Fancy Breakfasts and Philosophy Discussions - Smoke Restuarant in Pretoria, South Africa

Sometimes you just have to say screw it and do something, otherwise, you will stagnate and get stuck in your (false) sense of security. I saw a restaurant with good reviews in a fancy part of town and I told Hive account@urban.scout we need to visit them. I saw their menu and some of the items caught my attention. So we headed down to the Smoke Restaurant in Pretoria to grab a quick breakfast.

I made a reservation in their "whisky lounge" and we sat betwixt some neat-looking single malt scotch whiskies and the aroma of freshly ground coffee luring us deeper into the trap of getting something to drink. A couple of items on the menu prickled our interest.

Before scanning the menu for the food, Hive account@urban.scout's eyes caught a drink we had never even thought about: Lavender iced late.

The drinks came and we were blown away by the simplicity and the ensuing complexity; yes, it does not make sense! We marvelled and thought about the unique taste, something we had never even conceptualised. I am growing a lot of rosemary and lavender bushes and I am always contemplating what to make with them. Now I know! I am going to make different syrups. I am already thinking about lemon and rosemary, lavender and African/wild sage, and so on.

We scanned the menu and Hive account@urban.scout's eyes caught the sticky wings. But this was not normal wings, it was coated with fermented Rooibos (tea) kombucha chilli sauce. The taste was again out of this world and beyond what we had ever tasted before. Complex, yet simple. Again this contradiction between the simple and the complex. I think we want to overcomplicate so many things for the sake of making it complex. Yet, they are so simple and in their simplicity they automatically become complex.

The reason for this seeming contradiction is rather simple: we have not entered and facilitated it on our minds. It goes beyond our frame of reference, it challenges our ways of thinking in a specific manner: it asks us to contemplate it from different angles we had not yet thought about.

Being the simple person I am, I took a double espresso and the pulled brisket eggs benedict.

Soon, our conversation turned philosophical. What is wisdom? I told Hive account@urban.scout about Socrates and his ignorance, about knowing that he knows nothing. We contemplated this seemingly simple statement having profound consequences. Always stating that we do not have enough information yet but somehow we move on, we carry on with our daily lives. Our faith in our knowledge is actually paper thin. We trust everything from a safe distance because we know if we question it too much, the paper card house might tumble down.

We carried on to the skeptics, who get their name from the Greek word skeptikós/sképtomai meaning to consider, to enquire, to look, to seek. How we have butchered the meaning of this word; from meaning to seek, look, enquire, to meaning to doubt. I doubt xyz. This shift of meaning was in part due to Descartes who for some reason doubted his own material existence because he could only definitively prove his thoughts by doubting them. Now the idea of being a skeptic means to doubt, to be suspicious of something, to not totally believe it. Such a shame as the original meaning is much more productive and modest, humble, and open. And how arrogant are the modern skeptics who by doubting already have some pre-existing meaning in their mind, because being able to doubt something one already needs to know what she is doubting and the consequences of that doubting. The hubris of modern people and their reliance on anything that sways their beliefs. The skeptics, following Socratic ignorance, were onto something.

And we concluded that wisdom has always been seen as a kind of contradiction in negating itself. Wisdom is the lack of knowing, the lack of knowledge, yet always seeking knowledge and wisdom not as an end in itself but as something we might pick up along our search, our discovering journey through all that life has to offer.

Food brings us together. Over a plate of food, we leave behind our negative prejudices. Or no, we lay our prejudices out on the table so that we might inspect them from a closer perspective. Maybe this age-old tradition of eating together will help us shatter the divided world we have become. If we break bread together, or even better, if we bake bread together, we might come to the conclusion that our preconceived ideas need some more attention.

But that is the dream, and sometimes I live in a utopia locked up in my mind.

For now, I can only hope and break/bake some bread.

The photographs used in this post were taken by Hive account@urban.scout. The writings in this post are my own unless stated otherwise or hyperlinked. This is also not a paid promotion for the Smoke restaurant, we genuinely enjoyed their food.