Never Retire: What Life Feels Like in Spain

Good food, long lunches, late dinners, and a better rhythm.

We had dinner between 9 pm and 10:30 pm three times last week.

One night, my wife and I made chicken seasoned liberally with garlic, rosemary, pepper, and other spices, accompanied by onions and peppers. We drank a beer with dinner and went to bed around midnight.

We had dinner on Friday night at La Cooperativa del Mar, a great neighborhood restaurant specializing in tinned seafood. Our mussels came with potato chips liberally flavored with hot sauce and adorned with hot peppers. They liberally topped the tomato-based salad with fresh onions. Everything we had—including salmon, anchovies, cheese, and ceviche (more onions)—was (yes) liberally doused in local olive oil.

All of this liberal food preparation, accompaniment, and adornment—plus eating late at night—would have led to a whole host of digestion issues in the US. If I ate almost anything after 9 p.m. in LA—especially if it was spicy or seasoned—it was almost certain that I would wake up in the middle of the night with heartburn that lingered—along with the burps (and sometimes a lot more)—into the next day.

I remember walking home from one of the few restaurants we could walk to in our Los Angeles neighborhood—Petit Trois, where I had their famous burger. The pain and intensity I experienced on the 10-minute walk home were so intense that I didn’t think I was going to make it. Luckily, I did and spent the next hour or so, you know where you're doing, you know what.

Knock this puppy back with a couple of beers and fries at HUNDRED Burgers in Valencia—home of the best burger in the world—and no such misfortune.

I’m not here to focus on why the food is shit—and often makes you feel like shit—in the United States. Nobody I have come across covers the subject particularly well. I’m surely not going to be the person to change this.

However, I do know this—

• “Bobby Kennedy,” as my mother sacrilegiously referred to him the other day, sure as hell isn’t going to change it. The real Bobby Kennedy must be rolling in his grave.

• Going out to eat in the United States—and even sometimes, cooking at home is a ripoff. You think you’re paying for quality. But how can I spend $38 for a burger or spend $20 at the farmers market on a speck of produce and end up with the shits? A few burps and farts—that’s your body doing what it does. The digestive reactions people experience on the regular in the culinary wasteland that is the United States of America—that shit’s not normal.

• The land of opportunity has become the land of opportunism. As if we didn’t see it coming as capitalism ran amuck for so many years. Now we they have a President selling crypto ETFs from the White House. What’s next? $26 for a cheese pizza pie or $8.50 for a bottle of Bud?

But—hey—it’s all perfectly normal. Let’s keep getting fleeced, then get in our cars and drive long distances after being taken to the cleaners. We always have our Instagram memes and variations of the same tired TikTok videos to return to.

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Real food. Long lunches. Late dinners.

People out living in some of the best urban public space in the world, walking — not rushing — home, and definitely not eating behind a steering wheel.

You can sit down at 10 p.m., eat well, drink well, and wake up the next day feeling fine.

When the basics work, everything else feels a little easier.