When compiling this annual list of great tastes, it’s my custom to riffle through notebooks and stacks of menus. The hope is that, by way of cribbed impressions and sundry sauce stains, I rewire, if only briefly, the synapses that connect my palate and my brain.

This time out, however, I stayed away from the note- and menu-stuffed filing cabinet and relied solely on my memory. I figured if I spent a week spinning through recollections of meals past, true greatness would eventually emerge.

I was right. In fits and starts at first, then in torrents, memories of meals past came floating gauzily through my head. And soon the wheat and the chaff were separating as they should, and a pantheon of splendid eats began to emerge from the haze. What follows is a roster of the 2008 tastes that haunt me. And they are the tastes that will haunt you in 2009.

Bites

Fried Hominy
Proof on Main
702 W. Main St. Louisville
502.217.6360
proofonmain.com

You know what corn nuts are, so let’s start there. These deep-fried hominy nubbins are like corn nuts with a pedigree. And a nice hairdo. Yes, I know Michael Paley, the chef at Proof on Main, is better known for his salumi, for his way of salting and aging pork and beef. But never mind that.

What you want are these crisp little orbs of maize, goosed with the earthy funk of truffle oil. Consider consuming them at the bar, while drinking a tumbler of fine American whiskey and perusing the challenging, wacky, and often absurdist 21stcentury art collection curated by the adjoining 21c Museum Hotel.

Hodo Soy Yuba-Spinach Raviolo
Coi
373 Broadway San Francisco
415.393.9000
coirestaurant.com

Coi (pronounced kwah) is a French word that translates as something like tranquil. The name is fey. And so is the suggestion that you might enjoy dabbing a bit of the house fragrance on your wrist as you eat. Only in San Francisco, you say dismissively. And then the food comes.

Daniel Patterson is a sensualist of the highest order. The sort of chef who stakes his reputation on an opening course of pink grapefruit mousse with ginger, tarragon, and black pepper. The sort of chef who lets fly a free-form raviolo, built around ethereal sheets of yuba (also known as tofu skin) stuffed with a tofu-spinach smash. The plate comes scattered with buds of purslane. The whole affair is entangled in strips of pink pickled turnip. The crowd, at least the two at my table, roars with approval.

Birds

Eight Piece Quail Bucket
Ratcliffe on the Green
435 South Tryon St. Charlotte
704.358.9898
ratcliffeonthegreen.com

Talk of a bucket of birds and most of us think of the Colonel. Think again. Mark Hibbs, chef and owner of this elegant matchbox of a restaurant, set in a retrofitted flower shop in uptown Charlotte, has reinvented the form.

He dunks partially boned flyweights in buttermilk and flour, fries them to a lacy crisp, and piles them in a diminutive tin bucket. On the side, Hibbs pours rosemary gravy for dunking and plops silver-dollar buttermilk biscuits for sopping.

Rotisserie Chicken
RoliRoti
Various locations (including
Wednesday lunches at U.N. Plaza)
San Francisco Bay Area
roliroti.com

Switzerland. That’s where Thomas Odermatt learned from his father, a master butcher, to carve cows and chickens and other beasts. More to the point, that’s where he learned to roast chickens on rotating spits as they twirl in front of a wall of heat.

Odermatt mounts his spit arrays to the rear of three retrofitted trucks that make the rounds, visiting various Bay Area farmers’ markets to peddle local, free-range birds. Once rubbed with spice mix, they are flame-burnished to near the color of cordovan. Beneath those birds, on a modified flattop, fingerling potatoes sizzle and hiss in a shallow puddle of aromatic chicken juices until the potatoes, like the chicken, are a tender and golden exultation of fowl. This is street food for the 21st century.

Burgers

10 O’Clock Double Decker
Holeman and Finch Public House
2277 Peachtree Rd. Atlanta
404.948.1175
holeman-finch.com

10 o’clock is the magic hour for a visit. Until then, the cooks at Holeman and Finch Public House, a raucous tavern on Peachtree Road, are too busy deep-frying pig tails, baking homemade saltines, braising pork bellies, and roasting veal sweetbreads. Until then, the bar crew is too busy beating back the crowds that have thronged this kissingcousin- to-a-gastropub since it opened in the spring of 2008.

At 10:00, one of chef Linton Hopkins’s compatriots will cook you a burger. A handpatted doubledecker made from beef ground inhouse, served on a housebaked bun, smeared with house-made mustard, and, yes, capped with house-made bread-andbutter pickles. If all this sounds obsessive, well, it is. It’s also delicious.

Back Forty Burger
Back Forty
190 Ave. B at 12th St.
New York City
212.388.1990
backfortynyc.com

Peter Hoffman, who owns the chic restaurant Savoy in SoHo, was a founding member of the farm-to-fork movement. He still rides his bike to the Union Square Greenmarket in search of the moment’s freshest vegetables and fruits. At Back Forty, his new place, set in once grotty and now merely gritty Alphabet City, he does not turn his back on the ethic of eating locally. He just tamps down the rhetoric and ratchets down the prices.

This fortunate combination means his calling card of a burger is built with grass-fed beef. It’s lacquered with homemade ketchup, and it rests on a brioche bun. Be sure to get a side order of the fries — they’re raspy with rosemary and sea salt. When you get thirsty, you can always serve yourself a tumbler of water, poured from the recycled whiskey bottles that grace each table.

Sweets

Rice Pudding

Pane Bianco
4404 N. Central Ave.
Phoenix
602.234.2100
pizzeriabianco.com/pane

The sandwiches here are simple. As in tuna with red onion, olives, lemon, and arugula. As in mozzarella, local tomato, and basil. The bread, like the pizza that James Beard Award–winning chef Chris Bianco bakes at Pizzeria Bianco, is without peer. It has integrity and substance. And it’s somehow both chewy and tender.

But the sleeper at this industrially hip lunch-only spot is the rice pudding, sold by the cup from a cooler by the register. The rice — heirloom Carolina Gold grain from Anson Mills — retains a bit of texture, offering a mite of resistance to the tooth. And the cream that binds the rice is perfumed with mace. This is not the gruel of grade school lunchrooms. This is a grand glorification of the sweet possibilities of grain.

Muscadine Wine Gellée
MiLa 817 Common St.
New Orleans
504.412.2580
milaneworleans.com

A very sophisticated dessert, a jiggling mosaic of mango and other tropical fruits embedded within a dome of muscadine flavored gellée and scattered with a chiffonade of mint.

Said dessert is the creation of Allison Vines-Rushing and her husband Slade Rushing, co-chefs at this relatively new restaurant, set on the ground floor of a boutique hotel in the Central Business District of New Orleans. If the thought of a muscadine dome doesn’t make your heart go pitterpatter — and it should — go for the deconstructed root beer float, inspired by the excellence of Abita Brewing Company, just up the road.

Take Home

Soft Shell Lobsters
Three Sons Lobster & Fish
72 Commercial St.
Portland, Maine
866.588.8245
threesonslobsterandfish.com

My wife, on the other end of the telephone line, issues an ultimatum. If I am flying home from Maine, I am flying home with lobsters. So I stop down by the water, drawn by a dancing crustacean that looks like a refugee from a Sesame Street dress rehearsal. For around $30, I get three lobsters — weighing over a pound each — packed with ice in their own cardboard cooler.

I feel goofy walking out the door with three live animals in a box. I feel goofier still when the airport T.S.A. officer tells me I have to leave my ice packs behind. (A quick trip to the gate-side bar and a tip of $3 get me back in the transport business.) But I don’t feel goofy at all when, three hours later, I take a seat at our dining room table and begin cracking claws for my son and dredging sweet, white meat through rich drawn butter.

Sesame Pancake with Beef
Dumpling House
118A Eldridge St.
New York City
212.625.8008

The New Orleans muffuletta — a pileup of, among other things, mortadella, provolone, and olive salad — is defined by the round, seeded loaf into which the sandwich is stuffed, as well as by its portability, the way, while in transit, the loaf absorbs all manner of olive oil but still holds its shape and maintains its great taste.

This concoction is the Chinatown answer to the muffuletta. The Dumpling House employs a similarly seeded loaf. They overstuff it with sliced beef brisket, cilantro, carrots, and scallions, all swabbed with a sweet hoisin sauce. And that loaf travels well. On a recent trip, I picked up a sesame pancake at eleven in the morning and ate it at around five in the afternoon, soon after my flight out of La Guardia reached cruising altitude. By then, the hoisin had saturated the bread, which was — in my book — a most positive development.

John T. Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi. He is series editor of Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing and a contributing editor at Gourmet Magazine.