What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

MEAL MONEY

For the whole of my life, I have never gone into spending a huge amount of money on meals at restaurants or on the purchase of exotic provisions to cook meals at home. Don’t get me wrong; I’m far from skin G regarding meals and purchasing ingredients if we cook at home.

When travelling overseas, we often provided for ourselves by buying food from supermarkets or shops and then preparing that food ourselves. The same happened when we were travelling around Australia. The only exception I can think of was when we had Christmas dinner in Georgetown on Penang Island in Malaysia one Christmas.

We went to the Tunku Abdul Razzak Centre for our Christmas lunch. We decided somewhat extraordinarily to purchase a decent bottle of wine for our meal. From memory, I think it was about AU$45, the most I have ever paid for a bottle of wine.

Very few people, it seems, ever had wine with their meals at the restaurant. We had two or three drink waiters hovering around usFrom the bottle being opened until it was consumed.

I remember the wine but not what comprised the rest of the mail.

(Actually, it was on the same day that the five of us had the wildest and most hair-raising race ride in two trishaws from our hotel to our lunchtime meal. It was downhill all the way, and if the topic of a ride ever comes up on this site, I will write more fulsomely about going to dinner.)

When it comes to eating, I’m somewhat of a traditionalist and like plain and wholesome meals without too much garnish. I also love a good steak. We have had three meals in Australia going back over the years, which I remember not so much because of cost but the excellent way the steaks for our dinner are prepared and served.

The third most favourite steak I’ve eaten in this context was at the RSL Club in Gunnedah, New South Wales, back in the late 1970s.

The second-best steak I’ve ever eaten was served to us in the BP Cafe attached to the service station in Ravensthorpe in Western Australia.

A gold plate for the best steak I have eaten goes to the then chef, an apprentice of the Margo Myles Restaurant in the Tennant Creek Hotel in the Northern Territory. The steak was out of this world. It was probably around 1984 or 1985 when that particular meal was served, and I still remember it to this day.

I am 77 years old. Based on three meals a day for the years I’ve been alive, I’d estimate eating 84,300 meals in various situations. That is a lot of eating and a lot of meals. I’d hate to have to pay for them all at once.