Time and place affect taste.

There is no doubt that, objective as we may try to be, many non-taste factors, such as the time and place we eat something, affect our judgment of how food tastes. I thought this passage from the recent N.Y.Times article on BBQ in the City on target:

"But beyond rushed openings and the swift and occasionally intemperate judgment of the dining public, the people behind the new wave of barbecue places feel a bigger challenge. They are almost unanimous in citing nostalgia, in one guise or another, as their chief competitor."

"Every New York pit master I spoke with made a hypothetical example out of some food - pizza, hot dogs, bagels - and conjectured that given the same ingredients, prepared the same way, someone eating it in the hills of central Texas wouldn't feel the same about it as in the heart of Times Square."

"Jeffrey Steingarten, certainly among the most fastidious and assured food writers, recalls in the introduction to "Peace, Love & Barbecue" that he had a "very, very good" pulled pork sandwich at the Big "S" Grill in Memphis, which he describes as "a tumbledown house next to the railroad tracks." He continues, "Whether I would still remember it as the best pulled pork sandwich I've ever eaten if I had encountered it at a slick New York restaurant, I cannot say.""

Jonah