Chowhounding the Prato Do Dia

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the southern European tradition of "plate of the day" and how it fits into the long arc of civilizational dining... all in eight comically reductive paragraphs. The following epilogue explains how the situation has affected my chowhounding tactics.


I spent a full year, per my instinct, ferreting out better lunch places, and ones serving less common dishes. But I gradually realized I was working more against the grain than ever because that's not the proposition here. These places frame themselves as providing a commodity, like soybeans or propane. All roughly the same thing at roughly the same price, with none aspiring to do better.

Yet talent always reveals itself. Some are especially good, though never intentionally so. And hardly anyone notices, because everyone's tied to their local, while I'm the only moving part in the whole machine, dropping out of the sky into this or that lunchroom. When I score - finding exceptional talent - it's a matter of serendipity, not due to any ambition to develop a business edge.

If you complimented a chef on her delicious cooking, she'd take it as a romantic overture. Imagine if, having filled your tank at a gas station, you smiled languorously and pronounced the cashier's fuel delicious. You'd be a lunatic. Or have ulterior motives.

You're not eating in restaurants. You're patronizing fueling stations, where deliciousness is both accidental and commonplace.

Wait, what? "Accidental and commonplace"? To a chowhound, that's irrational. Deliciousness is always tied to ambition and wielded as a business edge. But not here. And it's taken time for me to adjust. I do, of course, find treasure, but from far outside the frame. This is not the Upper West Side.

If you asked a Portuguese person why the food's so good when chefs aren't the least bit aspirational, they'd all answer the same way:

"Because it's Portuguese food."

Who am I to argue?


View a series of photo essays of non-aspirational local lunches indexed (and updated) here.

I’m Ok; You, I’m Not So Sure

When I was a small child, an early self-help book titled "I'm OK – You're OK" came out and was an immense hit. A summer camp counselor tried it out on us, slow-talking super-deep truisms like:

“Parent is not the same as mother or father, Adult means something quite different from a grownup, and Child is not the same as a little person.”

Jesus.

The title says it all: this is not a zero sum world. Person A can respect Person B without shrinking. You can consider yourself a hero without conceiving of others as inferior shmucks. I'm failing to convey the book's saccharine voice — it's hard to work backwards, and I can't expunge my snarky exasperation with the trite obviousness of the message. But that's the gist.

Even as a child, I considered the book's message to be a cotton ball coated in "duh", kindling a lifetime of disgust with self-help and New Age material (some people imagine that's what I'm about, but it's definitely not what I'm about).

But that message, I learned much later, wasn't so obvious. It was a bestseller, after all. Even psychologists didn't find it banal. Their consensus was the very opposite: Readers will need copious therapy to swallow such a bitter pill of non-supremacy. This sappy cheese, it turned out, was deemed powerful medicine!

The book was a breakthrough proposition, less "Duh" than "Woooooah!". It was revelatory not just for oblivious types, egotists, and narcissists, but even for people you'd have imagined were light years beyond.

The brainy professor well-versed in cognitive fallacies and biases.

The smiley super-nice guy.

The detached therapist who well knows how people misframe.

Thinking it through now, I grasp the sheer animalism of the human perspective and am horrified. It turns out that people truly need to hear this. It's like a monolith.

Even more horrifying is that I was so slow on the uptake. I spent 62 years — including a decade managing a community the size of a large city — in a world of rampant zero sum egoism and selfishness, where even generosity and kindness can be diabolically transactional, before finally catching on.

I've frequently referred to the "suspension of social disbelief" in recent postings. This one's a doozy.

All the Marbles

If you've noticed that my writing's been getting better, this is, per my trademark contrarianism, actually a sign that my mind is going.

I'm getting older and no one in my family ever enjoyed noteworthy marble retention. So I've been compensating in two ways:

1. I'm trying harder than ever. Readers often assume that I dash this stuff off, which is both extremely flattering and completely maddening (I work like the house is on fire). But now I'm squeezing every last drop of juice from the grapes with extra purpose.

2. I've found assistance. I'm using ChatGPT to coax me through an extra few dozen drafts. I've found that the problem with mental fog is not inefficiency. Writing, after all, is performed out of time, so I can go as slowly as I'd like and you'll never know! The problem is that middling drafts strike me as finished. So the chatbot kicks me into gear by rooting out sloppy incoherence like a truffle dog.

I'm not being supplanted. The chatbot doesn't actually write anything for me...with one notable recent exception. That fantastic closing line on my last posting ("We're drowning in certainty and starved for magic") was 100% ChatGPT, whom I cursed with ample venom for having coughed up a line too great to ignore!

“Anything I Don’t Understand is Nonsense”

Anything I don't understand is nonsense.

It seems to be a widespread credo, and while it's always been popular, I believe it's been getting worse as we complete our unwitting transformation into silly, foppish, entitled, bizarrely overconfident aristocrats.

Also: I'm noticing better.

It took me a very long time to even begin to recognize that this credo exists, because it's so opposite to the way I think. For me, anything I don't understand is magic. Some magic I feel sharply compelled to acquire for myself, while most of it I just peer at with admiration, saluting the magicians. But ‘nonsense’?? Jesus, certainly not! Regardless of the source, anything surprising — anything I haven't heard before — makes my antennae eagerly perk up. Like I've been waiting for it.

Here's how people get stuck in this mindset: there's a conviction that anything that escapes me reflects on me. It lessens me. So any potentially humiliating evidence of my incompleteness and imperfection must be preemptively dismissed. I confidently arrange my desk only with familiar, mastered items from my owned realm. My ruler, my pencil, my pencil sharpener....

I went another way. Time and again, I've stumbled into discovering that self-lessening induces awe. One must feel small to be impressed by...anything. (This explains the omnipresent boredom.) I'm one of the few modern Americans capable of awe, which means I don't need to pop antidepressants or guzzle wine or fuck comely strangers or draw a promotion, a raise, or acclaim to muster appreciation for being alive.

Opting out of awe, we ferociously repel any self-lessening like a grizzly protecting her cubs. And, ultimately, it's profoundly exhausting to keep batting away indicators of deficiency. The main cause of major depression is the bitter collapse of one's heroic self-image in the face of unremitting contrary evidence. 

What sort of loser is eager to feel lessened? Isn't that going the wrong way?

We engrain cognitive judo as a countermeasure. The thinking is subtle, so pay close attention:

"I'm not stupid, you're stupid!"

That's how we develop and stoke the tectonic conviction that "Anything I don't understand is nonsense” (AIDUiN)

The great thing about this conviction is that it precludes self-awareness. Jealousy is far less effective. Jealous people know they're jealous, and this plagues their effort to mentally diminish That Lucky Asshole. Jealousy requires an intrinsic, galling acknowledgment of that other person's superior position. It's horribly dissatisfying.

But AIDUiN is seamless. No self-awareness, no lingering doubt. It feels like deep intuition: “I don't understand what this guy is talking about, but it sure sounds like nonsense to me, and I trust my gut.”

The jealous would love to trust their gut and mentally frame That Lucky Asshole to a position of delicious inferiority and crisply move on, but, at some level, they know the truth. Whereas not knowing is the very point of AIDUiN. “Anything I don't understand is nonsense.” So crisp!

You might argue that "I don't understand" — a tacit admission of shortcoming — is half the statement. But that portion is an incoherent mumble, while "nonsense" is a scalding howl heard throughout the multiverse.

This all explains why we're drowning in certainty and starved for magic.


For much of my life, I've been widely regarded as nonsensical, even by people who otherwise admire my intelligence and clarity. I might have expected the benefit of the doubt amid their non-comprehension, but AIDUiN is not a conscious credo applied with thoughtful reason. It's purely visceral, like a hockey goalie's puck vigilance.

My problem was that I'd spent my early years among willfully ignorant people who felt brazenly smart (they were ahead of their time; we've now reached a golden age for this mindset). And I try to avoid other people's mistakes. So when people deemed me nonsensical, I refused to sneer defiantly. I accepted and shared their assessment. Deep down, I knew I was right...while fully accepting my apparent wrongness. This psychic split seemed wiser than indulging my genetic propensity for haughty idiocy.

My decision to launch this Slog helped me out of the bind. Reading the backlog, it all seems pretty sensible. Sane, even! The gaslighting finally lost all effectiveness when someone queried an online forum for advice on launching an online community covering a narrow topic and attracting an especially expert and passionate user base. I was one of the best possible authorities to answer this, and while I (anonymously) offered a clear, easily digestible reply, it was — you won't be surprised to hear — counterintuitive. Failing to flatter expectations, it left readers just slightly baffled, and they projected their bafflement back onto me. My response was, they informed me, sheer nonsense, and it was downvoted into oblivion.

Would it have been better if I'd been a stuck-up prick all this time, sneeringly defiant of worldly feedback? It's a popular stance, but do I specially deserve it? Ick! The notion beckons me to follow in the mucky footsteps of fools. Forget it.

Moving forward, I'm pretty sure the cocky train has passed me by. I'll never grow overconfident. I continue to clock my failures, mistakes, and general confusion with great enthusiasm. It balances my confidence and helps me maintain my psychic split with poise — I'm a guy who's both deeply right and palpably wrong. Only a psychopath can deftly reject consensus over time.

I continue to seek the sweet spot: confident in my rightness yet hyperaware of my gaping limitations and comical missteps. When a good result pops out, I levelly recognize its quality but chalk it up as a lucky break — an errant jewel plucked from the muck. Which does, actually, feel right.

The Lickety-Split Century

This new century is now 1/4 done. 

A millennium is not a long time.

Limitation

To a bass-player friend stuck motionless in a hospital bed since August (non-musicians: low "E-natural" is the lowest note on a bass):

We all have limitations and boundaries. You cannot play lower than the low E natural, but this doesn't mean you don't have infinite potential in the range available to you. Human creativity is magical. It finds ways to expand fully into limited space. 

The only limitation is your perspective. We think the world limits us - we think the LIMITS limit us, like the low E natural - when it's our perspective of limitation that limits us. 

The world is the world, but perspective is pliable, and creativity - if you let it - will find ways to expand fully into limited space. 

 Be well.

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"

Good is the Default

I used to spend a lot of time explaining myself to awful people who didn't realize they're awful and therefore couldn't understand why I treated them as such. Explaining was the least I could do, because they often seemed genuinely confused and hurt. After all, everyone sees themselves as a virtuous good person.

But awful people, I decided, are inherently confused. In fact, that’s why they’re awful. 

People don't behave awfully unless their perspective is warped. The unvarnished truth is that we're in Utopia, basking in unimaginable comfort on a singular speck of color and beneficence in an otherwise cold, dark, tight, vacant universe, blessed with ample oxygen, life-giving sunlight, and quenching water. Our greatest problems include a troubling excess of food and personal possessions. Socially, things may feel a bit malevolent, but in reality, everyone's just fumbling through their day, and almost nothing they say or do truly reflects on you. In their minds, you're mostly a placeholder.

We depart from this baseline perspective on mere whim, choosing to indulge in drama — in Rich People Problems — which we eventually steep in so deeply that we forget that we paid and waited on line to ride this rollercoaster. And maladjustment begets confusion and awfulness.

So there is no Evil serving as an equal oppositional force to Good. Good is the default, though confused people may do evil things.

It's notable that the clear-headed are seldom awful (exception: psychopaths, who maintain a narrowed crystal clarity despite tectonic skew). I don't know anyone gifted with expansive wisdom and equanimity who makes a habit of being awful — though they may seem so to those expecting them to indulge posing and delusion.

I no longer explain myself to awful people. They're too lost to accept a road map. Anything said to them is received through a distorted lens, and you can't push truth so artfully that it maintains itself through a warped perspective.

But I take heart in knowing that any confused, awful person entangled in complication can, with an effortless gesture of surrender, re-moore to the simplicity of baseline goodness.


See "Flipping Your Street Smarts" for a much more down-to-earth version of this same flip of perspective.

I Forgive You For My Error

If you ever have your motives or intentions misconstrued or your words misapprehended, or if you're falsely accused, once you manage to make the other person recognize their error, your counter does not reset. You will remain on probation.

The other person, you see, has applied the faculty of forgiveness. If there's a subsequent violation, you will be afforded much less opportunity to explain.

This isn't a problem for most people, who say normal things and act in normal ways. Most people avoid being misunderstood by constraining themselves to highly-patterned, easily-construed behavior, aka conformity. Add this to the myriad reasons the world encourages us to choose and portray a canned personality type - the bearded teddy bearish dude in fuzzy sweater who says "It's all good" a lot, or the brassy husky-voiced woman full of high-spirited good fun, etc. No surprises, no friction. Social lubrication remains nicely greased.

But if you're the least bit original, or creative, or spontaneous, perils await you far beyond the expected playground-style immune response. It would require multiple leather-bound volumes to catalog the wide-ranging weirdness.

Am I being cynical? Nope. I'm being extraordinarily guileless. The notion of making someone "recognize their error" even once is ludicrously unrealistic.

There's a phrase I've heard over and over which reveals the whole ballgame. It's my rhetorical kryptonite, leaving me weak and defenseless. Upon explaining, with earnest horror, that someone has misunderstood me, I very often get back "No, I understood perfectly." Whereupon my internal organs commence to liquify.

If you can suggest a productive, non-murdery way to receive that response — "No, I understand perfectly" — I will hand over my house, my car, and my prized bagel plates.

Replacement Balloons

When I was a small child, I'd get terribly upset when a relationship with a helium balloon ended with a pop or heavenly ascent. They'd offer to replace it with an identical balloon, but somehow this made things worse. I wanted my balloon, which was obviously irreplaceable!

I recognized, even in my sorrow, how silly I was being. An identical balloon is an identical balloon! Yet the previous one felt special by virtue of — well, it was hard to explain. Time spent? Shared experience? Whatever the explanation, the popped or lost one was my balloon, whereas this was just some garish, oblivious hunk of inflated latex. The certainty was accompanied by an uncomfortable awareness of my childish caprice.

But my certainty was appropriate. At 62, I see that I was right about balloons. I only felt silly because the world has a gaping blind spot extending far beyond balloons. Even people can be viewed as interchangeable objects slotted into roles and categories, their singular essence, their essential reality, overlooked. 

We, ourselves, are often replacement balloons. It's common to approach new romantic relationships like swapping in a fresh tennis partner. And to yearn for canned family moments where relatives cosplay their respective roles. Bosses can't conceive of an employee knowing better, merely because they're The Boss. We have a devilishly hard time seeing individuality.

The world outside our heads appears as a grand glass menagerie, with everything and everyone serving as placeholders. But within this hot-swappable world, it's neither sentimental nor capricious to appreciate the unique individuality of some person or thing — even a balloon!


I am obviously continuing to examine The Empathy Asymmetry.

See also "Love Theater".