“Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life. I mean, let’s face it: when you’re eating simple barbecue under a palm tree and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the background, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion’s face, you realize that in half an hour you’re probably going to be having sex on clean white hotel sheets, that grilled chicken leg suddenly tastes a hell of a lot better.” – Anthony Bourdain

A good meal, it could be said, heals all wounds. You’d be a douchebag if you said that, but it’s still sort of true. Wounds, of course, range from skinned knees and runny noses to bruised pride and hangover-induced mushy-pea brain. And meals, naturally, range from still-cold flat ginger ale and Westerns from Louis’ to homemade chicken soup and pinky-out, legs-together fine dining. This weekend, we each experienced our own type of food cure, and we share these experiences with you in the hope that you realize that it is not the cost or the quality (see: Ratty Sunday brunch) of a meal that determines its value, but rather its company (or lack thereof) and context.

First came an evening out at Local 121. We will refrain from discussing the specific ailment, but, rest assured, a cure was much needed. The restaurant, we feel, has always been good, but not great—never a guaranteed homerun, not even in the small ballpark that is Providence. The meal started innocuously enough, with an awkward wait and mispronounced specials, not to mention the mishmash of dining attire that, like a girl who rebuffs your advances and doesn’t indicate whether it’s because she’s a lesbian or because you forgot to put on deodorant, so often and unsettlingly makes you look around the room and break a very minor—but nonetheless—petulant sweat. In both cases, we don’t really care—we just want to know. What followed, however, was a true step forward for the restaurant and really lifted an otherwise crappy week out of the gutter: a Hendricks with muddled cucumber and a vodka with lemon and ginger liqueur; radicchio and fennel salad with bluefish crostini, beet and ricotta pizza and curried lentil dip; braised beef cheeks, spicy eggplant crumble and barbecued quail with housemade bacon, corncake and grilled peaches. We were too contented for dessert. It was a delicious meal, the sort that you can be positive will lead to a good night’s sleep, and everyone walked out feeling great.

The next day, our other half—thrust violently out of the womb of the sort of sleep that perfectly caps off an overnight bender—opened his morning (draped on a massive leather couch in a too-nice dorm at a small college in northwestern Massachusetts) with the clarion call of the aforementioned ginger ale, which was miraculously, mercifully still cold. Later that day, he clomped out of the rapidly decreasing temperature and looming snow of that damned corner of the world and into The Old Forge, a reassuringly barn-like edifice housing a surprisingly good bar and restaurant. Shared amongst a large cohort of close friends were: a plate of no-nonsense nachos (feel free to check out some of our other work writing menus for TGI Friday’s and Outback Steakhouse), decently cooked but well adorned burgers, a seven layer dip that was so dense that it could easily find a home at the lower-right-hand corner of the periodic table, massive French fries, and hands-down the best Buffalo wings in the Dartmouth-Cornell corridor. There was a slight misstep in a Duvel Green, which, though refreshing, brought to mind minted, frothy egg whites; but this was quickly rectified with a Weyerbacher Pumpkin Ale. After an extremely frustrating week and exhausting weekend (capped off by an unfortunate collision with the low-hanging ceiling lamp over a dorm lounge pool table), this heavy dose of camaraderie, community, blatant excess and saturated fat was a welcome salve.

The point of all this was to say: no meal should be rote. If you’re eating a bowl of cereal alone at 1:30 in the afternoon, appreciate the things that make that meal unique. Or, if you’re going out to dinner with friends, make it about sharing and creating a moment in its own right. Or, if you’re freebasing ramen powder because it is that odd and awful hour between 2 and 5 when nothing is open and you’re too afraid to go to sleep but too lonely to stay awake, own that experience too.