We all have our favorite things, obvy, but especially when it comes to food & drink.
I thought it might be fun to collect them in this thread (as opposed to all over this site) — to share with one another.
For the sake of brevity, let’s limit replies to our top 5 (or fewer) for each category, and plz feel free to add your own category bc no doubt I forgot a bunch 
Appetizer: burrata Caprese, Vitello Tonnato, oysters, caponata
Beverage: sparkling mineral water, martini, Riesling, coffee
Bread: sourdough, rye, proper Rhineland Brötchen
Breakfast dish: most variations of eggs benny
Candy: dark chocolate
Cheese: Taleggio, Stichelton, feta, German fenugreek cheese
Condiment: Duke’s mayo, walnut mustard, screamingly hot hot sauce
Cuisine: Sichuan, Thai, Greek, Italian, Turkish
Fats: butter, duck fat, bacon fat, avocado oil, peanut oil
Fish: salmon, steelhead trout, rainbow trout, yellowtail
Fruit: avocado, cucumber, mango, pomegranate, tomato
Ice cream: pistachio, butter pecan, maple walnut, chocolate hazelnut, mango
Meat: lamb, duck, pork, venison, ostrich
Mushroom: porcini, chanterelles, king oyster, shiitake
Nut: pistachio (duh), walnut, pecan, brazil
Sauce: Hollandaise, Béarnaise, Piccata, beurre blanc, mushroom sauce
Pasta: pappardelle, fettuccine, linguine, paccheri, ravioli
Pizza toppings: green pepper, red onion, mushroom — ideally all of them together
Sandwich: BLT, club, mortadella / burrata / pistachio pesto, open-faced HBE sammich
Seafood: shrimp, scallops, octopus, oysters, mussels
Snack: Sichuan peanuts, popcorn, cheetos, dill pickle chicharrones
Vegetable: baby bok choy, fennel, leeks, spinach, corn
For me: Anything with Chorizo in it!! (especially if a homemade tortilla is involved)
For Sunshine: Anything with Chocolate and Peanut Butter in it!!
Gosh, you don’t half set us some hard tasks. But here’s today’s answers. Tomorrows, of course, could well be different.
Appetiser – pate de champagne, prawn cocktail, asparagus
Beverage – sparkling water, coffee, OJ
Bread – sourdough, sliced white
Breakfast dish – The “Full English”
Candy – dark chocolate
Cheese – Montgomery Cheddar, Bourne’s Cheshire, Sparkenhoe Red Leciester
Condiment – English mustard, Ketchup, Mitchell’s chilli & garlic sauce
Cuisine – British, Middle Eastern, South Asian
Fats – butter, olive oil, rapeseed oil
Fish – cod, salmon, tuna, sea bream/bass
Fruit – apple, banana, pear, grapes
Ice cream – vanilla, pistachio
Meat – lamb, pork venison, chicken
Mushroom – porcini, Portobello
Nut – pistachio, walnut, cobnut
Sauce – béarnaise, hollandaise
Pasta – casserecce, paccheri
Pizza topping – mushroom, onion, salami
Sandwich – ham & mustard, bacon, sausage, cheese/carrot/raisin
Seafood – prawns, mussels, crab
Snack – cheese & onion crisps, Bombay mix
Vegetable – red cabbage, peas, broad beans
Yah, no slacking in this thread, @Harters! Thx for playing 
Shrimp / prawn cocktail is a good app, and I can’t believe I forgot to mention it. And how could I forget CRAB in the seafood section???
Had to look up cobnut, which I only know under its other name, filbert.
Copied your list and used that as a template.
Appetizer: shrimp/lobster cocktail
Beverage: sparkling mineral water, campari & soda
Bread: baguette
Breakfast dish: Eggs
Candy: varies
Cheese: not so much
Cuisine: Many?
Fats: butter, bacon fat, avocado oil, olive oil (Spanish)
Fish:
Fruit: avocado, cucumber, tomato, raspberries, blueberries, stone fruit (in season)
Ice cream: pistachio, butter pecan,coffee
Meat: lamb, chicken, beef
Mushroom: most all of them
Nut: pistachio, cashew, pecan
Sauce:
Pasta: fettuccine, linguine, thin spaghetti
Pizza toppings: roasted peppers, pepperoni, mushrooms, fresh tomato
Dessert: Creme Brulee
Sandwich: ham and butter on a baguette (preferably all french and eaten in Paris)
Seafood: shrimp, scallops, lobster, mussels
Snack: hummus/pita or carrots
Vegetable: tomatoes…( I know its a fruit but its my favorite veg)
Yeah, filbert isnt really used here. And I suppose a more common name would be hazelnut - although hazelnuts and cobnuts are apparently close cousins but I wouldnt know the difference. You sometimes see cobnuts for sale in their “just picked” state. Very different flavour to the mature dried nuts - creamier, sweeter in some ways, a bit bitter in other ways. I like 'em.
Interesting! I’ve had hazelnuts, of course, but never a cobnut!
I learn so much here
Meat: chicken, duck, beef, bacon/pork
Seafood: scallops, shrimp
Vegetables: Peas, corn, green beans, broccoli, sugar snap peas
Bread: sourdough, bagel, English muffin, potato
Candy: chocolate
Condiment: mustard
Herbs/Spices: Aleppo pepper, thyme, oregano
Pasta: Spaghetti, fettuccine, egg noodles, Israeli couscous, orzo
Fruit: mango, apple, peach, figs
Nuts: cashews, pistachios, macadamia
Beverage: wine, water, vodka & lemonade
Cold sauces: chimichurri, nam jim jaew, Georgian garlic walnut sauce, horseradish, tonnato
Lettuce: mâche, frisée, Belgian endive, arugula, iceberg
Salad: Greek, German cucumber, arugula with shrimp, parm & lemon dressing, mâche with avocado, HBE, bacon in a creamy dressing, Cobb
Soup: Tuscan, Hungarian mushroom, tomato basil, lohikeitto
Aromatics: garlic, ginger, lemongrass
Herbs: Thai basil, cilantro, oregano, dill, parsley
Seasoning: salt, pepper, fennel seed, cayenne, fish sauce
Appetizer : any type of antipasto (cheese, salami, etc.)
Beverage: coffee, Guinness, Diet Coke
Bread: pretty much anything fresh and warm—especially bagels
Breakfast dish: scrambled eggs with crispy bacon
Candy: dark chocolate, most Irish Cadbury candies
Cheese: I have to pick one???
Condiment: sweet chili sauce, Heinz ketchup
Cuisine: Italian and Chinese
Fats: butter, especially Kerrygold or Plugra
Fish: salmon, particularly smoked salmon with cream cheese.
Fruit: fresh melon, navel oranges, sweet seedless grapes
Ice cream: vanilla, but a good, creamy, high quality one
Meat: skirt steak, rare duck breast, Chinese roast pork
Mushroom: porcini, baby bella
Nut: walnuts and pecans
Sauce: long-simmered tomato sauce, pan sauces made after sautéing
Pasta: pappardelle, fettuccine, paccheri
Pizza toppings: bacon, onion and mushroom combo
Sandwich: mozzarella caprese, prosciutto on good Italian bread
Seafood: salmon, baked clams, crab cakes
Snack: homemade popcorn, freshly baked cookies, charcuterie platter
Vegetable: spinach salad, fresh corn on the cob, roasted broccoli
Aromatics: garlic, ginger,
Herbs: basil, cilantro, thyme, sage
Seasoning: salt, pepper, adobo, Aromat, red pepper flakes
I knowwww. Maybe I shouldn’t have put a limit on peeps’ choices? 
Well, if we can limit it to six:
Extra sharp cheddar
Parm-Reg
Goat
Manchego
Cream
Feta
Mozzarella
Oh gosh, I will be kicking myself about what I left out for days to come.
Appetizer: The first thing I have to list is mozzarella sticks, the first—this sounds crazy in 2026—the first appetizer I ever had. We didn’t eat out a whole lot when I was growing up, and most of our regular spots didn’t have appetizers*. But the restaurant my uncle liked to bring people to when we’d visit did, and my brother and I would always split the mozzarella sticks. Food that’s not even a proper meal, even though you eat it as part of a meal? One that sort of tastes like pizza? And you still get dessert? That is fucking living.
But also nam khao, chicken skins (Simply Khmer was OUT OF THEM last weekend), and dumplings. And I have a lot of respect for the rare instances when crab rangoon is good.
*Remember life before Sysco, when most local menus didn’t start with a long list of pepperoni poppers, sloppy joe eggrolls, and chicken snaps?
Beverage: coffee, Cheerwine, Moxie, Coca-Cola. In the summer I make limeade with watermelon and cardamom or sometimes rau ram.
Bread: Rye, sourdough, Iggy’s Francese bread
Breakfast dish: I usually just have Greek yogurt with a spoonful of jam or marmalade, but scrambled eggs with feta, garlic, mint, and chiles are good. You salt the eggs and let them sit while you chop and saute the garlic and chiles.
Candy: Italian nougat, cola Napoleons, the cherry-lemon filled Twizzlers or fruit punch Jolly Rancher ropes, and these Japanese hard candy sticks that are cola-flavored and fizzy.
Cheese: Zimbro. In theory, thistle rennet cheeses in general, but I keep trying them, and I keep liking Zimbro so much more. Old cheddar; I miss being able to get Grafton’s four year (nevermind the five year), but Cabot 5 and 10 are good. All the chevre-like sheep’s milk cheeses, like Woolly Woolly. Eidolon.
Condiment: Chile crisp, Louisiana hot sauce, homemade onion dip, Edmond Fallot mustard (especially the tarragon or green peppercorn)
Cuisine: Southern, Lao, Nepali
Fats: Butter, okra seed oil, tomato seed oil, poultry fat
Fruit: satsuma, sumo, sour cherries. To cook with, yuzu, calamansi.
Ice cream: Toscanini’s espresso lemon, Morgenstern’s yuzu milk tea. Grapenut, coconut, orange pineapple.
Meat: Goat, lamb, pork, beef, chicken
Mushroom: maitake, porcini
Nut: Pecan, almond, walnut. I love pistachios in ice cream and pudding but rarely seem to have them otherwise. Boiled peanuts if we’re counting those.
Sauce: I think half the reason I order steak at Gibbet Hill is to get the bearnaise to dip my fries in. It’d be even better if I could do this with the sauce from the butter paneer at Bawarchi. Oh, Buffalo sauce for sure, and the sauce for New Orleans barbecue shrimp (which is basically Buffalo sauce with garlic, lemon, and Worcestershire).
Pasta: When I get it right, I love that spaghetti all’assassina. Broadly, I like bucatini and thicker spaghetti.
Pizza toppings: My default order a lot of places is double pepperoni with roasted red peppers and ricotta or fresh mozzarella, if they have it. Meatball pizza, the New England Greek style kind, was my favorite growing up. Zucchini (ideally thin-sliced) and artichokes are maybe my favorite vegetable toppings, but aren’t widely available.
Sandwich: Where do I even begin. Come back to me.
Seafood: trout, crawfish, Arctic char, oysters, turtle soup. Turtle’s seafood, right? It is in New Orleans during Lent, anyway.
Snack: Sharp cheddar with lime pickle or chile crisp; Trader Joe’s cacio e pepe puffs; crunchy Cheetos; Unique extra dark pretzels; Utz sour cream and onion potato chips
Vegetable: In-season tomatoes, okra, radicchio (tardivo), corn on the cob for those three good weeks
No need to kick yourself 
As you see, I even forgot a few categories & added them in the comments. You can come back & add to this thread FOREVER
PS: Great list, btw. Sounds like you like your sour flavors!
And I’ve never heard of tomato seed oil or okra seed oil for cooking. Could you tell me a bit more about these?
I’ve only ever seen okra seed oil from one producer, Oliver Farms – it’s kind of vegetal, the way olive oil can be but much moreso. It’s one of those things that’s nice in the summer to add a lot of flavor to a salad or a quick saute.
Tomato seed oil, I haven’t had in years. I even emailed Oliver Farms to suggest it as something for them to make, but it’s expensive and, I guess not surprisingly, takes a shitload of tomato seeds. We got a couple bottles of it from … maybe Cardullo’s in Boston? … some fancy food store, and then it stopped being imported here, as far as I could find out. It’s kind of orangey-colored and rich, and it’s so good on eggs. Like, a drizzle on a deviled egg, a little in the dressing for egg salad, anything like that. I miss it now that I’m thinking about it!
I tried making a salad dressing with it and tomato vinegar – one of those expensive vinegars actually made from fermented tomatoes (Gegenbauer brand, I think?) – because you’d think that would be a powerhouse, but somehow it was flat. Maybe it needed some lemon or something.
And I smoked three packs a day for years, so even though I quit more than 20 years ago, I think I may have permanently fucked up my palate a bit. I definitely incline towards sour and spicy flavors. When I make gingerbread, Caitlin says it’s smoker’s gingerbread: ginger by the spoonful, espresso, marmalade, etc.
Former (and very, very, very occasional social) smoker here as well. Might be why I prefer punchier flavors in general, but I don’t have trouble appreciating subtleties, either
That tomato seed oil sounds delightful.
Favorite sandwiches:
A BLT and its cousin, a chicken skin sandwich. In both cases the tomato has to be fresh and in season.
A tomato sandwich, ditto. I know, it’s supposed to be just tomato, S&P, Duke’s, and the plainest white bread you can find, but I like to lightly toast the bread so that it holds together a LITTLE longer, and often use a liberal amount of good butter instead of mayo. Sometimes I use corn-infused butter if it’s that time of year and I’ve made some. (And yet I never use garlic butter.)
Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich. There are like a million variants, but I’m not going to give them separate slots.
Grilled cheese. I usually add some onion or shallot, sometimes some pickled Fresno chiles. Usually American cheese and very sharp cheddar, though for yeeeears I made it with cream cheese and cheddar on pumpernickel.
Shit, I just remembered restaurants, so the uni panini at Coppa (which included beef tongue and whole grain mustard).
And I will steal Natascha’s, because burrata, mortadella, and pistachio is a magical combination. I like sundried peppers (there was an … Eater? Grubstreet? … article about a sandwich in NYC that added them) or pickled Fresnos too.
Favorite restaurant dishes near to home:
The soup dumplings at House of Noodles and Sushi in Merrimack.
The mortazza pizza—mortadella, burrata, and pistachio—at La Fiamma in Hampstead.
The nam khao at Laos Thai in Lowell (nearly as good at Lanxang Star in Dracut).
Just about any gobi appetizer at Bawarchi, but I think the kothimeera gobi is my favorite.
The miang kham at A Lot of Thai in Merrimack. Little leaf wraps you assemble with small chopped up pieces of lime, peanut, coconut, chile, shallots, I forget what else, but it hits all your taste buds. The coconut and the palm sugar dressing are both just sweet enough to balance out the fact that you’re eating lime segments.
Favorite restaurant dishes, vacation edition:
The guava and cheese pastelitos at CAO in Miami.
The tuna nduja at Itamae, also Miami. It doesn’t sound as amazing as it is; we ordered it because we had genuinely ordered at least two thirds of the menu at that point and asked what else was good. It was the best thing we got:
The famous foie gras tuna situation at Le Bernardin. Man, I’m not even a huge fan of tuna, but here it is showing up twice in this list—though in both cases, sharing the spotlight with stronger flavors.
Jambalaya at Coop’s in New Orleans. The regular has shredded rabbit and smoked sausage. You can add shellfish, or have it as a side with their very good fried chicken. Even when I was visiting friends in Lafayette, I built in time to stop in New Orleans just long enough to take a cab to the French Quarter, pick up jambalaya to go, and get back in the cab to the airport.
Honorable mention: the desserts at Itamae:
My Facebook memory says:
The top is “torta helada”—typically a cake with a thin layer of Jello on top. In this case it’s sponge cake with mamey seed cream (I believe that’s the pool of white at the bottom) and canistel mousse; the veil on top is gooseberry gelee. There’s a lot of red underline there, I guess: mamey is a tropical fruit, a sapote; you may have seen frozen mamey pulp next to the pigeon peas and empanadas and such. Canistel is a tropical fruit with a flavor a bit like a rich sweet potato—it’s one of those things that can taste a little spiced even when it isn’t, and like a lot of the tropical fruits that didn’t become US supermarket staples, it can lean savory—also called egg fruit because when raw and ripe, the texture is like a hard boiled egg yolk.
That was great. The thing on the bottom, though, the cremolada, was even better. Tangerine shaved ice. Thick whipped cream infused with hojicha (toasted tea). Those potato stix bits on top? That’s fucking meringue, piped by hand into those little bars and baked crisp. You have icy, creamy, and crispy, you have bright and rich, you have everything.
(Okay, it’s a long post, but I’ll blame the photos.)
