3 weeks ago, I was watching my favorite Youtube (Mark Wiens) eat in Lisbon as part of my travel research. Going to Portugal, it’s important to me to eat authentic food. I feel like I’m absorbing the culture better if “I eat what the locals eat.”
So when Mark Wiens couldn’t find an authentic Portuguese restaurant and had to end up in an Indian place to eat samosas and curry, I laughed my ass off. I thought:
How could a professional eater whose entire job is to find the best places to eat fail to find an authentic Portugese place to eat? That’ll never happen to me. Good job going to Portugal just to eat Indian food LOL.
3 weeks later, we ate at the exact same place as he did. And to add insult to injury, I wasn’t even right about the type of food it was! It’s not Indian – it turns out the food is African with Portuguese influence. So not only did I not find “authentic” Portuguese food, I’m racist as well. Goddamnit.
Fortunately, the food there turned out to be phenomenal. The piri piri sauce is intensely spicy and I love the aggression of the sauce. The samosas there is super fragrant and their lamb + lamb sauce mixes very nicely with rice. Their shrimp curry is also to die for.
Ironically, I highly recommend this place if you go to Lisbon (Cantinho Do Aziz). The reason’s because authentic Portuguese food is very heavy, and it’s nice to have some lighter tasting meals to break up the heaviness.
How Did We End Up There?
Turns out Mark Wiens was right. It’s remarkably difficult to find an authentic place to eat in Portugal, especially on Sundays and Mondays. The reason for this is that most “authentic” Portuguese take Sundays and Mondays off. For the few outliers that is open on Sundays, you will need to book far in advance as they will be packed.
So yesterday (Sunday), we were wandering around, not able to find any place that’s open. We wanted to hit up a takeout Thai place, but the wait was 40 minutes. So we walked around randomly in hopes we’d find something before starving to death…
…until I saw a small signage that had an image of a shirt that I’d recognize anywhere–Mark Wien’s shirt that says “I travel for food.”
We had randomly wandered to a place that Mark Wiens ate at, and it seemed like fate. So we sat down and ate there. It was only when I googled the restaurant name while sitting down that I realized this is the exact place I laughed at Mark Wiens for eating at 3 weeks ago.
Karma Is Real
…and it’s not what you think. It’s not cosmic justice or anything like that. I think laughing at others' misfortune invites misfortune into your own life in the following sequence:
- Laughing at others' misfortune means you’re overconfident in your own fortune.
- This overconfidence makes you careless and arrogant.
- Being careless for a prolonged amount of time means bad things will happen to you soon enough.
Thus, when other people make a stupid mistake or some bad thing happens to them, don’t be an asshole like me. Don’t laugh and fuel your own arrogance.
Instead, take bad things happening to others as a stern reminder that it can happen to you too.
After all, if a Youtuber whose sole career is to travel and eat at the best places, and even he couldn’t find authentic food, what makes me think I could somehow easily do it?
The more accurate way to interpret the event is to take that as a signal to book restaurants 3 weeks in advance so I don’t end up in the same place as him. Instead, I just laughed and did nothing to prevent this “misfortune” from happening to me, and literally ended up in the same place as him.