzzing.

Five guys burger and meatball sandwich from johns on bleaker street! Was also impressed by hooters’ food (am Irish so we just went in to see it but the food was really good!)

That very first McDonald's in Fremont, Nebraska in 1976, oh and then we had KFC a few days later.. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Certainly beat a Wimpy.

Maryland crab cakes, somewhere on the Chesapeake peninsula.
swordfish carpaccio in San Diego.

Lobster rolls on the Oregon coast
Sushi in San Francisco
Cuban food in Miami
Dim Sum in New York
Weirdly, some of the best Tex-Mex I ever had was in Colorado

Q in Austin Texas

I am off to New Orleans tomorrow so I’m hoping to try jambalaya there

Eggs bene with mushrooms on a crab cake with lemon hollandaise in Monterey

Or tex mex in a tiny town called Homestead in Florida. The restaurant was very basic, very cheap and full of Mexican agricultural workers. The salsa was to die for.

I had an amazing Indian meal in Santa Fe once, and Mexican in NY. But my favourite regular restaurant is the cheesecake Factory.

An amazing breakfast in an old-fashioned hotel in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania in 2002. The dining room was in a big white-painted conservatory, and there was a blizzard so heavy snow was falling outside the windows. Meanwhile they were playing vintage songs and there was this huge spread of tables covered in fruit, pastries, with chefs cooking French toast and omelettes to order and waiters bringing iced water. It was like being in a Bing Crosby film and the food was AMAZING. I remember the breakfast charge being sixteen dollars per person which these days sounds ridiculous!

Gumbo in New Orleans and randomly the best veggie burger I've ever eaten in my life was in a random restaurant in North Carolina. I still think about that burger.

Chicken wings.. honestly nowhere does them like it!

Fish tacos in San Diego. Like nothing I'd ever tasted at the time

An elk steak with creamed yam in Estes Park. I think I enjoyed it so much because I was heavily pregnant at the time and had it rare with a glass of red wine!

I grew up in the states. Things I really miss are proper tex-mex food, New England clam chowder with the little chowder crackers, and Maryland crab cakes.

There was this amazing restaurant I used to go to in Chinatown in Philadelphia as a teenager. I think it was all vegetarian or at least significantly vegetarian back in the days when vegetarian food in restaurants was pretty non-existent. I used to get this fried ‘chicken’ (I’m guessing it was seitan?) with walnuts and chillies in a sauce, probably like a Szechuan sauce, it was spicy and sweet. With rice and veg. But they also did these amazing siphon coffees. This was in the 90s, so before the current craze of single origin coffees. You could choose your coffee from like 50 different single origin beans or blends, and they’d grind it and brew it in a siphon by the cup. It was fantastic coffee. I was like 15, but I knew a good cup of coffee when I saw one!

Anyway, that’s not very American at all really. 😂 But it’s something I wish I could have again. Sadly, I think the restaurant closed many, many years ago and there’s like high rise condos built there now. 🤷🏻‍♀️

A wedge salad with bacon and blue cheese and loads of other stuff all over it that I've forgotten. It was a ridiculously hot day in the south and the lettuce was so cold and crisp, refreshing and delicious. Also so huge that I don't think I finished it!

a big bowl of fried alligator bites with jalepeno cream cheese poppers. Served in Tampa Bay in 1997 (it was years till my mum told me it was alligator she told me it was fish and for years I went on about these delicious fish bites we had till she eventually admitted it was gator!)

Shrimp (British prawns, I think) and grits in Charleston, SC. Sounds odd, was sublime.

Plain boiled lobster with drawn butter, fresh picked corn on the cob and coleslaw in Maine

Grilled shrimp tacos at a beach shack north of San Diego.

My first dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. DH and I were upstairs in the cafe, very romantic. All I remember is the roast duck, a perfect understated salad of green leaves, a pear tart and a good claret, but there was more to it. Just a perfect French bistro meal.

Devil’s food cheesecake in Grand Central Station.

Two lots of oysters, in very different settings.

Posh hotel in Nawlins, barkeep was shucking oysters to put on the bar as a bar snack - a bit like the bowl of peanuts on Sunday lunch-time used to be .in England 😀

He shucked, we ate, & washed down with cocktails.

Near Seattle, we stayed with cousin & family. Matriarch had bought & shucked a huge pile of them, & fried them as part of dinner.

I was 18 and went to Florida in the late 80s with a friend to stay with her grandparents. I’d been to France when I was 5 and Ireland, twice,. We had Fresh grapefruit from my friend’s grandma garden, and fresh squeezed orange juice. And went to a Mexican restaurant, where there was lime and coriander and chillis. It blew my mind that things could taste like that! It was like a relevation!