English Version | Corporate dining: cup or mini plate?

01 Sep 2023
By Nuno Miguel Dias

Back to Work Issue

The working year, which, all things considered, is just the bulk of the time we spend awake, has three key moments: the vacations, the vacation allowance, and the 13th month. But since in most jobs, the prevailing spirit is "one day at a time", the highlight of the day is lunch. At the very least, that would make a manual entitled "Interacting with Colleagues for Dummies." At most, it would make a short story. Or three.

I've got a lot on my plate

Fernando always went for the fish. Sitting at a desk writing balance sheets for eight hours a day had taken its toll on his abdominal girth from an early age and developed into a hunchback that often resulted in a muscular contracture in his neck that caused him dizziness. There was a silver lining. Namely, sick leave. Three or four times a year. Grilled sardines weren't an option because there's no fresh fish on Mondays and it's extremely dishonest of the restaurant to offer a fish dish other than cod. Which also happened to be on the menu stuck to the front door of the snack bar/convergería, between advertisements for a missing cat and an excursion to the Alqueva with overnight stay and boat trip included (€129). With chickpeas. "Too heavy," he thought. All that was left was the great classics of small-scale Tuscan catering: oven-roasted chicken legs, which he ended up ordering. With sautéed vegetables. Which turned out to be Macedonia vegetables. Deep-frozen "at the time of harvest, to preserve all the freshness" (LOL). A 500gr white label package from a hypermarket. And the unfeasible alheira de Mirandela, which there is grilled and accompanied by boiled greens and to the south has been misrepresented, breaded, topped with a fried egg, and surrounded by fries, a bomb that in itself canonizes an entire pot of feijoada from the same Trás-os-Montes, smoked pork snout included. He ordered sparkling water to go with it because that's what he saw the skinny Italians drinking during the six hours he had to explore Genoa on his last cruise ten years ago. Through the door come the colleagues who had invited him to lunch "at the chenese", as Fulgencio from the finance department says, the one who is now shouting so that no one will miss it, including the owner of the establishment, who is a little deaf: "Well? Didn't you have a lot of work to do?", to which Fernando replies quietly: "I had to eat something." "Of course, then you'd have a little soup and a rissolinho, you wouldn't be eating chicken with everyone, man," shouts the other man, who has just come to drink his coffee because, as everyone knows, the coffee "from Chenês" is no good. Fernando guesses the crepe, the spicy acid soup, and the serving of beef with oyster sauce with a whole bottle of Mateus Rosé, plus a whisky because you don't see lizard brandy on the Hua Ta Li shelves anymore. It's business as usual. "Then it gets like this," he thinks. But Fulgencio is always like that. He has a problem with alcohol. He drinks a lot of it, all day long. In the morning, before "going to work", as he says, he drinks a coffee and a Macieira. At lunch he swigs a bottle of wine and, during the morning and afternoon breaks, he always invites us to "go for a coffee" in front of the director general, but he consumes two mediums at a time, which he calls "substitute." After his "journey", another of Fulgencio's words, Fernando always passes the establishment on his way to the train, where he sees him with a whisky in a tall glass, rosettes on his cheeks, and a blank stare at the tiny TV screen where The Price is Right is on. The rest of his colleagues, who also come there to drink coffee that isn't "from the Chinese", all of them managers from each of the company's departments, come up to the counter in order of importance, tacitly assigned but stated on each pay slip. The only one who notices Fernando's presence is Glória, director of the commercial department, responsible for the nude sent by WhatsApp that ended up resulting in the divorce that Fernando asked for with a tough speech and a heart full of vows of eternal love made by the two of them in a pact of hot blood, profuse sweat and tears of happiness, the company's commercial and financial departments merged into one as if there were no budget presentation tomorrow. Unfortunately, Gloria regretted her decision to keep the Norwegian Forest cat called Popcorn and went back to her ex-boyfriend. Not only did she notice him, but after months of icy silence, she winked at him. "It must be because it's summer," thought Fernando, sucking on his Molotov. Then he raised his index finger. Gloria approached and the others stared at her for a few seconds, then lowered their heads in a close circle of whispering. "Did you call me?" she asked. "No, I was asking the waiter for the bill, I mean, but you could come, of course." She smiled and quipped: "And you're going to tip me, Mr. Fernando?" Smiles, once a constant, have been frozen for months. He remembered the two of them laughing as they stood in the ice cream parlor, trying to see who would order a scoop of cassata. Or in the pastry shop, when someone under 70 ordered a snail. "I'm glad you had a sweetie," she said, eyeing the rest of the caramel on the saucer. "You'll need it. You have to send me all the invoices for the quarter to see if I get the prize." "And with that money, where are we going to spend that promised weekend?" he demands. An icy silence was interrupted by someone tapping a coin on the stainless steel counter.

The First Supper

The usual hangout is officially called Rio Coura and its owner, Mr. Travassos, in his usual short-sleeved multicolored plaid shirt, speaks "ashim", saves "shempre" for the crowd and has no qualms about transferring, in front of the clientele, the leftover jaquinzinhos from the plates to the escabeche platter which, together with another one containing onion baits, he proudly displays in the window, above the soft drinks, and serves as a starter. Pureza, from the finance department, hasn't sat down yet and is already asking: "Does anyone want the ham or can we send it back?" To which Zé Maria, the rugby mastodon at weekends, replies: "We want the ham and you can have those wonderful crackling too." Rosarinho, from reception, also twitches his nose before sitting down. She's been eating salads for weeks and now she's certainly going to spoil herself, starting with the Cola Zero she'll be forced to order because she doesn't like wine, let alone beer. Everyone looks good, with a healthy complexion thanks to a summer of beach and countryside and terraces with snails and popular festivals and farturas and entremeadas on bread and sardines eaten by hand, but now, back to the working year, we have to maintain an image. So Matilde won't eat the cuttlefish with ink because she doesn't have a toothbrush in her desk drawer, where she keeps a scented rosary bought at the Shrine of Fatima, and Carlota, who shares the office with her and the PowerPoint presentations to discuss the annual budget, will not eat them. immediately forgets the horse mackerel with Spanish sauce because he'll be burping onions all afternoon. The seats at the end of the table are taken by the inseparable Dinis, Martim, Francisco, Manuel Maria, Isabel (Belicha), Carlota (Tota), and Sancha (Chinha), all recent marketing and communications trainees, i.e. those who do everything at the request of the other departments, from archiving images to drafting newsletters that could be an email. Anything but marketing strategies, which require higher orders, and communications, whose texts always have to pass the management's sieve. Some ask for the pataniscas with bean rice, others ask to replace the side dish with pea rice, which was intended for the hake fillets, aromatically and fried in the same oil that nobody asks for. Others go for the grilled roe and as someone asks for it to come only with broccoli, so goes the request for everyone, at least until Mr. Travassos appears to announce: "She's all with broccoli there's no broccoli for everything. Can you sher carrots?". Salvador and Zé Maria, who has earned the commonly accepted epithet of "the animals", choose, respectively, ribs with migas and hake head with all of them. Or almost all of them. Because there will be no broccoli. Belicha and Chinha ask for a prawn omelet to "crack", which will lead to a discussion in the kitchen, and Dinis, the local gourmand, asks for his entremeadas to come with boiled potatoes and not fried ones. He gets disapproving looks from everyone except Tota, who is pouting. The dishes arrive, the dishes go, the wine disappears and, as always, until the desserts and coffees arrive (decaf for Martim and a digestif for Zé Maria), the table turns into an assembly. The most demanding of the group launched the challenge of a four-day week or, at the very least, leaving at 3 pm on Fridays, complained about the lack of Wi-Fi in the office in the middle of 2023, others exposed their difficulties caused by low salaries, curse colleagues who aren't there, and so on, tongues wagging because of the alcohol and the heat of the moment, also due to the savings on the air conditioning in the room, tongues wag, with blame directly attributed, fingers pointing, the volume increases, the glances over the shoulder from other desks also, the dirty dishes are washed in such a way that Mr. Travassos is forced to show up. Travassos is forced to appear, whispering: "Is your boss here? Then don't bother, my boys". Yes, the director general isn't here. But everyone knows that he's going to know every detail spoken there, through the mouth of Pureza, now sunk in such silence that she's already grabbed the remains of the ham, making it dessert.

Collaborators of the world, unite in the lunchbox

"Even the English can't live without it. A very salty paste in a little jar that they spread on toast and sandwiches, which always have cucumber, the Marmite," said Ricardo, as he washed his cutlery. "But the word comes from French. Marmite simply means pot," replied Mónica. Ricardo knew that very well. He was just trying to make a joke. He hated this side of his work colleagues. Seriousness as a way of being, as if all their humor had been sucked out of them by some kind of dark vampire that overshadows their day and refuses to pry its claws from their shoulders from the moment the laptop closes and, he believed, life begins. There were very few people with whom he would risk a drink at the end of the day, let alone dinner or a night out. That's why he preferred the scullery, the place where the few but, in his view, good people gathered. He was now washing his Tupperware, the same that had accompanied him from school to university, where all his mother's love fit. It was a real box of surprises where, day after day, he expected to find the leftovers from the previous day's dinner, but whose opening always revealed a meal with the freshness of any ready meal and salads with the brightness of the day. Fried chicken, Russian salad, chickpeas with cod and peppers - it was amazing how a mother's creativity is not exhausted by the limitations of a cold meal. Now that he had stepped out of his mother's shadow, he demanded the same of himself. He woke up very early to work out what would delight him at lunchtime. A piece of fruit for dessert, yogurt for a snack, all neatly packed in a lunch box that he carried on his shoulder and never in his backpack, which was reserved for his computer and its components. Mónica had a different story. The daughter of a factory worker from the South Bank, she remembers accompanying her mother on her morning trips to the market, her careful choice of products, the subsequent sometimes complicated preparation, and the careful passing on to the lunchbox, the real thing, an aluminum container with a red lid that closed with a few springs on the side. Placed at the bottom of a linen bag with a quarter of a bottle of red wine and a good loaf of bread, little Mónica, by her mother's hand, would take her lunch to her father, who would meet her outside the cork factory so that he could have a hot meal with his comrades. Perhaps as a way of preserving memories that soothed her soul, she transposed all this to her day-to-day life and was very proud of her double thermal lunchbox, which allowed her to eat soup first while still warm and then a dish as if she were at home Carlos, the gourmand, was on another level. He dedicated his weekends to cooking elaborate dishes to receive friends. He would either go for traditional cuisine with chickpea stew, feijoada with homemade sausages, dogfish soup, or dory with dogfish roe açorda, or he would venture into exotic curries, mackerel temaki, pad thai, lapaz batchoy or ray ambotic. He preferred the classic term, which had been in the family for as many years as it took to remember the delicious rabbit rice that was taken for a day at the beach. His father used to call it "térmes" and now he was making it possible for the specialties that Carlos prepared with the finesse of a Michelin-starred chef (hence his nickname Carlinhos Pirelli) to arrive at the table still warm. "But there's a microwave over there," insisted Sandra and António, the other two marmite makers whose delicacies were nothing more than leftovers in hypermarket ice cream cartons and hermetically wrapped in plastic bags, all conveniently hidden in a beautiful waterproof lunch box they carried in their backpacks. "Yeah? And how do we do it if we want to eat out?" he asked, receiving general astonishment in return, a strand of spaghetti falling onto António's chin, who had stopped sucking on the contents of his coffee and macadamia Tupperware: "I don't earn to go out to restaurants," he said as if everyone didn't know. Carlos clarified: "I'm talking about getting out of here, and having lunch outside on a park bench." They looked at each other. From that day on, and for as long as the weather allowed (we know that the Portuguese summer lasts until São Martinho), all lunches were taken by the river, sitting on beach towels spread out on the grass. A fisherman there, a boat passing by there, seagulls accepting the offer of a piece of bread or a penne rigatte, Sandra and António varying between salads of black-eyed peas with tuna and ricotta cheese with walnuts, Mónica enjoying her soup and Ricardo the inspired humor of his colleagues. Or the fact that Carlos swapped his excellent delicacies for a ham sandwich and twenty minutes of a semi-nap in the shade of the rhododendron tree where, the following spring, they spotted a blackbird's nest. They watched the offspring grow until they became indifferent to their presence. Sometimes there was a picnic. This meant that everyone brought something that they laid out on the tablecloth for general enjoyment. On those days, Ricardo always brought a jar of Marmite.

Translated from the original on The Coming Back Issue, published September 2023. Full stories and credits on the print issue.

Nuno Miguel Dias By Nuno Miguel Dias

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