Last night, I had the best meal of my life, possibly the best meal I will ever eat. Last night, we celebrated K's birthday at The French Laundry.

Both she and I had tried to get reservations before and failed. It's not easy--you have to call two months to the day before you want to go. The phone lines open at 10 a.m. and if you hit redial as many times as possible on as many phones as you have at your disposal, if you're lucky, you might get through to them before 10:30 and snag a reservation at one of their 17 tables. Anyway, K. happened to try again a couple of months ago, and in a birthday miracle, she managed to reserve a table for four! So, yesterday afternoon, she, Matt, Selila and I all headed up to Napa Valley.

We'd all been dying to go forever, and knew a little bit what to expect. I'd heard that the building was inconspicuous, and sure enough, we drove right past it at first. We had a 5:30 p.m. reservation, but traffic wasn't bad and we got there early, 5 p.m. Rather than go elsewhere to kill time, we decided to sit in their garden and bask. We were the first diners there, but could see lots of kitchen- and wait-staff through the windows. I knew that the restaurant was in a former saloon and steam laundry, but really, from both the outside and the inside, it looked like an old farmhouse with a more modern addition on it.

At around 5:10, a woman emerged from the building to greet us, and then she came back again about 10 minutes later with the wine list, which was 60 pages long. To my relief, I saw that it was quite diverse, not just geographically but also financially. There was a $4000 bottle of wine on the menu, but there were some $50 and $60 wines, too, and lots of wines by the glass and half-bottle. And OK, even $50 is more than I'd usually spend on a bottle of wine in a restaurant, but this was French Laundry.

But before we could even seriously discuss wine, they whisked us inside and seated us. We were the first people to be seated, and our table was incredible. The downstairs part of the restaurant had a main dining room, and then a little alcove off to the side. We were seated in the alcove, which only had three tables in it. It looked as though our room was just outside the original outside of the building, because the wall we were seated against was made of stone, and right behind where I was sitting we could peer in a little window and see the wine room. It was like being in a cozy little cave. The tables were set with the restaurant's squat little silverware and our place settings each had a napkin tucked into a laundry pin that had "The French Laundry" printed on it. We all immediately stashed our laundry pins in our bags (actually, Matt tried using his as a tie clip first, but that didn't work out).

Soon after we were seated, another couple was seated in our room and a party of four in the adjacent first-floor dining room. It was very quiet, and we were all a little intimidated, but the staff there was pretty amazingly friendly and non-snooty. The first decision we had to make was what kind of water we wanted. They had bottled waters from Wales and England...and tap water. Not being a big bottled water fan, I suggested the tap water, and K agreed. But when the waited walked away, Matt said we should have gotten the fancy water. "We're at The French Laundry," he said, "when they offer you water from Wales, you take it!" It was a good point, and I agreed, but he said it wasn't a big deal, so we stuck with the plain water.

Luckily, the food was an easy choice for all of us. They give you three basic choices: a five-course menu with a few options for each course, a 9-course chef's tasting menu, and a 9-course vegetarian tasting menu. Being vegetarians, we all went with the vegetarian menu. So now, we were asked to choose the wines. They encouraged us to order all the wine for the entire meal at the beginning, so that the courses could proceed with no interruption and everything would be matched with an appropriate wine.

Seeing as how K was the most knowledgeable about wine out of all of us and also the birthday girl, we made her pick the wine. I didn't envy her the task, given the 60 pages of options, but luckily, the amazing sommelier came to our rescue. First, he asked how many bottles we wanted to drink with dinner. Even this question was difficult for us to answer, though, so when he suggested that we order three bottles, we went with it. Then, we had to decide what kind of wines to get. Again, we wound up going with the sommelier's suggestion of starting with a bottle of champagne, then getting a bottle of white for the middle courses and a bottle of red for the last dinner courses. And then K. had to decide which actual wines to pick. Again, the sommelier was very helpful, asking K questions about what kinds of wines she liked and then making suggestions accordingly. "It was very clever the way he did it," she told us afterward. "When he made suggestions about the champagne, he picked a few in different price ranges, and then after that, all the wines he suggested were in the same basic range." He'd managed to suss out about how much we wanted to spend on wine without actually having to ask.

We ordered our wines, the champagne arrived, and soon afterward, the amuse-bouche arrived. As if the nine courses on the menu weren't enough, they started us off with something not even on the menu. Tiny "ice cream cones" that weren't really ice cream but a tiny scoop of delicious tomato paste and eggplant caviar in a miniature savory cone, with a paper napkin wrapped around each one. And, they informed us that Selila's had been prepared without minced onion (she had told them when ordering that she had an onion allergy, so they allowed her to substitute one of the courses for another cheese course from the 5-course menu). I was so excited! I'd read about the cone concept in A Cook's Tour, in The Soul of a Chef, in The French Laundry Cookbook and now I was eating one and drinking amazing champagne and sitting in a little man-made cave in the Napa Valley. We were all very happy.

The cones were gone in about three bites, and the next course arrived right on its heels. This course set the stage for the rest of the meal--several servers emerged carrying three plates for each of us, and we were all served nearly simultaneously. The first item to hit the table was a large white bowl with a cover on it. I have to admit that I was uncouth and tipped up the lid to peek at what was underneath. "What is it?" Selila whispered to me. We'd all looked at the menu, but it had been too detailed for me to really absorb what anything was, much less remember what was coming when. I'd seen a white almond-shaped dollop in my bowl. "Something creamy," I whispered back to her. When everyone's plates were in place, the servers removed the covers and announced the dish as they spooned the gorgeous, green spinach puree over the almond mousse (the white dollop I'd seen in the bowl). Alongside this were coconut croquettes and a dipping sauce.

I'm going to warn you now that the names I'm going to give things are not the proper names that appeared on the menu. K. and Selila did snag menus and promised to send me a copy, but I wanted to write all this down while it's still fresh in my mind, so my unpoetic descriptions of everything will have to do for now.

The next course was a salad of mushrooms (chanterelles, hen of the woods and something else) and fennel. And then another salad of beets, which our server informed us had been picked from a garden across the street from the restaurant that morning.

At around that time, they brought out our second wine as we started on slightly heartier courses. A beautiful, perfectly-cooked single dome-shaped cauliflower floret over a cheese sauce. A corn cake with molasses sauce served over collard greens. For each course, they brought out a new set of silverware, and when they served the corn cakes, they gave us something that looked like an asymmetrical spatula, but which turned out to be a flattened spoon. To accompany these courses, a server brought out a tray with three types of bread to choose from, and these were served with two different types of butter, one a salted butter from the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company and one a local sweet butter. Two butters! I think we all preferred the Vermont butter, and I was very excited when Selila told me that you can get it at Whole Foods!

As the meal went on, the pace of both our eating and the service slowed gradually. Actually, Selila and I were slacking a little bit in our wine drinking, so when it was time to start on the red, a waiter subtly let us know it by asking if he could take away our half-full glasses of white. We drained our glasses obediently and prepared for the next courses.

It was at this point that I started to get seriously full and as a result, seriously worried. I still had four courses to go! In the car on the way up, Matt had expressed concern about being able to eat a nine-course meal, but I hadn't been too worried. I knew that all of the courses would be extremely tiny, and also that the meal would take a long time (and it did--we ate for about three and a half hours straight). The next dish they brought out was very rich, but I was determined to give it a shot. It was ravioli made from dry-farmed potatoes, which they brought out along with a polished wooden box that resembled a humidor. But instead of cigars, it contained black truffles. K. loves truffles and cheered when our server showed them to us before individually shaving them over each of our plates of ravioli.

Sadly, I was too full to eat more than a few bites of the ravioli, but we were in the home stretch. I was going to make it! The next course was a cheese course of goat cheese, served with a sort of cooked-onion salad with a single pickled pearl onion the size and color of a cranberry and a tiny drizzle of basil-infused olive oil. I wasn't really sure what the oil was supposed to go with (and there were literally only a few drops' worth of it anyway) so I just took my fork and mashed it in the oil and licked it off. I didn't want to miss anything!

After that, we all needed a little break. We walked out into the garden for a stretch. It had gotten dark by now, and a little bit chilly, too. I felt uncomfortably full, but still wanted to keep eating! For the first time in my life, I wanted to be bulimic.

When we sat back down, it was time for the sorbet course--gravenstein apple sorbet, served over a baked apple with apple chips and a sweet yogurt sauce. As if that weren't enough, that was followed by dessert proper: roasted figs served with candied walnuts and a dollop of exquisite mascarpone sorbet over a sort of sugar-cookie type thing. But even there, it didn't stop! On the drive up, K. had mentioned that she'd always wanted to try one of their signature desserts, "coffee and doughnuts," which is cappuccino-flavored semi-freddo served with a brioche cinnamon-sugar "donut" with the donut hole sitting on top. It wasn't on the menu, but when K. got up to go to the bathroom, Matt asked our waiter if he might be able to make it happen. And of course, he could and did and brought out two of them for the table. Like everything else it was exquisite. And still the dessert kept coming. Two vanilla creme brulees for the table, and a pair of panna cottas. And then they brought a plate of macaroons and a tray of fruit gelees, chocolate truffles, and shortbread cookies. I managed to take a bite of almost everything, but that was the best I could do.

And then it was over. We paid (even the check was exquisite--it looked like a giant laundry "ticket" and instead of an itemized bill, it simply listed the charge for food, wine and service, and the total) and then staggered out into the garden and towards the car. And even though we were so full we didn't think we'd ever be able to eat again, I know that personally, all I could think about was when I could come back.

It was an insanely over-the-top extravagant meal. I will be tacky and tell you that the bill came out to $250 a head, which is obviously an astronomical amount to pay for a meal for a single person. But even though I consider myself a fairly frugal person, I thought it was absolutely worth it. It's not that the food was so much more delicious than what I normally eat. There are plenty of inexpensive delicious things to eat--pizza, burritos, peanut butter and jelly...But the craftsmanship of everything was just so astonishing: the tiny details in the food, the amazing and totally non-snooty service, the theatrical presentation. It was equally as theatrical as it was gastronomical. Like Matt said at the beginning of the meal "it's The French Laundry!"

When I got into work this morning, several of my co-workers were clamoring to hear all about it. The French Laundry has a mystique to it that goes beyond the fact that lots of people consider it the best restaurant in the United States or even in the world. I think the thing about it, at least for me, is that even though it's the ultimate food luxury, it's an accessible luxury. Anyone who has a phone can call up and if you try enough times, probability says that you'll eventually get a reservation. Maybe it sounds a little out of touch to say that anyone can afford a $250 meal, and it is a lot of money, but not more than most people routinely spend on clothes or jewelry or flashy cars or other non-essential luxuries we afford ourselves.

Anyway, it was every bit as amazing as I expected. If you're ever in the area, you should go.