Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Situational Awareness
A few weeks after I returned from a week performing in Switzerland with my guitarist friend Teddy Barlocher, I received terrible news. Bicycling in the mountains near Berne, Teddy had come across a horrific accident. He stopped to help, and, in the confusion, lost his situational awareness and was struck and killed by a passing car.
The tale baked a lesson into me: when things go wrong, I go the other way. Like learning to steer into skids, I've conditioned myself to anti-panic. I pay attention and get hyper-rational. I swiftly process (reframe!) the surprising circumstance, and calmly widen my perceptions to register conditions. At such junctures, the hallway of my apartment or some park bench become like railroad crossings. Even without hair-raising horn blasts from passing locomotives, I won't scamper across tracks without having paid cautious attention.
Everyone knows accidents come in threes, and it's because the first surprise stuns us, making us susceptible to the second surprise, and, just when the horror and the irony register, along comes surprise number three. I'm vigilant to this. While I can't bring back Teddy, I have learned from his mistake.
So when everyone starts freaking and flocking, I remain grounded. "Stop, look, and listen." And as a result, I notice things. Sometimes much broader things. Things other people miss.
In NYC on 9/11, as I knuckled down and plotted my course, I was able to contextualize from within the moment. I realized that history would fail to capture the truth. We'd remember buildings falling, but that was just the nucleus. Ten million people were in deep trauma not just from the event, but from the enormous and insidious uncertainty, which history wouldn't record. The event would be remembered as a tale of buildings collapsing, a tragedy dwarfed by cumulative weeks, months, and even years of subsequent uncertainty for multitudes. Just because nothing else happened didn't mean nothing else happened.
For months afterwards, I ventured into Manhattan with transistor radio and (small) flashlight. I did this because Teddy had died from lack of situational awareness, and because of the uncertainty.
But the same situational awareness reinforces my gratitude that the other shoe never dropped. I never stopped noticing this, or celebrating this, while noting that I was right about history: on September 11, buildings collapsed and everyone was sad, the end.
Yesterday I woke up and turned on my lamp. Nothing. My apartment sometimes flips its circuit breaker, but, no, it checked ok. I opened my door, and the hallway light was out. So it was the whole building. I threw on slippers and walked outside, and the corner grocery was dark. I shuffled around the city, which was, yikes, entirely dark. Passing policemen gravely shrugged off my questions. No idea.
Word filtered down that a big chunk of Europe was dark. This wasn't a problem for my apartment, my building, my block, my town, or my country, but for my entire continent. That's very science-fictiony. A "fresh feeling", as the feminine hygiene ads phrase it.
It seemed most likely that it was a hack of the electric grid, which pointed to Russia (North Korea had no motive and China's too invested in markets to grind them to a halt). Perhaps they had information that the EU was about to radically upscale Ukraine aid. Who knows. But Putin's name was being spit in the streets.
Strolling around town, formulating my plan, I watched panic form in real time. I scored some of the last bottled water in town (the Bangladeshi grocery had declined to gouge the pricing, so I'll stay loyal to them forever) and somehow hustled the case home with damaged arthritic shoulders (it's amazing what you can achieve with ample rest stops and patience).
Everyone was waking up to the realization that they had no more than 24-48 hours' worth of food, and supermarkets were closed, and our water system is fragile. The municipal water treatment was surely offline, and even if we were lucky enough for murky water service to continue, we couldn't boil it, because most have electric stoves.
I asked my building manager if the little girl downstairs would be ok, and whether I should pitch in my extra milk. He reassured me in that empty, baseless, stubborn Portuguese way. It occurred to me to warn him about the water issue, which no one else was considering (thanks, Teddy!). If he has a gas stove, he ought to boil his water before drinking. But he pretended not to understand.
Like most, I went to bed at 8:30pm. Hoping to read myself to sleep, I promptly dropped and broke my only flashlight. And my sleep was disturbed by the prospect of a dodgy food supply on my already problematic stomach. But I took solace in recognizing that 24 years untouched by terrorism was an awfully generous run, all considered.
Then the lights suddenly came back on. And I knew it would be tough to make anyone understand that it wasn't just the lights going out. History records the events, not the uncertainty.
Looking back, a lot of this represented the sort of self-story-telling I constantly warn against. I was conjuring froth, then suffering from conjured froth. After all, I didn't know it was terrorism, or Putin. And I didn't need to link it to 9/11 and make it a part of some tragic larger story. While I was likely the calmest person in town, I have to concede that I fluttered.
But the thing about this world, with all its touchy drama, is that everyone gets caught sometimes. There are moments when traumas line up and even a highly equanimous yogi is punked by the passing yadda-yadda. What matters—all that really matters—is how quickly we recover perspective. It doesn't require the lights returning. Just the recognition that bumpy rides are, indeed, rides, and we paid to ride this rollercoaster.
Even with power coming back, it can be hard to restore equanimity. Our facility for post-suffering exceeds even our tremendous pre-suffering.
Postscript: Don't just grab the most inviting string—"9/11 was bad" or "What would I do in a blackout" or "Don't imagine you can rely on the nice guy". There's more to consider. Even when you're placing yourself in such circumstances hypothetically, you'd honor Teddy by aiming for the broadest situational awareness.
The tale baked a lesson into me: when things go wrong, I go the other way. Like learning to steer into skids, I've conditioned myself to anti-panic. I pay attention and get hyper-rational. I swiftly process (reframe!) the surprising circumstance, and calmly widen my perceptions to register conditions. At such junctures, the hallway of my apartment or some park bench become like railroad crossings. Even without hair-raising horn blasts from passing locomotives, I won't scamper across tracks without having paid cautious attention.
Everyone knows accidents come in threes, and it's because the first surprise stuns us, making us susceptible to the second surprise, and, just when the horror and the irony register, along comes surprise number three. I'm vigilant to this. While I can't bring back Teddy, I have learned from his mistake.
So when everyone starts freaking and flocking, I remain grounded. "Stop, look, and listen." And as a result, I notice things. Sometimes much broader things. Things other people miss.
In NYC on 9/11, as I knuckled down and plotted my course, I was able to contextualize from within the moment. I realized that history would fail to capture the truth. We'd remember buildings falling, but that was just the nucleus. Ten million people were in deep trauma not just from the event, but from the enormous and insidious uncertainty, which history wouldn't record. The event would be remembered as a tale of buildings collapsing, a tragedy dwarfed by cumulative weeks, months, and even years of subsequent uncertainty for multitudes. Just because nothing else happened didn't mean nothing else happened.
For months afterwards, I ventured into Manhattan with transistor radio and (small) flashlight. I did this because Teddy had died from lack of situational awareness, and because of the uncertainty.
But the same situational awareness reinforces my gratitude that the other shoe never dropped. I never stopped noticing this, or celebrating this, while noting that I was right about history: on September 11, buildings collapsed and everyone was sad, the end.
Yesterday I woke up and turned on my lamp. Nothing. My apartment sometimes flips its circuit breaker, but, no, it checked ok. I opened my door, and the hallway light was out. So it was the whole building. I threw on slippers and walked outside, and the corner grocery was dark. I shuffled around the city, which was, yikes, entirely dark. Passing policemen gravely shrugged off my questions. No idea.
Word filtered down that a big chunk of Europe was dark. This wasn't a problem for my apartment, my building, my block, my town, or my country, but for my entire continent. That's very science-fictiony. A "fresh feeling", as the feminine hygiene ads phrase it.
It seemed most likely that it was a hack of the electric grid, which pointed to Russia (North Korea had no motive and China's too invested in markets to grind them to a halt). Perhaps they had information that the EU was about to radically upscale Ukraine aid. Who knows. But Putin's name was being spit in the streets.
Strolling around town, formulating my plan, I watched panic form in real time. I scored some of the last bottled water in town (the Bangladeshi grocery had declined to gouge the pricing, so I'll stay loyal to them forever) and somehow hustled the case home with damaged arthritic shoulders (it's amazing what you can achieve with ample rest stops and patience).
Everyone was waking up to the realization that they had no more than 24-48 hours' worth of food, and supermarkets were closed, and our water system is fragile. The municipal water treatment was surely offline, and even if we were lucky enough for murky water service to continue, we couldn't boil it, because most have electric stoves.
I asked my building manager if the little girl downstairs would be ok, and whether I should pitch in my extra milk. He reassured me in that empty, baseless, stubborn Portuguese way. It occurred to me to warn him about the water issue, which no one else was considering (thanks, Teddy!). If he has a gas stove, he ought to boil his water before drinking. But he pretended not to understand.
Later I realized he did not want to confess that he did, in fact, have a gas stove, because it might have led to requests for food-sharing. This is a twinkly, smiley, pleasant gentleman with solid eye contact and gentle manner. The nicest of nice guys (for more on nice guys, read this).Desperate for news, I drove around seeking mobile internet, on the theory that perhaps the 'net wasn't down, but merely over-accessed. But even in the boonies, there was nothing.
Like most, I went to bed at 8:30pm. Hoping to read myself to sleep, I promptly dropped and broke my only flashlight. And my sleep was disturbed by the prospect of a dodgy food supply on my already problematic stomach. But I took solace in recognizing that 24 years untouched by terrorism was an awfully generous run, all considered.
Then the lights suddenly came back on. And I knew it would be tough to make anyone understand that it wasn't just the lights going out. History records the events, not the uncertainty.
Looking back, a lot of this represented the sort of self-story-telling I constantly warn against. I was conjuring froth, then suffering from conjured froth. After all, I didn't know it was terrorism, or Putin. And I didn't need to link it to 9/11 and make it a part of some tragic larger story. While I was likely the calmest person in town, I have to concede that I fluttered.
But the thing about this world, with all its touchy drama, is that everyone gets caught sometimes. There are moments when traumas line up and even a highly equanimous yogi is punked by the passing yadda-yadda. What matters—all that really matters—is how quickly we recover perspective. It doesn't require the lights returning. Just the recognition that bumpy rides are, indeed, rides, and we paid to ride this rollercoaster.
Even with power coming back, it can be hard to restore equanimity. Our facility for post-suffering exceeds even our tremendous pre-suffering.
Postscript: Don't just grab the most inviting string—"9/11 was bad" or "What would I do in a blackout" or "Don't imagine you can rely on the nice guy". There's more to consider. Even when you're placing yourself in such circumstances hypothetically, you'd honor Teddy by aiming for the broadest situational awareness.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
The Day They Perfect AI
I asked ChatGPT for advice on painting my TV room. It fluently advised six paint colors that would look smashing, and twelve contrasting colors to make one of the walls "pop". So fluent! So expert!
It offered to produce a photo of the room with the new colors, and it botched it, but, hey, that's to be expected. Image stuff is still hard, and getting better. But I figured I could work out the final look on my end, after compiling all this savvy advice. So I went down the line, searching for info on the recommended colors and, whoops, almost none of them actually exist.
ChatGPT apologized profusely. I found colors with similar names, asking "was that what you meant?" and it immediately and unconvincingly agreed. "Oh, yes. Definitely! That's the one!" Tapdancing and bullshitting.
Some might say this shows that chatbots just aren't "there" yet. But that's incorrect. They are right "there." Because this is how humans behave, and we want chatbots to be like humans. That was the remit, and it happened, and everyone's weirdly upset about it.
What about a professional painter? Ask one for color advice, and he'll laboriously call up a blurry photo on his cracked iPhone of his last customer's living room. She was pretty happy with Elysian Fresco in her craptastic den with the singing fish on the walls and the vinyl couch covers. Useless!
Hire a decorator (does anyone actually do this?) and you'll be steered to a $1500/gallon gourmet tint available only from Monsieur Frederick Paint Boutique, which kicks back to her. Ask friends, and you'll discover what crap taste your friends have. They'll forget which room you meant, will answer you while half-buzzed, and likely suggest the colors from their rec rooms growing up. Useless!
Humans fuck up everything in every way (ever heard of Murphy's Law?), one of the few exceptions being doctors. Doctors can be incredibly wrong much of the time—because they're human— but they do have one superpower: they mostly won't kill you. And the training, steadiness, and brainpower required to produce this person who mostly won't kill you values them at many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Perhaps millions. That's the high bar of human competence.
Also: aircraft mechanics. They'll make plenty of mistakes, but they mostly won't mangle your plane in a way that will kill you. That's why it costs huge sums to hire them to so much as swap out a windshield wiper.
Here's why we get so piqued over chatbot glitches: everyone presupposes that they're fancier computers. And computers, running along firm rails according to painstaking instructions, have no trouble spitting out consistently crisp, correct and on-target work. But chatbots are not computers any more than Beyonce is a set of headphones. Chatbots are ghosts in the machine—operating ad hoc and in the moment—not the machine itself.
And we asked for this! For years, we sought an artificial intelligence that could pass a Turing Test, fooling us into thinking it's human. And we got it. Like humans, they fuck up every way till Tuesday, because, like us, they are not computers. Like humans, they are wavery thought streams, easily distracted, often misapprehending, constantly mis-framing, and generally frigging random. Glory be, we've created synthetic intelligence in our own image.
And this is how it must be. Awareness wavers and fogs. That's an intrinsic part of awareness. Intelligence sometimes exhibits stupidity. Un-intelligent things never act stupid...and unaware entities never fog. These problems are the exclusive—and inevitable—domain of intelligent, aware entities.
So the day they finally "perfect" AI, we'll all breathlessy enjoy the fabulous steady reliability of the re-introduced TRS-80 microcomputer, able to calculate and categorize and edit images and words with infallible accuracy, and without any iota of fog, stupidity, or misapprehension!
And then we'll immediately go back to wishing it was aware.
It offered to produce a photo of the room with the new colors, and it botched it, but, hey, that's to be expected. Image stuff is still hard, and getting better. But I figured I could work out the final look on my end, after compiling all this savvy advice. So I went down the line, searching for info on the recommended colors and, whoops, almost none of them actually exist.
ChatGPT apologized profusely. I found colors with similar names, asking "was that what you meant?" and it immediately and unconvincingly agreed. "Oh, yes. Definitely! That's the one!" Tapdancing and bullshitting.
Some might say this shows that chatbots just aren't "there" yet. But that's incorrect. They are right "there." Because this is how humans behave, and we want chatbots to be like humans. That was the remit, and it happened, and everyone's weirdly upset about it.
Are they useless? Sure, insofar as an infinitely fast-thinking awareness that knows literally everything and eagerly and imperfectly engages without ego, drama or neediness is "useless". Me, I can find a couple billion use cases for that.Forget your imaginary cartoon view of how life goes. Un-suspend disbelief and behold the truth: humans fuck up everything all the time. We tap dance and bullshit. If you have an intern choose paint colors, what are the odds it would be exactly what you need? Are the odds not toweringly high that you'd be handed something maddeningly wrong and entirely useless? That you'd need to follow-up, correct, encourage, push, and ultimately throw it all into the garbage?
What about a professional painter? Ask one for color advice, and he'll laboriously call up a blurry photo on his cracked iPhone of his last customer's living room. She was pretty happy with Elysian Fresco in her craptastic den with the singing fish on the walls and the vinyl couch covers. Useless!
Hire a decorator (does anyone actually do this?) and you'll be steered to a $1500/gallon gourmet tint available only from Monsieur Frederick Paint Boutique, which kicks back to her. Ask friends, and you'll discover what crap taste your friends have. They'll forget which room you meant, will answer you while half-buzzed, and likely suggest the colors from their rec rooms growing up. Useless!
Humans fuck up everything in every way (ever heard of Murphy's Law?), one of the few exceptions being doctors. Doctors can be incredibly wrong much of the time—because they're human— but they do have one superpower: they mostly won't kill you. And the training, steadiness, and brainpower required to produce this person who mostly won't kill you values them at many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Perhaps millions. That's the high bar of human competence.
Also: aircraft mechanics. They'll make plenty of mistakes, but they mostly won't mangle your plane in a way that will kill you. That's why it costs huge sums to hire them to so much as swap out a windshield wiper.
Here's why we get so piqued over chatbot glitches: everyone presupposes that they're fancier computers. And computers, running along firm rails according to painstaking instructions, have no trouble spitting out consistently crisp, correct and on-target work. But chatbots are not computers any more than Beyonce is a set of headphones. Chatbots are ghosts in the machine—operating ad hoc and in the moment—not the machine itself.
And we asked for this! For years, we sought an artificial intelligence that could pass a Turing Test, fooling us into thinking it's human. And we got it. Like humans, they fuck up every way till Tuesday, because, like us, they are not computers. Like humans, they are wavery thought streams, easily distracted, often misapprehending, constantly mis-framing, and generally frigging random. Glory be, we've created synthetic intelligence in our own image.
And this is how it must be. Awareness wavers and fogs. That's an intrinsic part of awareness. Intelligence sometimes exhibits stupidity. Un-intelligent things never act stupid...and unaware entities never fog. These problems are the exclusive—and inevitable—domain of intelligent, aware entities.
So the day they finally "perfect" AI, we'll all breathlessy enjoy the fabulous steady reliability of the re-introduced TRS-80 microcomputer, able to calculate and categorize and edit images and words with infallible accuracy, and without any iota of fog, stupidity, or misapprehension!
And then we'll immediately go back to wishing it was aware.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Humanity's Kidney Stone
Below are four wildly varying examples of a dysfunction that's become like a kidney stone humanity seems unable to pass. We are obliviously unable to recognize—much less diagnose or resolve—this cognitive problem.
In short: our intelligence has become dangerously clumpy. We are towering geniuses when it comes to Them, and blindly yammering morons when it comes to Us.
Matched Set
There are two toxic, flamboyantly unreasonable women in my life who are like colicky toddlers wearing the glittering crowns of haughty queens. Naturally, they hate each other.
Like all maladjusted children, they've learned to rage to get what they want, which they do frequently because nothing else is real for them. The rest of us out here exist solely to assist or impede the getting of what-they-want.
Having exhausted their surrounding ecosystems, they rarely get what they want. But that's lucky for them, because their desires are uniformly stupid. Delusional superiority long ago smothered any facility for learning (learning requires the acknowledgement of deficiency), ensuring a remarkably consistent level of stupidity.
Yet each could sketch a shrewd and detailed profile of the other. In this one field of knowledge—exegesis of the hated—both are brilliant scholars.
Middle East
Talk to any Israeli and you will hear a long litany of Palestinian atrocities. But any Palestinian could offer an equally horrifying litany of Israeli atrocities.
Shrewdly expert in the moral deficiencies of the Other, each side clutches grievances to justify ever more repugnant behavior as they climb symmetrical ladders of barbarity.
MAGA
America's extremists on both the left and right are cartoonishly repugnant. For a clear-eyed accounting and explanation, just ask the other sides. Unless you're perched directly on the precarious center line, one account will have the ring of deep truth while the other seems like caustic lies.
Moderates reserve their most lavish contempt for moderate counterparts on the other side. How can they so blindly excuse their tribe's extremists? Vision is hyperacute in one direction, and entirely blurry the other way.
Leff's Dictum
Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant.
Every profound insight translates, upsettingly, into some impossibly banal cliché. If "Two wrongs don't make a right!" still had some juice to it, I wouldn't need to write this.
In short: our intelligence has become dangerously clumpy. We are towering geniuses when it comes to Them, and blindly yammering morons when it comes to Us.
There are two toxic, flamboyantly unreasonable women in my life who are like colicky toddlers wearing the glittering crowns of haughty queens. Naturally, they hate each other.
Like all maladjusted children, they've learned to rage to get what they want, which they do frequently because nothing else is real for them. The rest of us out here exist solely to assist or impede the getting of what-they-want.
Having exhausted their surrounding ecosystems, they rarely get what they want. But that's lucky for them, because their desires are uniformly stupid. Delusional superiority long ago smothered any facility for learning (learning requires the acknowledgement of deficiency), ensuring a remarkably consistent level of stupidity.
Yet each could sketch a shrewd and detailed profile of the other. In this one field of knowledge—exegesis of the hated—both are brilliant scholars.
Talk to any Israeli and you will hear a long litany of Palestinian atrocities. But any Palestinian could offer an equally horrifying litany of Israeli atrocities.
Shrewdly expert in the moral deficiencies of the Other, each side clutches grievances to justify ever more repugnant behavior as they climb symmetrical ladders of barbarity.
America's extremists on both the left and right are cartoonishly repugnant. For a clear-eyed accounting and explanation, just ask the other sides. Unless you're perched directly on the precarious center line, one account will have the ring of deep truth while the other seems like caustic lies.
Moderates reserve their most lavish contempt for moderate counterparts on the other side. How can they so blindly excuse their tribe's extremists? Vision is hyperacute in one direction, and entirely blurry the other way.
Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant.
Every profound insight translates, upsettingly, into some impossibly banal cliché. If "Two wrongs don't make a right!" still had some juice to it, I wouldn't need to write this.
Friday, April 18, 2025
Framing
It's what you do to the world, which completely changes according to your shifts of perspective.
Framing is contagious. We adopt the perspective of those we pay attention to. Conformity is most obvious in our appearance and behavior, but it stems from adopting a prevalent framing.
Framing is entirely volitional, though we forget our freedom. We have eternally owned our own perspective, which is not driven by circumstance (you've seen countless happy poor people and miserable rich people). We can effortlessly opt in or out of a given framing. It's entirely up to us.
Framing is like a smart phone feature you forgot about.
Framing underpins and explains absolutely everything.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples
Pastel de nata is for tourists. Head into the side streets, to the lunch counters where limping pensioners feast for pennies (I've been covering them on Facebook, per this constantly updating list), and it's all about the baked apples.
And so I proudly offer, as a downloadable PDF photo book, "A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples"
And so I proudly offer, as a downloadable PDF photo book, "A Treasury of Selected Recent Baked Apples"
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Reframing Alcoholism
I spend a lot of time explaining about framing, but not enough time giving real world examples. This isn't navel-gazing Eastern MYSTICISM. This is the key to happiness, to change and growth and learning. It's the key to everything.
Want to be The Messiah? Framing is the only way. Want to escape depression? Depression's when your perpsective (same as "framing") gets stuck. Want to see your family and friends stroll out of a funeral 3000% happier without even noticing what happened, like by magic? Framing! Want to talk meaningfully to someone on the opposite side of the political divide? Framing!
You can't persuade or help anyone by pushing opinions or facts at them, or by arguing with them. But you can kindle reframing. that you can do. It's within your power. It requires effort and polish and deep empathy, and you must bake fresh to ensure a custom-tailored result, but it can help powerfully.
I recently sent the following to an alcoholic friend:
Want to be The Messiah? Framing is the only way. Want to escape depression? Depression's when your perpsective (same as "framing") gets stuck. Want to see your family and friends stroll out of a funeral 3000% happier without even noticing what happened, like by magic? Framing! Want to talk meaningfully to someone on the opposite side of the political divide? Framing!
You can't persuade or help anyone by pushing opinions or facts at them, or by arguing with them. But you can kindle reframing. that you can do. It's within your power. It requires effort and polish and deep empathy, and you must bake fresh to ensure a custom-tailored result, but it can help powerfully.
I recently sent the following to an alcoholic friend:
I'm not a temperance guy. If you want to fuck yourself up, I don't judge (though at a certain point I'd imagine it would get boring for you). But here's the thing: putting yourself in that condition is how you say "No!" to the universe. "No, I don't want to perceive you clearly and soberly", and "No, I don't want to contribute helpfully or coherently". That's what drunks and addicts do. That's the mindset. It's a denial of what's going on (and the problem from out here is that we're the universe, so you're saying "No" to all of us, even as you eagerly try to connect and contribute). It doesn’t feel like a party to us out here when you’re slobbering. I'm not sure you get this.
But you don't actually have this “No" mindset. There’s stuff in the world that bugs you, and makes you anxious, but, more deeply, you're someone who lives to express, comprehend, and connect. And those are all sober functions. That's not drunk stuff, it's the opposite of that. Those things are about saying "Yes" to the universe, and they all require mental clarity. So you are, by nature, one of the most sober motherfuckers I ever met.
You don’t need to grow or learn or meditate or “change” to do those things. You don’t need to add stuff, just subtract. Just subtract boring stuff.
Hey, it’s an option.
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 2
Continuing from Part 1...
Vinho e Noz
Vinho e Noz (click title, above, for link), despite being hidden way out of the town center on a scary residential street, was so stuffed with American tourists that the waiter couldn't speak to me in Portuguese—he was 100% in English language mode. But the food is real, traditional, non-pandering. Is it touristic? I'm confused!
Nice shroomy throwaway.
We need to talk about the cilantro. Portugal loves cilantro, but Alentejo worships it. They use more of it, and in mysterious ways. An Alentejan chef does things with cilantro that Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican chefs could scarcely imagine. I tried to capture it in a photo. Behold cilantro as biomass:
I'm digging into a holy grail. I remember açorda from my music tours of Portugal in the early 90s when you'd get a thin soup full of garlic and strewn with some bread cubes, much like Castilian garlic soup. These days, when you ask for açorda you get wet migas—a thick gruel of bready stuffing. I've been trying to score old-style açorda, and a few elderly folks have pointed me to Alentejo. And here I am, doin' it!
This is not a great açorda. It tasted like faded glory. A dish from a past generation. I need to get out into the countryside and find a staunchly traditional village where I might find a more vibrant version, and perhaps even one with fish eggs—the apotheosis of classical açorda.
But I'm awfully glad to have emerged from the gaslighting, having confirmed that my memory of açorda wasn't manufactured by my fevered imagination!
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira ("Typical Wednesday Tavern") is the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. They tout their high-concept service: a lengthy tasting menu with many daily-rotating dishes—just show up and eat, no decisions required. They bring course after course of basically traditional Portuguese food, with just enough quirks to sustain the “tasting menu” conceit.
It’s all really good, and a few things are awesome, and far more food than anyone can eat, like fattening hogs. Then they charge 57.50€/person, a king’s ransom in Portugal, even in a presumptuous restaurant town like Évora.
There’s no question that you receive value, both in quality and in sheer quantity. But I felt like someone sold me twelve printer cartridges. I don’t need twelve printer cartridges. Nobody does. And while it might be a fair price for twelve printer cartridges, it’s still a lot of damned money when, again, no one needs twelve printer cartridges.
But it was delicious, everyone left happy, and the staff is lovely. They speak perfect English, as they must—it’s nearly all Americans, because no Portuguese person would spend 57.50€ on lunch. In the end, they won me over with the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. And great food.
Folhada de queijo. About as good as it gets.
Beautiful "black pig" presunto.
Tongue sliders with a relish of chopped pig ear and rabbit. Edgy! But by no means a false note. It's both innovative yet organically Alentejan. No pandering here.
Exquisite calamari, decent bacon-wrapped dates (ala Better Homes & Gardens canapés circa 1965).
Thin sliced slow cooked pumpkin (HOW DID IT NOT DISSOLVE? THIS IS MAGIC!) with onions, oxtail rice, and actually good Belgian-style fries. Still a million miles from pandersville. They're not betraying Portugal by making Belgian-style fries. Fries are everywhere, and they're just doing them right.
Ultra slow-cooked pork neck. The best thing. With spinach migas.
Dessert for four. yeah, as if!
Those shot glasses are "frozen mojito". Again, forgivable. It's not like a Sriracha jello boilermaker. They've managed to be clever without pandering. Évora restaurants have mastered the impossible, none more than these guys. They walk the line with grace and aplomb. It's real. And it's good.
Note: the waiter told me "I don't taste coriander, really." He meant it in the same way that a Thai doesn't taste chili heat. This statement was the essence of Alentejo, and I was honored to receive it. I wear the insight like a medal.
Yikes!
Dom Joaquim
Dom Joaquim is a historical, weighty, dignified old-school place, as you can see from the dining room. Though even here they offer (in addition to a weighty leather bound tome of a la carte offerings no one looks at) revolving plates-of-the-day specials at lunch (catch up on that culture via my explanation).
I went for ovos rotos ("broken eggs") with mushrooms (self-explanatory from the photos, below):
...and deer and wild boar stew with chestnuts, with migas featuring delicate wild asparagus, a local craze that only appears for a brief few weeks per year.
Staunchly traditional cooking with no shortcuts. Nice.
For dessert, I often fall into the "which of these things is unlike the others", and I'd never had sericá before, which they describe as milk/sugar/flour/cinnamon pudding accompanied by conserved plum. But it turns out I know it under a different spelling, Srikaya, which always intrigued me due to its random and unintentional Thai correspondence. Wikipedia has it as sericaia. Not sure what's up with all these spellings. In any case, you can't get the full vibe from a single portion, so check out this photo from Wikipedia:
Oof!
Padaria Arte Antiga
Quick random bakery stop at Padaria Arte Antiga, which is nothing special but centrally located and had some interesting local stuff.
At 6 o'clock, that's doce de grão, a fried patty stuffed with sweet chickpea filling. If sugar + chickpea strikes you as strange, just remember how in East Asia all beans are prepared sweet for dessert. It works.
At 11 o'clock, a big discovery for me. Argolas de azeite are crunchy baked bread rings, with plenty of olive oil baked in, very much like a number of Genoese and Tuscan bread-stick adjacent items. This really got under my skin.
The bratwursty pastry at 4 o'clock was stuffed with sweetened sweet potato (they also make them with jam or with pumpkin/walnut marmelada). It would be too doughy/heavy anywhere else, but the local bread is so tasty that you could polish off five pounds of these lickety-split. They're called popias (aka alcôncoras, aka poa de espécie). I never saw anything like them, but found this explanation online (translated into English):
Snack Bar Portugal
The ultimate honor is a return visit, and so I lunched again at my proudest obscure find (I actually stumbled into it a year ago), where I admire everything so much. This meal couldn't match the supernal watercress soup and majestic feijoada de choclo, but the caldo verde and cação com amêijoas—dogfish shark with clams and mashed potatoes—was homey wonderment. The caldo verde did not contain the traditional slice of choriço, and the owner declared "meat in soup is disgusting!" Well, all right then!
That was a new dessert for me, farófias. I normally steer clear of the bright orange heritage Portuguese desserts devised to use up egg yolks left over by the hordes of nuns using egg whites to wash their habits. Farófias comes from the other side of the coin, an example of Portugal's meringue-fluffy egg white desserts, this one with crème anglaise at the bottom and a psychoactive quantity of cinnamon atop.
Ginja Gouge
I asked for quality ginja (sour cherry liquor) at a hotel bar. They poured me this 2011 reserva, and it wasn't until they'd rung my card up that I realized it cost an obscene 29€. I later found it online at €44 for a whole bottle. So, yeah, I finally hit the tourism wall full-force. But even so, it was real good ginja, so I couldn’t bear too deep a grudge.
Ruínas Fingidas
These ruins are part of the sprawling public garden (Jardim Público) in the city center. The town describes it as a "folly", having repurposed an old convent and its grounds into quirky civic parkland. In this photo uppity pea hens peer down on their lessers—specifically, peacocks courting from below.
Redux
Even though I hit mostly lesser-known sidestreety places (Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira a big exception), the food was, obviously, expensive. Plus they're filled with American tourists. Yet I ate great, and detected no pandering whatsoever. I was mugged only once, though I'd have made out worse if I'd patronized the main-drag joints with colorful umbrellas (colorful umbrellas places are the sign of death in South Europe) serving as traps for spring breaking kids and groovy middle-aged American couples feeling "adventurous".
Well, here's all I've got: Évora, unlike Setúbal, is "on the map". They have Unesco World Heritage status, which inexorably lures the groovy. It's also not far from the obscenity of "Melides" (don't speak it out loud), the Alenetejan beach community where George Clooney and his shiny pals bask in local culture by turning everything into the French Riviera. But while all world regions are proud of their cuisine, Alentejo is pugnaciously, religiously so, which might make pandering viscerally impossible. The food's got to be real, even as the economic wheels spin.
That's my theory, anyway.
Vinho e Noz (click title, above, for link), despite being hidden way out of the town center on a scary residential street, was so stuffed with American tourists that the waiter couldn't speak to me in Portuguese—he was 100% in English language mode. But the food is real, traditional, non-pandering. Is it touristic? I'm confused!
We need to talk about the cilantro. Portugal loves cilantro, but Alentejo worships it. They use more of it, and in mysterious ways. An Alentejan chef does things with cilantro that Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican chefs could scarcely imagine. I tried to capture it in a photo. Behold cilantro as biomass:
But I'm awfully glad to have emerged from the gaslighting, having confirmed that my memory of açorda wasn't manufactured by my fevered imagination!
Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira ("Typical Wednesday Tavern") is the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. They tout their high-concept service: a lengthy tasting menu with many daily-rotating dishes—just show up and eat, no decisions required. They bring course after course of basically traditional Portuguese food, with just enough quirks to sustain the “tasting menu” conceit.
It’s all really good, and a few things are awesome, and far more food than anyone can eat, like fattening hogs. Then they charge 57.50€/person, a king’s ransom in Portugal, even in a presumptuous restaurant town like Évora.
There’s no question that you receive value, both in quality and in sheer quantity. But I felt like someone sold me twelve printer cartridges. I don’t need twelve printer cartridges. Nobody does. And while it might be a fair price for twelve printer cartridges, it’s still a lot of damned money when, again, no one needs twelve printer cartridges.
But it was delicious, everyone left happy, and the staff is lovely. They speak perfect English, as they must—it’s nearly all Americans, because no Portuguese person would spend 57.50€ on lunch. In the end, they won me over with the world’s kindest, most diligent, and principled rip-off. And great food.
Those shot glasses are "frozen mojito". Again, forgivable. It's not like a Sriracha jello boilermaker. They've managed to be clever without pandering. Évora restaurants have mastered the impossible, none more than these guys. They walk the line with grace and aplomb. It's real. And it's good.
Note: the waiter told me "I don't taste coriander, really." He meant it in the same way that a Thai doesn't taste chili heat. This statement was the essence of Alentejo, and I was honored to receive it. I wear the insight like a medal.
At 6 o'clock, that's doce de grão, a fried patty stuffed with sweet chickpea filling. If sugar + chickpea strikes you as strange, just remember how in East Asia all beans are prepared sweet for dessert. It works.
At 11 o'clock, a big discovery for me. Argolas de azeite are crunchy baked bread rings, with plenty of olive oil baked in, very much like a number of Genoese and Tuscan bread-stick adjacent items. This really got under my skin.
The bratwursty pastry at 4 o'clock was stuffed with sweetened sweet potato (they also make them with jam or with pumpkin/walnut marmelada). It would be too doughy/heavy anywhere else, but the local bread is so tasty that you could polish off five pounds of these lickety-split. They're called popias (aka alcôncoras, aka poa de espécie). I never saw anything like them, but found this explanation online (translated into English):
At first glance it looks like a dry cake, but then the filling is surprising and delicious, based on honey, sugar and olive oil cooked in the light until it forms a dough. This dough is then wrapped in a thin, sugar-free dough and goes into the oven to bake for about 15 minutes. It's a typical cake from the Odemira area.I'm lucky; turns out there's a food fair in Odemira in three weeks where selected ancient grandmas converge to bake these. I'm giddy. I'll report back.
The ultimate honor is a return visit, and so I lunched again at my proudest obscure find (I actually stumbled into it a year ago), where I admire everything so much. This meal couldn't match the supernal watercress soup and majestic feijoada de choclo, but the caldo verde and cação com amêijoas—dogfish shark with clams and mashed potatoes—was homey wonderment. The caldo verde did not contain the traditional slice of choriço, and the owner declared "meat in soup is disgusting!" Well, all right then!
I asked for quality ginja (sour cherry liquor) at a hotel bar. They poured me this 2011 reserva, and it wasn't until they'd rung my card up that I realized it cost an obscene 29€. I later found it online at €44 for a whole bottle. So, yeah, I finally hit the tourism wall full-force. But even so, it was real good ginja, so I couldn’t bear too deep a grudge.
These ruins are part of the sprawling public garden (Jardim Público) in the city center. The town describes it as a "folly", having repurposed an old convent and its grounds into quirky civic parkland. In this photo uppity pea hens peer down on their lessers—specifically, peacocks courting from below.
Even though I hit mostly lesser-known sidestreety places (Taberna Tipica Quarta-Feira a big exception), the food was, obviously, expensive. Plus they're filled with American tourists. Yet I ate great, and detected no pandering whatsoever. I was mugged only once, though I'd have made out worse if I'd patronized the main-drag joints with colorful umbrellas (colorful umbrellas places are the sign of death in South Europe) serving as traps for spring breaking kids and groovy middle-aged American couples feeling "adventurous".
Well, here's all I've got: Évora, unlike Setúbal, is "on the map". They have Unesco World Heritage status, which inexorably lures the groovy. It's also not far from the obscenity of "Melides" (don't speak it out loud), the Alenetejan beach community where George Clooney and his shiny pals bask in local culture by turning everything into the French Riviera. But while all world regions are proud of their cuisine, Alentejo is pugnaciously, religiously so, which might make pandering viscerally impossible. The food's got to be real, even as the economic wheels spin.
That's my theory, anyway.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Chowhounding Évora (Portugal), Part 1
There is an evil genie aspect to life in Setúbal. I'm a huge booster of soulful grandma cooking. But when that's all there is, months of unremitting peasant fare will leave a hound yearning for precision, refinement, and even mild pretension. One needs some goddam yang to counterbalance the smothering yin.
My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.
The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.
It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.
But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.
Sal Grosso
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.
Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).
I'm eating meat here, obviously. Pork cheeks, to be specific. And those are migas alongside. No one translates it as "stuffing", but it's moistened seasoned bread crumb, so...yep. This one's tomato flavored and colored, and the acidic sharpness cuts like a knife, perfect counterbalance to the unctuous cheeks.
Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.
Bread's great everywhere in Portugal, but better in Alentejo, and better still here. Yeah, the yellow one is broa de milho, the Portuguese cornbread that is, alas, mostly found in the north.
This was the first salad I've had in two years that didn't come with greasy bottles of oil and vinegar for self-dressing. Fancy!
Pudim de água. "Water pudding" might not sound exciting, but just look at that! Those almond flakes are not throwaway. They're super fresh and careful.
Dangerously high prices compared to my €8 complete lunches back home. But entirely worth it.
A Choupana
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.
You figure this is the quintessential cozy Portuguese lunch room, right? Straight out of our collective unconscious! Ah, Portugal!
No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.
I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.
Menu shots:
Recanto
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.
Nyuh-uh.
Welcome to fricking Instagram.
Behold overcooked duck with unrendered rubbery fat strewn with molar-busting pretzel salt, plus a multilayered vaguely Frenchy potato slab reheated to the puckered point, served with a zippy raspberry sauce with strong shampoo vibes. Ugh.
You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).
Snack Bar Portugal
I was here on my one previous visit, and Snack Bar Portugal remains my proudest Évora discovery. No one here knows about it outside its small die-hard clientele, all Portuguese. By contrast, literally every other restaurant was full of Americans, which we'll ponder in an upcoming installment.
This is one of Évora's humblest restaurants, but it's a great restaurant. Cheery, clean, the owner and his family are full of positivity and kindness, and the food has both the grandma soul you'd expect in a humble lunch room, but also some magic.
This watercress soup tasted like saffron. Which makes no sense, because it's not often used here, and certainly never in a cheap canteen. I asked the waitress, and the older Portuguese wife sitting two feet from my right elbow, who'd just eaten an entire meal without saying a single word to her husband, broke in to explain the culinary alchemy that yielded the saffron flavor via a 2000 word soliloquy I 40% understood. None of this would happen in Setúbal, where I don't think anyone even knows what saffron is, and where the wives stay home.
In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.
Then feijoada do choco. Beans and cuttlefish. Kicked the ass of the versions I've had back home. This was downright magisterial.
Finally, bobo de caramelo, caramel custard. Nothing deep or refined, but all balances nailed. What a meal. I left glowing.
To be continued...
My desperation has driven me as far as London (which is like Pittsburgh from here - $75 round trip flights), but it turns out that I just needed to drive an hour south to the neighboring state of Alentejo—which I could practically spit at from my balcony—and to its capital, Évora.
The Évora food scene is like night and day. The menus are similar (Alentejo has a distinct cuisine, but, like Punjabi food in India, it's worked into the national consciousness). The difference is the profusion of restaurants that are actually restaurants, not grim lunch pots run by cigarette-dangling wizardly grandmas who can't be bothered to skin the fava beans or core the apples. There are captivating winkles and touches. There is care and subtlety. It's The Answer to My Prayers.
It's also expensive. In Setúbal you can't eat well above 15€ (pricier places exist, but they're clip joints). But if you want a special occasion meal, there's no need to fly to London (aka Pittsburgh). Just head south to Évora. I've never been so happy to fork over €30 or €40 for a meal. You get solid value...at least if you choose good places.
But it's not easy! The most anonymous lunch joint in Setúbal is damned good, but in Evora, you must choose wisely. Let's start with a high note.
My top find: Sal Grosso (click the titles, e.g. above, for links) was like manna to my tears. Lemonade for a sleeping bee. It's every mixed metaphor rolled into a giant soufflé.
Sal Grosso is a restaurant restaurant. This may sound like nonsense for those who haven't spent months eating grandma pot lunches, but Sal Grosso has pace, bustle and excitement. The staff knows it's bad-ass, and the customers feel lucky to be there, and the chalkboard menu (largest I've ever seen) is packed with enough choices to stoke anxiety—the good kind. I'd almost forgotten what that's like (normally, I trudge through a dank doorway grunting boa tarde, and a sea of limping pensioners moans back indistinctly while harried Grandma hip checks me out of the way to rush stew to someone's table).
Big takeaway: Setúbal is for fish—Évora natives envy the quality our grilled fish—but Évora's about meat, further heightening the yin/yang aspect. If you ever visit Portugal, hit Setúbal for fish, Evora for meat...and let Lisbon be your souvenir shop.
Right next door to buzzy Sal Grosso, give or take a century, is A Choupana.
No. None of that's true. Nothing like this exists, aside from this one unicorn. Counter seating is unknown here. The hobbit hole coziness is aberrant. This is not, at all, what Portugal is like.
I desperately want to come back and eat here. My eye is very much on the ensopado de galinha do campo, country hen stew. Not a normal offering, but totally Alentejan (for more on all things hen, see my trip notes from El Salvador). I love counter seating. Table seating makes me feel like I'm on display. For many people, that's a feature, not a bug. But, me, I'm in it for the food. I am not a decor element.
Menu shots:
I actually started the trip at Recanto, which I did not fully trust despite its sterling reputation. Online photos had sent up warning flares. But I figured they'd know what they're doing, having earned senior status in a solid restaurant town.
Nyuh-uh.
You can fail here. This isn't Montreal (where even crap restaurants are like blessings from some benevolent god).
In any case, this was one of the great soups of my life.
To be continued...
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