When compiling this annual list of great tastes, it’s my custom to riffle through notebooks and stacks of menus. The hope is that, by way of cribbed impressions and sundry sauce stains, I rewire, if only briefly, the synapses that connect my palate and my brain.

This time out, however, I stayed away from the note- and menu-stuffed filing cabinet and relied solely on my memory. I figured if I spent a week spinning through recollections of meals past, true greatness would eventually emerge.

I was right. In fits and starts at first, then in torrents, memories of meals past came floating gauzily through my head. And soon the wheat and the chaff were separating as they should, and a pantheon of splendid eats began to emerge from the haze. What follows is a roster of the 2008 tastes that haunt me. And they are the tastes that will haunt you in 2009.

Bites

Hodo Soy Yuba-Spinach Raviolo
Coi
373 Broadway San Francisco
415.393.9000
coirestaurant.com

Coi (pronounced kwah) is a French word that translates as something like tranquil. The name is fey. And so is the suggestion that you might enjoy dabbing a bit of the house fragrance on your wrist as you eat. Only in San Francisco, you say dismissively. And then the food comes.

Daniel Patterson is a sensualist of the highest order. The sort of chef who stakes his reputation on an opening course of pink grapefruit mousse with ginger, tarragon, and black pepper. The sort of chef who lets fly a free-form raviolo, built around ethereal sheets of yuba (also known as tofu skin) stuffed with a tofu-spinach smash. The plate comes scattered with buds of purslane. The whole affair is entangled in strips of pink pickled turnip. The crowd, at least the two at my table, roars with approval.