«"Friendship is born in 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 frequently repeated scenes in Christian tradition. He had before him a story of faith, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and farewell. He chose to organize it around a table. The Last Supper It would become one of the most recognizable images in the history of art. Christ at the center, the apostles distributed on either side, bread and wine before them. But perhaps part of its extraordinary power survives beyond the religious episode it represents. Because Leonardo placed some of the deepest human emotions in an absolutely everyday setting: people sitting at the same table.
It is at the table that we welcome those who arrive and save a place for those we are waiting for. We pass the bread, serve the wine, tell stories, discuss, make peace, and prolong conversations long after the dishes have been cleared. The table can either separate two strangers or make it difficult to realize, hours later, that they ever were strangers.
This is one of the most beautiful things we've invented without truly realizing it. A table needs another to fulfill what we expect from it. We can eat alone, of course, but sitting at a table belongs to another order of things. It implies sharing space, bringing bodies closer, passing a plate, filling someone's glass before our own, conversing with the person across from us. At some remote point in our history, eating ceased to be merely a necessity and became a form of relationship.
Civilizations have built much of themselves around this gesture. Food, rituals, religions, and ways of receiving have changed, but this strange human desire to place something at the center and gather people around it has remained. Perhaps because sharing food is one of the most basic ways of saying to someone: sit down, stay with us, we like you very much.
That's also why certain holidays are difficult to explain through a program.
We can list tastings, dinners, producers, wines, conversations, and awards. We can say where we've been, who won, what we tasted, and who we met. All of that describes a party. But it doesn't necessarily explain what makes someone want to belong to it.
Bia is perhaps the best metaphor I've found for this. Before August, she starts asking when the Tomato Festival is. She awaits it with an anxiety reserved for very few things, and shortly after we return, the next question inevitably arises: when are we coming back? Of all the events she accompanies us to, it's the one she enjoys the most. Gui doesn't exactly keep the same track, but he throws himself into the atmosphere with equal enthusiasm. They don't need to know producers, discuss varieties, or understand what distinguishes a good Oxheart (although they already give ratings, try to taste them all, and have their own competition :P). Along the way, they realized something much more important: they feel good there.
And so did we.
Perhaps because we ended up doing what happens when we are greeted often enough with genuine joy: we stopped knowing exactly when we went from being visitors to becoming part of the human landscape.
Celeste bears some responsibility for this. We met her elsewhere, when she was promoting a restaurant, and gastronomy brought our paths together. The restaurant, unfortunately, is now in the past, but the friendship, fortunately, remains. Perhaps this is also how you recognize people who truly know how to welcome guests: some time later, you can no longer tell where the circumstance that introduced us ended and where the affection began.
In Douro Oxheart Tomato Festival You can feel a lot of that.
Producers, cooks, organizers, friends, children, returning guests and first-timers mingle with a naturalness that no communication strategy could fabricate. People chat with those next to them, sample what someone brought, a glass appears, a chair is found, a child disappears to play and reappears somewhere among people who, by then, are no longer strangers. It's not exactly entering an event. It's entering a kind of house, temporarily enlarged to accommodate everyone.
It was in this environment that the Quinta do Mourão received this year 11th edition of the Douro Oxheart Tomato Competition, In what was the edition with the highest participation ever, for two days, the tomato was transformed and preserved, tasted blind, discussed and, naturally, served. In between, we visited the farm and discovered the... Knox Port, the extraordinary historical reserve of Port wine of Quinta do Mourão (We'll talk about it in another post because it deserves this spotlight), since talking about the Douro without including wine in the conversation would be almost grammatically impossible.
The key moment, however, was the blind tasting. And, when the names returned to the tomatoes: the Quinta do Ventozelo won first place for the second consecutive year., a repetition that begins to say as much about consistency as about excellence. A Quinta de Medim He came in second place and... Quinta do Crasto He completed the podium. Even more interesting is realizing that the contest is no longer limited to the question of which is the best tomato.
The debate “"How to transform the TCBD into an economic asset for the territory"”, with John Gonçalves, president of CIM Douro, Carlos Coelho, from the Ivity, and Antonina Barbosa, director-general of Falua, He raised a far more important question: how to increase the value of a product without diminishing what makes it special? Perhaps the future of Coração de Boi doesn't simply lie in producing more, but in better valuing what the small farms of the Douro already do so well, involving producers, restaurants, institutions, and a territory that has realized that gastronomy can also be a form of identity.
A Tomato Festival without the Renato Cunha It would already be difficult to imagine. Next to the pots on the fire, the Chef of Rust He returned to doing what he does so well: interpreting the tomato without hiding it, respecting it and making it shine. This time, he also incorporated it into his traditional custard, where the tomato's vegetal acidity counteracted the sweetness and gave it an unexpected balance. It turned out so well that we dare say: perhaps even better than the original, which was already very good. This year he participated in the festival despite dealing with a health problem. Some people simply don't know how to let go of their fears. And, every time we taste something of his, an old certainty grows: sooner or later, what we know has to come will arrive. 😉
The next day, the party moved to Arroios.
And it is precisely there that Leonardo returns to this story.
O Tomato à Capella, integrated into Capella Project 2026, He brought to the village a much more humble combination than the one Leonardo painted in Milan: tomato, olive oil, and fleur de sel, in a tasting held inside the Baroque chapel. Outside, the Capella's Little Market It brought together Douro DOC and Port wines, snacks, local and regional products, producers, inhabitants, visitors, entertainment and, inevitably, lots of tomatoes.
We missed out on that part of the celebration. And perhaps it's particularly fitting that, in a text that began with a supper painted on a wall, we missed precisely the part that ends in a chapel. The promise, however, remains: we'll be there next year.
That's because I like the image that remains to be lived. After the blind tasting, the awards, the wine, and the discussions about the economic value of the product, everything ends up reduced to the essentials.
One tomato. Olive oil. Salt.
And people around.
It's a party of friends for friends, including those who don't yet know they will be friends.
This year we took Sylvie and Luís, our in-laws. It was their first time, and judging by their enthusiasm, we suspect we've passed the bug on to them. Perhaps that's how these things grow best: someone brings along someone they truly love.
That's also why it would be impossible to write about this festival pretending to have the detachment of someone who simply arrived, tasted, and evaluated it. We don't have that detachment. And it would be intellectually dishonest to invent it. We like this festival. Very much. It's one of our favorites. One of those where what's on the plate matters immensely and yet, on its own, it can't explain what we feel.
At the heart of all these people, there is, in fact, something extraordinarily modest.
Not a rare delicacy brought from the other side of the world. Not a product that needs luxury, technique, or staging to justify its value. Just something that someone took from the earth and brought in their hands.
A tomato.
Large, irregular, fleshy, delicate, imperfect like almost everything that nature does better than we can. Grown in the small gardens of the Douro Valley, simple enough to require little more than olive oil and salt, unique enough to mobilize producers, cooks, institutions and an entire region around it.
They called it Ox Heart because of its shape.
After experiencing this festival, I'm beginning to suspect that anatomy was given too much prominence.
Because the shape can explain the ox.
The heart explains everything else.
We could conclude by describing the delicacies we sampled, the music, the statistics, the social media reach, the tastings, the wines, or the discussions. That would be a rigorous way to recount what happened.
But what's missing from the programs would still be missing.
The faces we recognize when we arrive. The conversations that start again without introductions. Celeste. Renato. Sylvie and Luís, who arrived for the first time and already realized that it's difficult to go through this party without wanting to belong to it a little bit. Gui, strangely happy amidst the "chaos". And Bia, the best allegory I found for this party.
I don't know if the organizers deserve higher praise.
Leonardo needed bread and wine to create one of the most recognizable images in our culture. In the Douro region, they added tomatoes.
Despite all the differences, perhaps both remind us of something elementary: what we put on a table may be extraordinary, but it will never be more important than the people we manage to bring together around it.
That's why we'll be back.
Because of the tomato, certainly.
Also for the ox.
From the heart, especially.
Because, in the end, an empty table is just a piece of furniture.
Leave a Reply