There is a restaurant in New York City where the bread tastes like it came from the "price reduced for quick sale" shelf of a supermarket and the salad dressing recalls something you might put on a sunburn. The menu is a confounding hybrid of nouvelle cuisine (beet Napoleon), country club stalwarts (shrimp cocktail), and fusion experiments (filet of tuna is marinated "in an Asian manner", grilled, then "painted with two mustards"), all so redolent of the late 1980s you expect the salmon to arrive wearing a knit tie, popped collar, and pastel linen jacket with the sleeves rolled. The safest bet is the French fries, which are salty, crisp, and hot.

To go there for the food is entirely beside the point. You go there for the friendly, arch-yet-chummy waiters (tell one you want a certain glass of wine, and he may respond, 'oh no you don’t'); the hostess who makes you feel like a regular after you've been there three times; the shelves of books, more than a few of which were written by the real regulars, a few of whom you may spot sitting at the bar; the utter lack of pretension or hype; and the feeling that you're in one of the last few bastions of slightly shabby and therefore all-the-more-glamorous intellectual life in the city. (All of which you feel most strongly, and sentimentally, after one or two of the unapologetically strong cocktails.)

I don’t know if the food writer and editor Colman Andrews has been to this restaurant, but I suspect if he has, he loves it. Maybe he loves it so much he intentionally kept it out of his new memoir, My Usual Table. The only New York restaurant he writes about at length is Eleven Madison Park, where the bread assuredly has never seen the inside of a cellophane wrapper. Many other impeccably pedigreed houses of food worship get name-checked as well. But what makes Andrews’s book so delightful, and so bracing, is not the description of his transcendent experience at El Bulli in Spain, or the carrot he ate in France that was "perhaps the most perfect thing" he ever tasted. It’s the places that serve passable, mediocre, or even occasionally bad food yet remain good, even great restaurants that make this book both rare and delicious.

Too often food writing, especially food memoirs, are written as though the author has traveled through life with a golden tongue and rhinestone stomach. Each meal, described in course-by-course detail, is more perfect, more transporting, than the last. When food is bad, it is only noted to underscore an otherwise unpleasant experience: a terrible first job where the chef was a tyrant, it rained 300 days of the year, and the cream of asparagus soup came from industrial-sized vats. But when life is good, the butter is always sweet, the chicken is roasted to perfection, the lemon tart brings tears to the eyes. It is all in exceedingly good taste.

In life, however, what we taste with our mouths doesn’t always align with what we feel in our hearts, and its possible to have a meal of gummy pasta, overcooked scallops, cold burnt coffee, and yet consider it one of the happiest gustatory experiences of your life. Andrews understands this, and the first half of his book is devoted to restaurants where the food was far from the main attraction. He starts with Chasen’s, a Hollywood institution he frequented with his parents where the star dish was something called "hobo steak," and where the menu also featured chicken tetrazzini, parmesan cheese toast, and, of course, shrimp cocktail. "The truth is that as I gained experience of food and became an avid, and critical, restaurant goer on my own, I came to realize that Chasen’s was not a paragon of the culinary arts," he confesses. "But I also came to realize that that didn't matter one bit – that a restaurant could please you, and even nourish you, in more ways than one."

Among the restaurants that nourished Andrews was Trader Vic’s, an ersatz Polynesia emporium where the hula party décor, the high octane cocktails, and the crowd-pleasing "pupu platter" made it easy to ignore the fact that none of it was authentic to any nation, South Seas or otherwise ("as much as I loved (the chef’s) crab Rangoon, I sincerely doubt that any Burmese cook ever wrapped crabmeat and cream cheese in a wonton skin and deep-fried it.") At El Coyote Café, the margaritas were spiked with pineapple juice and Andrews’s standard order included a "soggy meat-stuffed rolled tortilla resting in a soupy lake of melted cheese and mildly spiced brown sauce." And at Ports, "an unassuming if eventually legendary restaurant" Andrews devoured countless albondigas en chipotle -- a dubious-sounding dish of meatballs in chile sauce topped with melted cheese. Andrews liked to eat the cheese off the top, then send the denuded balls back to the kitchen for another cheese blanket. The night his father died he sought solace at Ports, where he sent the meatballs back for two additional cheesings: "I couldn’t think of what else to do."

Once the writer became a food professional the cuisine became more haute -- while editor at Saveur his ‘diet lunch’ was "half a dozen oysters followed by (chef Kerry Heffernan’s) oxtail and foie gras terrine." He traveled the world, swallowing one rarified, superlative meal after another, eating at the molecular gastronomy temple El Bulli half a dozen times and rarely pausing to digest lunch before diving into dinner. All this is quite entertaining, but it is the descriptions of the forgettable meals at the unforgettable, life-shaping restaurants that leave the best taste.