The Best Meal I Ever Had

The best meal I ever had

wasn’t a meal

it was a Bloody Mary

every morning the summer of 2013, to be exact.

A mason jar full of vodka and heart-friendly polyphenols

with my best friend in the heart of our college town;

High July in Alabama and as at home as anyone can ever be.

I had a crush on every bartender in the restaurant.

The best meal I ever had

was spaghetti

sprinkled with inexplicable bits of bone

under a metal awning on a hillside in Greece.

(It was the best meal ever

because my grandfather,

with crinkly, mischievous eyes,

told my brother he ordered him beef

and later revealed it to be lamb genitalia.)

The best meal I ever had

was a bowl of ramen in Paris

with a new friend, in a city I had run to

to soothe the wound of being a post-grad.

The broth was mainly butter, bad for your heart but good for your soul.

We both woke at 4 a.m. with a stranded-in-the-desert thirst,

and yet, every Sunday, a text: “Ramen?”

The best meal I ever had

was the morning after New Year’s Eve

back in our hometown during our first year of college

at our favorite high school restaurant.

We began 2011 in giddy, morning-drunk laughter

because under my bootcut gray sweatpants I was wearing the only shoes I had:

glittering, black, pointy-toed stilettos.

The best meal I ever had

has happened many times.

It happens whenever my dad lowers his crab cages

into the murky Severn river

and we drink cheap beer and get Old Bay in our eyes

and I marvel at his picking skills, and feel grateful that he taught me.

You see, I could rhapsodize for days

about burrata, mille-feuille and tender medallions of ostrich,

crunchy golden beets, smoked bacon with caramelized bourbon sauce

and really anything in the sandwich family.

But ambience is nothing without conversation

and appetizers fall flat without affection

and after 23 years of loving food,

there’s one thing I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It ain’t what you’re eating,

it’s who you’re eating it with.

Images via Harpers Bazaar. For past writer’s club prompts and submissions, click here. For a recap of this whole week on MR in one fell swoop, read Esther’s little ditty. And if you haven’t seen Gucci’s Resort 16 show yet, you definitely should.