Category: Restaurants
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At the table, with time.
A restaurant is more than just a well-executed dish. It's gesture, rhythm, context, and relationship. It's the place where technique meets culture and where time, when well managed, becomes part of the experience. In this section, I write about restaurants from my own experience: what one eats, but also how one eats, where one eats…
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Kruger | I Know I'm Going That Way
“"The universal is the local without walls. It is the authentic that can be seen from all sides, and on all sides it is right, like the truth." Miguel Torga. A small dog can survive hunger, a colonial empire, a rough road, and more than a tumultuous century, as long as someone…
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Johannesburg | A Long Walk
“There’s nothing like returning to a place that remains the same to discover how much we’ve changed.” Nelson Mandela. It was to the sound of a national anthem that Johannesburg ceased to fit into what I’m about to tell you. At the Steyn City Clubhouse, amidst a lavish meal, a Springboks game, a fine South African Sauvignon Blanc…
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Douro Oxheart Tomato | The Holy Grail in the Right Place
«"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What? You too? I thought it was just me…'" Clive Staples Lewis. An empty table is just a piece of furniture… At the end of the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint one of the most repeated scenes in Christian tradition. He had before him…
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DOP | Yesterday That Arrives After Tomorrow
«It was not only missing some of those branches that time and life's successive encounters cause to break off from the central trunk, it also lacked someone to help its roots penetrate to the deepest underground layers, someone to refine the consistency and flavor of its fruits, someone to broaden and strengthen its crown to…"
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Convento do Espinheiro | With Absolute Certainty, Perhaps
“A God is born. Others die. Truth neither came nor went: Error changed. We now have another Eternity, And what has passed was always better. Blind, Science tills the useless soil. Mad, Faith lives the dream of its worship. A new God is just a word. Do not seek nor believe: everything…”
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Patio in the Avillez Neighborhood | A Doorway to Who We Were
“"What we see is not what we see, but what we are." Fernando Pessoa. In In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust needed only to dip a madeleine into a cup of tea to discover one of the most beautiful things ever written about memory: perhaps the past does not disappear; perhaps it only…
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Douro Oxheart Tomato Festival | From the intimate causes of things
“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” Georgics, Book II, v. 490 “Happy is he who could know the causes of things.” Few poems have exerted such a silent influence on Western civilization as Virgil's Georgics. They do not narrate battles, celebrate heroes, or recount the adventures of capricious gods. They speak of the earth. Of the seed sown…
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AliveTaste26 | The Sapere Library
“If you want to build a ship, don’t start by gathering wood; first awaken in men the desire for the sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. There are words that silently carry the memory of an entire civilization. Knowledge is one of them. Few imagine that knowledge and flavor share the same origin. Both descend from the Latin verb sapere, which simultaneously meant…
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Herdade da Rocha | The Slow Art of Being Rooted
“We all want a place in the sun, I think that’s perfectly normal, my boy. However, I think you should then make the sun instead of trying to earn the place.” Jean Giono. When we read The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono, we quickly realize that the true protagonist is not Elzéard Bouffier, the solitary shepherd who passes by…
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DASAU | From the Rift to a Beautiful Form of Joy
“"Food is the cornerstone that allows us to acquire the simple condition of 'being' or 'being present'... To be happy or angry, to stay or leave, to laugh or be depressed simply because of where we are, and amidst all this arises the question: what are we going to eat? When we eat without thinking, it's...