I can still taste it. “It” was a dish of stacked tube pasta, resembling tiny Lincoln Logs, smothered in cream sauce and gaudily stuffed with fois gras. It was the single best dish we will have ever and will ever taste. It happened at a restaurant named Lasserre in Paris.

I know. A great meal in Paris? How embarrassingly obvious. Danger, cliché ahead, you think. But an obvious truth is still a truth, and despite the fact that Parisian chefs practically invented haute cuisine and the word by which we know it, the French have been getting a reputation for complacency and rust lately from people that pronounce such things. Magazines swoon over Spanish innovation. Seattle tech billionaires are applying science to cooking, inventing new flavors. The English are going back to their roots, quite literally, and embracing seasonal produce. The French, well, seem a bit burdened by their fanciness.

Still, there are times when all that French tradition transcends and on one of our already happiest days on earth—the April night we were engaged—the momentum of memories and heightened senses lovingly conspired to carry us to Lasserre, usher us into a velvet-draped room of crystal and flowers. At least, that’s what I think it looked like; my eyes were closed most of the time. It’s a reflex that occasionally happens to me when I taste something truly sublime, my eyes and ears seems to shut automatically to block out any other senses, leaving my brain to focus intently and ecstatically on the flavors overwhelming me. It sounds silly, I know it does, but it’s true. My eyes were closed for most of the meal.

The service was a ballet of psychics. In fact, I hardly remember any waiters, they seemed to be invisibly bringing new plates and removing others. The only time I remember seeing anyone was a blur from the opposite side of the room when I thought about pouring myself some more wine. It was just a thought, perhaps the thought had barely traveled to my hand and caused the slightest twitch of intention, when the blur started, but before I completed my thought, I had no need to act on it. My glass was already full, of my first grande cru no less.

And that’s how we’ll leave this memory, forever in the candlelight of optimism and love, having dessert and eating it too. And the tiny pair of sterling silver birds on our table that kept us company, perhaps a symbolic representation of that other cliché—two love birds—have kept us company ever since. Both the real and metaphorical love birds that nest in our home, will always have a strong association to one of our best memories: our favorite meal ever.