O Prato do Dia

I've been planning to write a treatise on "plate of the day", a southern European fixture that I've only come to fully undertstand since moving to nineteenth century Portugal.

But in my latest photo essay summarizing the past week's ingestion (here's a grand index of all previous to this latest), I managed to boil it down to eight paragraphs, including, la-dee-da, a sweeping history of dining, generally. For full context plus photos, see the first link, above.


I'm an exponent of soulful grandma cooking, but too much of anything provokes cravings for the opposite thing. So I booked a table at the fanciest place in town, hoping for a refined touch, step-up ingredients, and some creativity.

"Sóce by Mauro Loureiro" is like a real restaurant restaurant, and I can't explain the significance without a comically hasty journey back to the dawn of dining.

Restaurants started when one villager took it upon her/himself to venture out into the fields or the mines or the mountains to feed workers who didn't have time to get home for their midday meal. The hearty one-pot offering — rotating daily to stave off boredom — cost mere pennies, sufficient to reimburse ingredients and keep a roof over the head of the cook's family.

It all developed and refined from there, except here in Setúbal, where anonymous little joints still serve sturdy, rotating lunches for pennies to local workers. They look like restaurants, and seem like restaurants, but it's more medieval/communal. None of the standard restaurant smoke and mirrors, for good or for bad. No aim to DELIGHT — any delight is strictly incidental, though also commonplace. The same hyper-local crowd goes every day, and couldn't imagine eating elsewhere, because their families patronized the same lunchpot practically since the fields, mines, and mountains.

"Daily plate" lunch is a staple offering all over southern Europe, but only here do you feel the roots of the tradition. It's not a capitalistic enterprise. You're not a consumer, you're a cog being nourished per civic duty, and your restaurateur dutifully accepts grinding poverty to serve this critical role.

This ain't no Zagat shit.

A real restaurant would be an oddity here, and they arise through a twisty route. The daily plate lunch places can't charge much more than around 10€ for a complete lunch, severely limiting profitability. But some folks glimpse fancy lifestyles on TV and develop aspirations. They can only bust through the 10€ barrier by laying it on thick — everything shiny, pretentious, and presented with smug flourish.

This parallels the 19th century development of "French Cuisine", where ways were found to justify charging real money for what had always been a commodity, if not a human right. But the French provided meticulous quality amid the flamboyant gestures, while, hereabouts, it's mostly just gestures.

But, hey, I thought I'd give it a shot.


An epilogue to this posting for chowhounds: "Chowhounding the Prato Do Dia"

Index to a series of photo essays of non-aspirational local lunches: "Non-Aspirational Lunches"