The Anarchist Restaurant

According to the centuries old legend of the 5th Empire, there will come a day when the world knows no nation states. There will be no rulers. Instead, everything will be ruled in the spirit of love and understanding. The only law will be the golden rule.

The source of this empire will be the river Douro. A spirit of enterprise and enthusiasm for all things will flow from its sacred banks, and this spirit will liberate the world from our current system.

Where it will all start, according to legend

As an anarchist, I love this legend, especially since the river Douro flows along the city of Porto where I live. Whenever I feel particularly poetic about my vision of the future, I love to look for evidence of the 5th Empire in the random and organic style of architecture and social organization found everywhere in this town, and today was a particularly fruitful day in that respect.

My wife and I had just been to an art gallery in the vicinity of the river. It was time for lunch, so she suggested we'd go to a place she had been to a week earlier. This place serves lunch for four euro a person, including soup and beer, she told me. That's almost half the price of similar lunch menus other places in town. Furthermore, the restaurant is run by an African woman. It's an interesting place with interesting food.

This is precisely the sort of thing I like about Porto, so I wasn't hard to convince. We headed down towards the river. Pretty soon we were walking down a residential street. Then, my wife stopped. It's here, she said. Here? I asked. We were standing outside an unmarked garage door half way down the street. Where was the restaurant? Then my wife pushed open a steel door embedded in the larger garage door and stepped into what by all accounts was a private space.

The garage was fitted with several tables to one side and a bar with a make shift kitchen to the other side. Beyond the garage, to the back, there was a garden with grape wines giving natural shade to several other tables. A plump African woman was busy over by the pots of food. How did you know about us? she asked. Then my wife explained that she had visited her restaurant a week earlier with some friends. Welcome back! was her friendly reply. Go have a seat!

My wife and I chose a table under the wines out in the garden. The food was simple but delicious. Not too generous, but plenty good enough for us, certainly for the price. From the look of it, most of the other customers were students from the nearby art school. They too seemed happy and content.

Two dogs roamed around freely in the garden, which is odd for a restaurant. However, this was no ordinary restaurant. This was an anarchist arrangement, organized with no interference from the state. The owner of the restaurant had therefore arranged things completely according to her own wishes with no regards to local rules and regulations. She's not forcing anyone to come to her restaurant, so anyone bothered by dogs can simply go somewhere else.

With no official business status, the owner is also spared the paper work that goes with it, and she pays no taxes. In the end, she ends up with more money, less hassle, and more freedom, especially in this age of plague hysteria. This woman kept open throughout the lockdown. She was making money while others went bankrupt, and the thing that saved her was her pragmatic decision to do this the anarchist way rather than the official way.

The only problem with her arrangement is the constant threat of arrest. However, with the alternative being Kafka like bureaucracy and bankruptcy through lockdown, she's already one step ahead of herself had she chosen to go the official route. Besides, she probably doesn't have a bank account or anything else that the state can confiscate, so the most she's risking is a few days in jail.

The fact that she cannot promote her business with a sign outside is not really a problem. Word of mouth travels fast, especially among students where a few euros saved is a big deal. My guess is that she makes at least as much as any other restaurant in the area. But there will no doubt come a day when someone snitches on her, and that will be the day she will have to find some other way to make a living. Until then, she's doing rather well, and justly so.

Another thing that my wife and I got confirmed today is that the 5th Empire is not some den of criminal low life, but a place of respect and appreciation, at least as much as it is in our current state run society.

Having had a very nice lunch experience, we went for a walk in the neighbourhood. Not until a good half hour into our stroll did I realize that I had forgotten my cane at the restaurant, and I was immediately worried that someone would have seen it and taken it. It's a valuable antique. The temptation to take it would be great.

Me and my cane

Making this all the more agonizing is the fact that it isn't really my cane. I'm borrowing it from my mother in law. If I lose it, I'm losing more than just a cane. I'm losing goodwill as well, and that to me is something I take very seriously. However, I was soon relieved of my worries. The new occupants of the table where my wife and I had been sitting were genuinely relieved to see us claim the cane. They had spotted it and recognized its value, and were concerned on behalf of its distracted owner. The woman running the restaurant was likewise relieved to hear that no-one had taken it in our absence. She's running a respectable establishment, and would hate to see its reputation damaged by some rotten apple among her clients.

This doesn't mean that the 5th Empire will be without the odd crook. But it illustrates that human nature is not so corruptible that it needs a bureaucracy of law enforcers to be good and just. All that's required is freedom and a pragmatic approach to problem solving. Who knows, maybe I just witnessed the very beginning of the 5th Empire. Maybe there really is an unstoppable force of love and understanding emanating from the banks of the river Douro.

The river Douro