Frankly, I’ve had a lot of bad food in Portugal, even at restaurants rated 5 stars on TripAdvisor or recommended by the trip planner who put my itinerary together. There is an obsession with cod here, and the bits that I had in restaurants or on a food tour my first few days here tasted like freezer-burnt fish sticks, not the flaky, fatty stuff we get at home in good fish and chips. They’re obsessed with canned sardines like Hawaiians and Spam, and the sardines are better here than in the US but still not exactly tasty. Bread in this country is consistently inedible. It just turns to paste in my mouth. In Porto, at a restaurant that had already served me several minimally edible dishes, I ate one bite of an order of mashed potatoes and sent it back—if my instinctive toddler memory serves, wallpaper paste would have had a less gluey texture. One night I ate at an outdoor restaurant in a marina that had served me pork tenderloin that was tough as shoe leather, and then noticed the patio I was sitting on was covered in ants and seagull shit. Up until my last day here, my best meal was cooked in a restaurant in Porto…by a Brazilian. You get the idea.

But I had two very good meals on my last day in Portugal. One was a fish cataplana, essentially a Portuguese cioppino. All of the seafood was perfectly cooked, even the salmon, and especially one whitefish that literally just melted in my mouth.

Last night, I ate at a restaurant called Drogaria, which means “drugstore.” I found it after google searching “best new restaurants in Lisbon” and coming across a Forbes article written by an American expat living there. They were included in the Michelin guide that includes restaurants beyond their star rating, so I figured, this can’t be all bad. I Ubered to Drogaria and never would have found it otherwise, as it was in a hilly neighborhood far from any business district and with narrow streets packed with apartment buildings. I sat outside. On my right was a tree and a pocket park, but on my left was a crumbling 1950s faded lime green apartment building that looks like something from a barrio in LA or Miami. The shop on the ground floor was a dry cleaner. So the name of the restaurant fit the setting. And since the intent of the restaurant was to provide new takes on traditional Portuguese food, to have the location in such an ordinary residential area fit as well.

The chef, if memory serves, previously worked in a Michelin 3-star restaurant in Macau, a former Portuguese colony, so the Asian fusion elements in the cuisine were unsurprising. But there was nothing passé about these dishes. The first dish was gyoza, with the most lightly fried edge, stuffed with a Portuguese meat stew, cozido. The stew was sublime, with tender shredded chicken being the primary texture but with sausage, beef, and pork contributing to the rich flavor. It was served with the stew broth poured on top. As I finished the gyoza, the broth was left over and I (quite rudely, I thought) started spooning it down. The flavor was different than the stew itself—tangier, brighter, complex. This was not food to be appreciated by a Neanderthal. As it turns out, the broth is often served as an appetizer before the stew, so I guess I wasn’t too ill-behaved.

The roast duck was a take on duck a l’orange with delicate potatoes au gratin and spinach and mushrooms in a soy ginger sauce. If you don’t think duck a l’orange goes with the spinach, or all three together in one bite, think again. I think this was the chef’s intent, to have the diner taste each dish separately but let the flavors and ultimately the foods meld into one bite by the end. The wine accompanying this was a red blend described simply as “dry” by the server but it was far more complex than a single varietal and certainly not bland like a merlot—it was so indescribably complex that it was simpler and easier to ponder the meaning of this dining experience and marvel at the wonders of what was going on. 

Then dessert was a turd, an actual turd.

If the rest of the dinner hadn’t have been so delicious, I would have been furious, but here I knew the turd was not the actual guano from the other night. It was a milk chocolate mousse with a dark chocolate [chip] in the middle and a white chocolate mousse underneath. It was glorious.

I guess I can describe the meal better in a different context. I am listening to a 15 year old Chanticleer recording as I type this. Chanticleer is a professional men’s a cappella group based in San Francisco, and they set the gold standard for classical men’s a cappella singing in the US. They sing with perfect intonation and technique, but they sing music that is not necessarily accessible to people without a lot of experience listening to Renaissance or modern music. When I listen to them, particularly live in the Italianate marble St. Ignatius church on the campus of the University of San Francisco, I experience feelings I can’t normally access, often at the same time. I feel more than the same exhilaration than I felt the first time heard a men’s chorus. I feel sorrow and get teary, but am not sad because below that I access deep peace. I feel my own emotional scars and yet they do not hurt, because I feel love for the world and the universe at the same time. For me the epitome of quality in art, or food, is that it unlocks this complexity of emotional range and experience in us. It requires a high degree of technical expertise to reach this level—in fact my chorus director Joe Piazza goes so far as to state that the best music performance is devoid of emotional input from the singer but that it is the technical excellence that communicates the message, the meaning, the complexity, the sublimeness, the emotion, the experience to the listener. Regardless of how much emotional contribution is required from the artist, that is the character of quality that I experienced at Drogaria.

That is the unspoken hope I think I have for this trip—to experience those deeper feelings, richer feelings, complex feelings that I’ve been so numb to for a while. To “rehumanize,” to reexpand after feeling so desiccated for the last few years, like a spore waiting to germinate, like those expandable water toys we had as kids. And also experience authenticity, the uniqueness of a place, perhaps in search of something authentic inside myself.

And if I’m to be honest, I didn’t experience this for the most part in Portugal. If you will indulge my perhaps unfair generalization but one that matches my experience, Portugal is a gritty country. Its cultural quality is not generally or easily accessible except to the wealthy or well informed, and the rest of us are stuck looking for ordinary food in crowded restaurants or (as in Porto) enjoying the beauty of the place without the easily found deeper cultural meaning and quality that is conveyed in places like France or Italy. 

It is said that Lisbon is the San Francisco of Europe because of its charming buildings, hills, and total knockoff golden orange bridge. And I think I’m disappointed in Lisbon, in Portugal, in the same ways I’m disappointed in San Francisco too. 

Drogaria, vintage port, and Chanticleer are the exceptions in Portugal and San Francisco rather than the rule. And Drogaria is the most deeply local experience of all of these: Portugal as it can be (a thoughtful experience of ancient foods in new ways) but equally necessary, what it is (a crumbling barrio apartment, possibly even a turd). That honesty makes the quality authentic, and the quality makes the honest truth more than bearable but something beautiful.

A couple of years ago there was a meme circulating that read something like, “Next time you complain about traffic, remember that you ARE traffic.” I felt that way in the Algarve, one locust among a horde of locusts overwhelming a place to scrub it of its beauty.

The Algarve IS undeniably beautiful. And the weather is pristine. The Algarve refers to the entire southern coastline of Portugal. Its rugged outcrops, cliffs, and caves are formed by limestone erosion. While a quarter mile inland temperatures were in the mid-90s, once you got next to the water things felt much more temperate from the sea breeze (and one night I even wished I had my jacket with me).

The outcroppings off Ponta da Piedras, a small peninsula near the southwest tip of Portugal, resembles the Twelve Apostles off the south coast of Australia—limestone towers—but the differences here are the turquoise water, the warm weather, the calm waters, the boats circling the towers.

The caves of Benagil are a particular highlight. To reach Benagil cave and its surroundings, you have to kayak in, or ride a speedboat. I did the latter—trying to sea kayak solo in those choppy, crowded waters might have killed me. (Trying to swim there, of course, would have killed me, as it does to several people every year.) You can rent a spot on a speedboat on the beach, which is a difficult-to-access cove at the bottom of a steep hill. You had to board the boat in the shallow surf in front of the endless stacks of sea kayaks available for couples to rent.

And it’s this beauty that of course leads to overtourism. The beach at Benagil was packed with European sunbathers assuredly trying to escape the heat of Britain, France, and Spain. The sea around the Benagil cave was chockablock with kayakers with boats like mine narrowly missing capsizing the smaller vessels. Another beach we saw on the boat trip, the Praia da Marinha with its elephant and gorilla, was almost completely inaccessible by land because police had closed the roads due to too many people. Somehow my Apple Maps GPS, possessed by the same demonic spirit of taking me up narrow, winding borderline impassable roads that I experienced from a Garmin GPS while driving in Ireland a decade ago, got me around some of the roadblocks, but only got me to within a mile of the beach trailhead. And in the heat of a 97 degree day, I wasn’t about to make that walk to see something from above that I’d already seen from the water.

Even more crowded was Lagos, one of the main towns in the region. Lagos is a small town whose historic center is solely a tourist center, much like the center of Mykonos. Unlike Mykonos, however, the shops and restaurants here are noticeably lower quality. The food is ordinary. The shops don’t sell compelling art but mostly trinkets. I ate one meal here at the only place I could find a reservation—a burger joint of all things. At least this place embraced the kitsch and went full on madness, even serving a sangria made with “green wine,” the vinho verde produced in the more lush regions in northern Portugal on the border with Spanish Galicia.

And that’s how I experienced the area, always having trouble getting into restaurants, having a difficult time finding decent food. Those were the loneliest times this week, wandering around oversaturated tourist trap towns with nothing in common with the other tourists and with nowhere meaningful to go while waiting for a late dinner reservation.

Ah loneliness. Have I told you about how lonely the last two years were, living alone, working from home, unable to travel, and for the first 15 months of the pandemic, stuck at home unable to see friends except in limited circumstances? How everything good in my life—travel, eating out, and most especially a sense of community—all but vanished? How it felt like I was reliving the other darkest times of my life, both of which were associated with severe loneliness: being friendless in my middle school years, and working horrifically long hours treating children with cancer without a well-developed social network to go home to in my first year in Houston? Do you know what the loneliness of having no friends is like, or of burnout is like, or of realizing you’re not like everyone else because you’re “the nerd” or worse “the queer?” Do you know what the loneliness of being 43 and never having been in a long term relationship is like, how that makes you think you’ll be alone forever? All of this while actually being an extrovert, meaning that I get energy more from being around people than being by myself? I don’t mind being alone on a trip such as this when I’m being awed by nature and culture on a long journey such as this, but when I feel a lonely moment in a crowd of people, sometimes I feel the loneliness of decades.

But there is balm too. A couple weeks ago when I was in Hawaii, the thought “the season of ruminating on the past is over; now is the time for new experiences” came to mind. And so on one day, after wandering around the empty, all-white, searing hot, creepy village of Tavira, I drove the to the Praia da Falesia.

Praia da Falesia is a beach backed by cliffs. It is crowded with beach goers near the steps at its entrances, but it is so long that eventually the crowds thin out and you are able to have more than enough space to yourself. I don’t like sitting on the beach when I’m by myself—I get bored quickly—but I took a walk in the surf for a few miles. The breeze took away the heat of the day. And the negative thought loops, the ruminations on loneliness, I’ve been stuck in during the last 2 years seemed to wash away in the gentle Atlantic surf.