Your Worst Meal Ever
Salon had a great piece recently when they asked a number of food writers to write about their worst meal ever. This of course got me thinking about my worst meal ever. When I started ruminating on what constitutes an awful meal, I realized that truly terrible meals are all about dashed expectations and dire circumstances. When it comes to abysmal meals context and circumstances are everything.
It was a cold April day in 1968. I was a junior in high school attending Hackley in Tarrytown, NY. We went to play a rival school in baseball. I pitched seven innings. I must have thrown over a hundred pitches. My arm was about to fall off, my whole body was aching and cold, and I was absolutely famished by the time we got back to the school around 7 p.m. My worst fears were realized when I hit the dining room.
We were having liver and onions. Gnarly, overcooked liver, accompanied by instant mashed potatoes and canned string beans (not pictured). I tried to eat some of it, but I just couldn't swallow. There was no alternative. I ended up having jello (the dessert offered) and bad dinner rolls for dinner.
What's your worst meal ever?
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13 Comments:
For me, everything is in the expectations. I remember one particular meal with my then girlfriend as a university student. The whole thing was for an anniversary of some sort (can't honestly remember what) and I had reserved in some classy Tunesian/Morrocan restaurant in town, I even reserved a place in the small moroccan salon they had with the pillows and the low table, the romantic lug that I was. Ended up ordering the most insipid and tasteless couscous royal in the history of man. The lamb was like cardboard, the Mergez awful and dry and everything about the experience incredibly disapointing. My date's tagine was just as bad. Terrible.
grubnoise at 8:56AM on 10/17/06
i was so excited! just having moved to new york, and with not access to much cash, my boyfriend and i decided to treat ourselves to a nice breakfast out. we traveled to soho to a restaurant that our friends had raved about. oh YUM! poached eggs and potato latke! with a bloody mary in hand i decided that was the route i was going to go. oh, how i love little poached eggs! here it comes! oh wait. what is this? something that wasn't noted on the menu... i think it's spiced apples? spiced apples with so much juice that the plate was flooded with apple cinnamon spice that was so cloying it was like a yankee holiday candle. and when i say flooded.. i mean flooded. the juice looked like it had been ladled on the eggs. on the potatoes. on the beautiful little biscuits that were also on the plate. i asked for an extra plate and a stack of napkins and moved the crap apples away and attempted to mop up the horrible liquid. didn't work. the flavor had permeated everything. so my glorious first new york breakfast, happy sitting at a table next to gael garcia bernal, turned into cinnamon apple arse.
Julma at 9:05AM on 10/17/06
My mother used to cook something called "cube steaks" for my Brothers and I. No idea what the actual cut was, but came flat and pounded out. served overcooked, dry, grey and lifeless.... WITH A SLICE OF SINGLE WRAP AMERICAN CHEESE MELTED ON TOP.
I think I had actually blocked this from memory and thought of it for the first time in a decade recently.
Another creation of hers was a microwave "grilled cheese". two slices of store bought "country white", buttered on the inside, couple slices of cheese, then microwaved until melted. unbelievable. I don't think we minded it then because it was basically butter and cheese, but the thought of eating it now is unbearable.
Needless to say, I worked in a couple restaurants for about a year in order to learn how to prep and cook for myself as a reaction to the "food" i was raised on.
Abe_Froman at 10:17AM on 10/17/06
funny, 1 person's "bad" is another's good. growing up, 1 of my favorite meals were those very same cubed steaks, thrown into a skillet browned with butter & worcestershire & served with french fries & a coke, before the advent of diet coke
baruch at 11:14AM on 10/17/06
We moved to New Zealand a few years ago. A restaurant opened called "Coyote" that claimed to do American regional food -- vaguely southwestern. We ordered smoked ribs with pineapple salsa (hoping against hope). When they arrived, they had been BOILED, probably for some time, since what we were actually served was a plate of bones with a few grey shreds of pork clinging forlornly to them. The pineapple marmalade (!) had nothing to hold onto, so was pooled on the bottom of the plate. This was the first time in my life I actually sent something back to the kitchen.
grubstreet at 1:00PM on 10/17/06
I was in fourth grade, and we were visiting Walt Disney World's then-newish Epcot Center. I was young and a sucker and really did believe in the animitronic magic of the place. Epcot center had an international gallery of plazas pretending to be other countries--Germany, England, China, etc. One night we ate dinner in a fake Aztec temple in fake Mexico, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. The following night my parents made a dinner reservation for the restaurant in fake Morocco. The restaurant was brand-new, nearly empty, and totally screwed up. We waited two hours for food I was not interested in at all in the first place. I fell asleep with my head in my mother's lap, more out of boredom than fatigue. I awoke to a dry, bland mess of couscous. It was midnight by the time we got out of there. The only redeeming quality of fake Morocco was the belly dancer.
SaraBir at 3:45PM on 10/17/06
I was an impressionable three years old when my mother, generally an excellent cook, decided to try her hand at Coquille St Jacques, a scallop dish with cream and butter served in a scallop shell. It was a disaster. The cream sauce was lumpy and charred around the edges of the shell, the scallops were long past rubbery, and the smell was nauseating. Not even the novelty of eating from a shell could console my brother and I, who refused to eat it. We eventually arrived at a compromise: if we ate four scallops, we could have dessert. I clearly remember walking over to the sink, washing the rancid sauce off the scallops and swallowing them whole.
Three years old, and this memory is burned into my mind. To this day when my mother cooks scallops we give her a hard time, though there has never since been a disaster on quite that scale...
Carey at 3:49PM on 10/17/06
I moved to manhattan after graduating from medical school. Did my residency at an UES hospital. One day my parents visited from Brooklyn. We decided to stay local. [ This was in the mid 1980's ]. There was a restaurant/bar about on 1st avenue and 88th street on SW corner sort of like a Dorians type place. Served mostly burgers and a few specials...That day it was shrimp in curry sauce. I cant to this day figure out why i ordered this as i never was a fan of curry. Plate came...a pile of what seemed to be frozen,rubbery shrimp slathered with the strongest, stinkiest, goopiest yellow sauce i have ever seen with a lump of gummy tasteless white rice on the side...I got nauseous,, couldnt eat and ruined the whole meal...Even my mother was disgusted but blamed me for ordering it....!
Doctorted at 8:54PM on 10/17/06
In Budapest I ordered a quattro stagione pizza. Honestly I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I guess I was just missing Italian food and tired of goulash. But since when is broccoli a season? What the hell were they thinking!
cookingwit at 6:19PM on 10/18/06
The worstmeal I ever had in a restaurant was at LUPA.
Tried to go many times and finally went for my birthday.1st we waited 45 minutes for our reservation.
Then we were sat in the aisle right outside after requesting a nice table when we made the reservation.Waited another 15 minutes for a waitress & another 15 for bread water etc.
Finally placed our order and got dry salami & proscuitto like leather, overdressed salad and
the sardines were off.
Then our waitress comes over to inform us she is leaving and the busboy will handle our table!!!!The mains arrive and I tell you it was shocking.The deep fried cauliflower was burned,which I was told it was supposed to be like that and the saltimboca was so salty and the fontina was like a sheet of brittle.
The sauce was non existant and my dates food was just as bad.
Then cold espresso and and some really horrible desserts.
I was really amazed that this was the food people were lining up outside for and to top it all off we were leaving and Mario is sitting in the front dining area with 2 of the guys from REM getting wasted.
That was and will be the last time I ever set foot in his restaurants after having a similar,previous experience at Esca.
His places are way over rated.
chameleonz at 11:37AM on 10/19/06
Most of the worst meals I've had that spring to mind are all the result of terrible service more so that terrible food, and from restaurants who's reputations would lead you to believe the service would be quite good. Although my memory of the food at Ouest and DB Bistro is that it was competent, if unremarkable, the ill treatment by unpleasant staff was memorable enough that I'd never go back, not even on someone else's dime...
AnalogBass at 4:42PM on 10/26/06
I will happily share my worst meal ever because even though it happened in the mid 1990s it still haunts me to this day. A friend and me were visiting England (I know, ominous start) and we were going up to Oxford from London to visit a student friend later in the day. We were so new to Oxford and England that we didn't quite get how small and close everything was. So we got off the train at the Oxford station and proceeded to walk through the town into the next village thinking we were still in Oxford. My friend and I were both New Yorkers at the time so we were used to walking great distances while carrying stuff. We probably only walked five to eight miles or so, but when we started seeing grazing sheep we figured something was amiss. So we stopped into a pub and learned that we walked right through the town without seeing the University (in all fairness to us Oxford at the time wasn't exactly open to the public).
We were famished and this was a country pub so we thought well let's at least have lunch. The waitress was wonderfully friendly the menu looked good. I ordered the chicken parmesan and my friend got the pub favorite shepard's pie. And some hard ciders. What I got was something fried to the point of resembling dark shoe leather doused in cheese whiz. I am not exaggerating. My friend's shepard's pie was worse. We weren't going to even try this food. The cheeze whiz was glowing and just poking the chicken I learned it was brittle. We gulped down the ciders, paid the bill on the table (with generous tip of course -- our waitress not only didn't make fun of us for being tourist dweebs but drew us a map and explained how Oxford was set up). Then we RAN back to the pizza hut near the Oxford train station for lunch before we met our friend. (Mind you we were carrying our luggage backpacks.)
Anyway, love your blog and thoughts!
claude r
Claude at 9:04AM on 10/27/06
This really happened when I was in Georgia for my father's second funeral.
A sandwich supper that consisted of cold Velveeta and Treet sandwiches on Wonder bread dressed with MIracle Whip mixed with ketchup and pickle relish. Served with Mountain Dew, choice of regular or diet.
Do you hear the banjos?
Tina
tinastrong at 4:07PM on 06/05/08