Does a great dinner depend solely on the restaurant?

“Unbreak my heaaaaart…. Say you’ll love me agaaaaain”… we sang excitedly on the Via do Infante, as we left Vila Vita Parc in Porches behind, to the sound of the M80 – even though we weren’t Toni Braxton fans.

It was in 2021, still in the midst of the pandemic, after dinner at Ocean. My wife and I were on a family vacation, and that day, we left the children with their grandparents and uncles, took a few relaxing dips in the pool, and left in time to be at Vila Vita before our reservation time. The day before, the restaurant had called to explain that, due to health restrictions and the obligation to close at 10:30 pm, the tasting menu would be shortened by two courses. However, without ever conveying a sense of rush, the kitchen and dining room teams managed to serve the complete menu. Before we sat down at the table, expectations had been lowered; when we left, they had been largely exceeded.

For a while I was convinced that I had experienced the best dinner of my life in Portugal – don't read this hastily: I still think it was an extraordinary dinner and I remain convinced that Ocean is one of the great Portuguese restaurants, to which, at that level, a third star would be fitting. But, after a few years, I realize today that it wasn't just the cuisine or just the dining room that created that memory. There was a set of circumstances that I now recognize as impossible to ignore: the relaxation of the holidays, the absence of worries, the company, the surprise caused by the ability to serve the entire menu and, finally, the drive back where, happily, we simply sang.

This is a rarely discussed fact: no one enters a restaurant as if they were a blank page. Each customer brings with them the day they've had, the worries they carry, the people they share the table with, the expectations they've created, and even how they arrived at the restaurant. All of this "sits" at the table with each customer. And, although it's impossible to quantify this influence, it seems difficult to deny that it exists. Just do the reverse exercise.

I think, for example, of the times I've gone to Belcanto, Alma/Henrique Sá Pessoa, or Feitoria in Lisbon. It rarely happens on a Saturday; it's almost always a weekday, often at lunchtime. Many times I come straight from the office, and although I try not to schedule meetings for that afternoon or the following day, I know that work is still waiting for me. I may not be in a hurry, I may not even receive calls in the middle of it, but the context is inevitably different from that holiday day in the Algarve. And it would be naive to pretend that this doesn't condition how I perceive a dinner, just as I have to acknowledge that, under these conditions, my standard for evaluating these restaurants may be different. And if these conditions are repeated – if in Lisbon I often go on weekdays and, for example, in the Algarve I go mainly on holidays or weekends – what seems to be just a circumstance of a visit can end up introducing a more consistent bias in how I appreciate them.

Nothing I've pointed out diminishes the merit of the kitchen or the dining room. A great restaurant will most likely remain a great restaurant regardless of the customer's mood. But between what the staff offers and what each person takes away from lunch or dinner, there's a space that no restaurant can control: the personal life of the person who enters.

Not only that, but also because of that, I'm intrigued by how easily restaurants are discussed as if it were possible to completely separate the gastronomic experience from the human experience. We talk about technique, product, service, creativity, the wine list, or value for money, and all of that naturally deserves to be analyzed. But we rarely reflect on the circumstances in which that lunch or dinner was experienced.

This reflection inevitably leads me to another: that of writing about gastronomy. For a long time, genres were relatively easy to distinguish. A critique was a critique. A chronicle assumed the subjectivity of the writer's perspective. A travel diary didn't have the same ambition as a technical evaluation. Today, especially on social media, these boundaries have become almost completely blurred. A one-minute reel, an Instagram carousel, a chronicle, a promotional text, or a simple recommendation among friends often end up being consumed in the same way and, often, under the same implicit designation of review. But the confusion isn't only for the reader: those who publish also sometimes benefit from this lack of definition, presenting conclusions with the authority of a critique only to later, when confronted with them, claim the freedom and subjectivity inherent in a personal account.

The problem is that not all of these exercises seek to answer the same question, nor do they start from the same assumptions. And there is, between criticism and chronicle, a territory today that is probably much more populated than either of them: that of recommendation. Saying that you went to a restaurant, that you liked it, and that it is recommended is not necessarily writing a review or a chronicle, and there is nothing wrong with that; the problem is when the reader or viewer attributes to this recommendation a pretense of objectivity and rigor that it did not have – or when the person writing it pretends that it does, without assuming the demands that follow from it. Criticism, in the classical sense of the term, seeks to approximate an appreciation that survives the context in which it was written. It does not ignore that the author may also arrive tired, happy, worried, or particularly receptive, but makes a deliberate effort to ensure that these circumstances interfere as little as possible in the evaluation of the restaurant. It is a difficult and intellectually demanding exercise.

The chronicle starts from a different premise. It doesn't seek to eliminate the observer; rather, it accepts that the observer is part of the story, not because they are more important than the restaurant, but because it recognizes that the experience never exists in isolation from the person living it. The dinner inevitably includes what happened before the first course arrived and continues even after the last dessert disappears from the table.

Conveniently for me, who prefers the chronicle style, I would say that transparency is perhaps more important today than absolute objectivity, which is almost impossible. This is not because context should serve as an excuse for hasty or unfair assessments, but because it helps to interpret what is being read. Knowing the circumstances in which an experience took place does not diminish the credibility of the writer; on the contrary, it allows the reader to better understand the scope of the conclusions reached. The kitchen and the living room do everything in their power to provide a great experience. The rest depends on each individual.