From Puglia With Love

Last week I took my girly girl for a small vacation.

Since I’ve been holed up in my office room for the last 6 months, only going out to buy lamb chops and wrestle hairy Serbian men, I thought why not.

Let’s go to Italy. Stay at nice places, eat sh*t tons of cheese pasta, and live the life that everybody on Instagram seems to want.

For the ones that know me…

I don’t joke around with the food that I’m eating.

It needs to be a lot, it needs to be hand-made (no Uber eats for me), and it needs to be straight from the farm.

So we arrived at the first place that I booked for my lovey-dovey and me.

It’s the kind of old money place, in which the average age is 60+ years, and everybody just talks about the next vacation they’re going on.

During the 2-hour drive, I’ve been carefully planning my feast.

What I had in mind…

• 200-300 grams of Cacio e Pepe pasta

• 400-500 gram Fiorentina Steak

• A bottle of light Tuscian red wine

• And finished off with a little bit too much tiramisu

I opened the menu…

No meat? No cheesy pasta? No chance of getting a risotto?

Holy cow - what’s going on here I thought.

The owner, Pierluiggi, tells me in a charming Italian accent:

“You know in Puglia, we prefer to eat seafood and vegetables. No cheesy pasta - that’s only what the idiots in the North cook.

So what you can have are Oysters, Spaghetti Vongole, and all sorts of shrimp. But no cheesy pasta and no meat.”

And it was true. No matter where we went, no matter the strings I tried to pull - the same story.

No cheese, no fatty meat. Just plain tomato pasta, mussels and fried fish.

Most of the restaurants were like 50% full and they all offered the same boring stuff.

I accepted my fate and closed that chapter.

Until something happened…

Be sheer luck, on the last day, we found a place in the middle of nowhere, far away from Tourist streets, that did exactly the opposite of all “virtue signaling” chefs.

All sorts of cheesy pasta, Lasagnas, Tiramisu, all the things you dream about when you go to Italy.

And this place was full to the brim. Tourists wait one hour just to finally taste some cheesy pasta.

And no sight of boring, bland Tomate noodles.

Lesson here:

Give people what they want.

Not what you think they want.

And sometimes - in order to be successful, you just need to do the exact opposite of everybody out there.

It reminds me of our Maslow Pyramid of Blockchain.

In web3 people want…

No gas, gambling options, free staking money, and guaranteed security.

As easy as that.

The restaurants in Puglia reminded me of 99% of web3 projects out there that talk about “tech”, “bridging the gap” and “transaction speed”. Nobody cares.

Just give people the cheesy pasta they want.

Apollo