I met Céleste, Dawg, and Marga my sophomore year of college. They reinstilled my hope for what you can expect from your friends, the breadth that friends can teach you, and how much fun it is to live with people who love salty snack foods as much as you do. We spent most of our time together sitting and talking. Most of that sitting and talking was done with a glass of wine in hand and some kind of food in front of us. During the year that we lived together, they introduced to me a concept known as “apéro.” For those of you who don’t know, apéro is what you do before dinner – you snack and hang out and have a drink or two – it is an extraordinary moment of the day.

The snacks can be nuts. The snacks can be nuts and some olives. The snacks can be nuts, olives, and a saucisson. The choice is yours and you cannot go wrong. Céleste, Dawg, Marga, and I quickly coined the term, apérodinner, which, much like it sounds, is when you get all the snack foods of apéro but have enough that it constitutes dinner; girl dinner has nothing on apérodinner. 

The summer after our sophomore year, I traveled to Marga’s parent’s home in Brussels to reunite with my apéro sages. Early on in the trip, we found ourselves at a small bar on a quiet residential street. There was a triangular median area which was full of small tables and chairs which we quickly slid into and went up to the bar to order our drinks. To our great delight, we  found out that with the purchase of our drinks came four small to-go soup cups which were meant to be filled with roasted salted peanuts. These glistening peanuts were kept in a large barrel by the door with a self-service shovel stuck into the great mound. I mean…..

Apéro is genius because it transcends temporality, location, expectation, and definition. It is the consummate encompassment of what Americans who travel to Europe see and why it is that they come back talking about how much better Europe is in comparison. It encapsulates the ability to enjoy, sit, allow time to pass, be with your friends, or your book, or your surroundings and it is only when you become hungry for a meal or cannot sit in the same place any longer that you then move on to dinner – or in our case, you just keep enjoying apéro and eat enough to call it dinner. There is also something ridiculously accessible about it. Everyone at any given bar in the 6pm to 8:30pm region is probably taking part, or my favorite kind of apéro happens by first going to a supermarket, buying your snacks of choice, a bottle of wine, and finding a place to sit. 

The idea of enjoyment and aperitivo/apéro go hand-in-hand for me. In Italian, the verb godersi means to enjoy. It is a reflexive verb, meaning it’s done to oneself. You, yourself must take part in the enjoyment in order to enjoy. Apéro and aperitivo symbolize this liminal moment between expected mealtimes; the saltiness from your snack and the warmth you get from your drink leads to this beautiful levity that doesn’t really exist elsewhere – the excitement of what’s to come and the settledness that exists within the absolute pleasure of sitting, talking, and eating a lot of olives – which to me, is heaven in a nutshell.