As a restaurant critic there's one question – other than "how do you live with yourself?"– that I'm asked more regularly than any other. It's this: what's the best meal you've ever eaten? If only all questions were so easy.
It has to be the 42 courses I was served at the now closed El Bulli, Ferran Adrià's famed modernist temple by the sea, two hours north of Barcelona: the spherified gel olive that burst with pure essence of olive, the gnocchi made from jellified egg yolk, the ham consommé bobbing with cubes of melon and the rest. Of course, it was irritating that the best things, being so small, had gone before they'd barely started. And a few dishes felt like repeated riffs which quickly became tiresome. But even so, it was still the very best meal I've eaten. Ever.
Except for the whole suckling pig at Fergus Henderson's St John. That was brilliant. Undoubtedly the best. It had been baked in the bread oven for eight hours until the skin was the colour of the caramel on a crème brûlée and just as crisp. That, with a bitter-sharp watercress salad. Just me and 15 of my greediest mates. Perfect.
Although when I say 15 of my greediest mates, I didn't actually like all of them. I mean, how could I? Nobody can like 15 people can they? Most days I struggle to like myself.
So in truth the best meal I've ever eaten was the freshly boiled crab at the Company Shed on West Mersea. That, a loaf of crusty bread and a pot of Hellmann's mayonnaise. With one friend. Perfect. The best meal I have ever eaten. End of. Well I say end of. The crab thing demanded an awful lot of work and I am quite lazy.
So here it is, my number one best meal, the one that could not be bettered: a two-inch thick ribeye steak, crisp, rustling homemade chips, a good bottle of Bordeaux eaten alone with my wife one New Year's Eve.
If I sound confused, it's because I am. Not that I'm meant to be. I'm meant to be belly deep in clarity and superlatives, capable of scoring one thing over the other.
After all we live in the age of the rating, when everything can be marked out of five stars, or 10 stars or 100; when no restaurant experience is regarded as worth considering unless it can be shifted into a position on a list. Napkin-sniffing food bloggers photograph every dish that passes, like butterfly collectors pinning their collection to a board, and killing it just as effectively. This one is better than that one; that one goes to the bottom of the class.
The reality is far more banal. All the food experiences I have described are the best. Each of them had their moment and their sense signature: the warm breezes of a Catalan evening at El Bulli, the abattoir chic of St John, the salt tang on the air at the Company Shed. And, of course, there are the people. I remember each meal not just because of how it tasted but also because of who was there.
That's the great thing about eating well: you can keep doing it, and keep finding new and lovely ways in which to do it. For example right now I'm going to make a sandwich from treacle-cured bacon: crisp sweet-salty fat, soft white bread, a smear of Korean chilli sauce.
I promise you: it will be the best thing I've ever eaten. Until, that is, the next best thing.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
SEE ALSO: The 45 Best Restaurants In America >