CONTRARY TO POPULAR belief, a restaurant critic's life is not an endless cascade of fantastic meals. Mostly, it's a lot of copycat salmon, arugula salad bitter as remorse, panna cotta moon white and jiggly. You can't predict when a dish will jump out at you, so much so that you'll go back for it again and again, try to re-create it at home, buy the restaurant's cookbook, or simply file it in the pantheon of personal epiphanies. I still hope that someday Bay Wolf will bring back an autumn special of buckwheat ravioli filled with goat cheese, the nutty pillows smothered with beets and walnuts. I muse over the lemongrass and coconut mussels at Oakland's otherwise Italian-ish Spettro, which made me want to get down on all fours and lick the bowl like a dog. I'll never be able to reproduce the ethereal turnip soup at the Martini House in St. Helena, which captured the essence of winter in an earthy froth. My pizza will never have the perfect, oily crunch of Arizmendi's sourdough pizza crust.

Now that September's here, and with it, the long-awaited, basking heat of the season, I've been dreaming about the most flavor-drenched, sweet-salty foods I can find. Ravishingly multihued tomatoes, swinging from suave to acid and back again. Intensely perfumed melons, deep orange and yellow, begging for lime. The swift crunch of a knife going through the green skin of the coldest, ruby-hearted watermelon. A watermelon agua fresca at La Taqueria, pulling the sandy bits of melon up through a straw in between bites of a veggie taco with extra tomatillo sauce and a hefty slather of avocado. Melons are the true beauties of late summer, holding all the season's musky heat in their sunset-colored, dripping flesh. Everyone goes on and on about the beauty of figs, their sexy plumpness, their sticky, seed-crunched pulp. And yes, they're nice. But there's no tang to a fig, no snap of acid to pique your appetite. It's the same with white peaches: delectable, but not piquant. And in summer, piquant is what you need, something that rolls like a breeze over your tongue. Ceviche, gazpacho, lemonade, the tangy brine of seafood. I'm still charmed by a salad I had at the Chickenbone Cafe, on a hot July night in Brooklyn. The chef, who'd trained at the French Laundry, built a crisscross stack of watermelon batons topped with whorls of grilled squid. Interspersed were frilled shreds of mint and cilantro, salty bits of feta, and down at the bottom, tiny, tiny sweet-sour cubes of pickled watermelon rind. It was delicious, and also witty: watermelon two ways, both of them unexpected.

Melon – watermelon especially – goes better with salt and savory than you might expect. With something salty, and something hot, and something savory (what the flavor experts call umami, the Japanese term for the sort of savoriness you find in soy sauce or Parmesan cheese), you can fill out almost the whole flavor pantheon in one dish. And the heat doesn't have to come from pepper: the bite of a red onion will work, in a Greek-style salad of watermelon, onion, and feta drizzled with olive oil and showered with mint. Or the classic, unbeatable combination of ripe cantaloupe and sheer slices of prosciutto. Grilled or boiled shrimp on skewers with cubes of pale green honeydew, dunked in lime juice and sprinkled with red pepper. But my favorite melon salad ever comes from a dish I've had – and had again, whenever I could – at Ponzu. Asian fusion is a tricky genre; go too authentic and you'll leave your clientele wondering why they didn't just keep walking up Eddy Street for the same thing at a Formica table for half the price; go too Western and you miss the point. At Ponzu, though, the Bangkok melon salad (originated by former executive chef John Beardsley, now at Le Colonial) is something I'd eat all summer long. At a dinner with a friend a couple of years ago, we ordered one as an appetizer, and then, at the end of the meal, another one as dessert: full circle, as round as a melon, and both times we ate the whole thing.

Bangkok Melon Salad

1/4 cup water

1/2 cup sugar

2 tsp grated fresh ginger

1 stalk lemongrass, finely chopped

2 kaffir lime leaves, thinly sliced (or grated zest of 1 lime)

1/2 cup each lemon juice, lime juice, and Vietnamese fish sauce

1 fresh red chile, minced

1 lb each cantaloupe and honeydew, peeled and cubed

1/2 a small watermelon, peeled and diced

1/2 bunch Thai basil leaves

grated zest of 1 lemon

1/2 cup toasted, chopped peanuts