Magical meals come along only so often in life. They require a near-perfect combination of setting, company, cuisine, and service. Usually, even if everything else aligns perfectly, one of those is somehow off. The server might be having a bad night. The post-meal espresso might reach the table just a tad on the cool side. Maybe one of the diners had a little too much to drink. Any number of things can go wrong, and at least one usually does.

Personally, I’ve only had a handful of these perfect meals. As a teenager, my first haute-cuisine experience at the now defunct Le Francais at Wheeling, Illinois in the 1980s was one. Another was with my young family at a nondescript roadside restaurant at Normandy one summer afternoon in the early 2000s. Two more that come to mind were at the Blackberry Farm at Walland, Tennessee and one at a churrascaría outside Sao Paulo, Brazil.