What comes to mind when you think of the best things you ate in 2015? Are they foods you eat regularly, or were they new to you? Did you eat them at home or in restaurants or at a friend’s house?
The Times food critic Pete Wells introduces his “Top 10 Restaurant Dishes of 2015” this way:
These are the 10 dishes of 2015 that I can’t stop thinking about. They’re the tastes that I ate with the most intense pleasure and that left the most vivid impressions. They do not necessarily represent the year’s finest achievements in the culinary arts. Then again, maybe they do.
One of the dishes is the sandwich pictured above. Here is how he describes it:
Porchetta sandwich at Mekelburg’s
Is it the way the hard snap of the pig skin echoes the loud crunch of the roll paved with sesame seeds? The benign bitterness of the broccoli rabe under the pork? The garlic and herbs that blend into everything else and at the same time don’t? Not sure, but I’ll keep going back until I know.
Students: Read and look at photos of the other nine dishes, then tell us …
— Which of the foods Pete Wells describes would you most like to eat? Which would you least like to eat? Why?
— When you go out to eat, do you prefer to order foods you’re familiar with, like roast chicken, or are you sometimes willing to experiment and order, say, the “sea urchin lobes with a swoosh of partly fermented chickpea purée” that Mr. Wells describes here?
— What’s the most memorable, notable or adventurous thing you’ve ever eaten?
— What would be on your Top 10 list of the best things you ate in 2015? Choose one and attempt to describe it in a sentence or two, the way Pete Wells does here. What made it so delicious?
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