French meals, snacks and food: apero

Apero

Apero is really common over here and it seems to be a chance for a 4^th “meal” of the day, or at least an excuse to meet up with people and socialize with food and drinks. The term "apéro" is short for aperitif, maybe a bit like a casual drinks meetup in the U.S., but with tastier snacks. The rules are hardly rigid, but even so, there seem to be more rules around it than any kind of late-afternoon after-works drinks I’ve been out for.

Apero doesn’t have to be fancy, but it definitely can be, and it generally lasts 1-3 hours, depending on how well everyone is enjoying each other’s company, and it’s best if it rolls right into dinner.

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It’s really just social gathering around snacks. If you don’t know people well, expect a “2 and through” kind of situation. As one host explained to me, it’s “a drink and a refill, and usually nothing more.” While it was nice to know the rules, it’s was also the last and only time we’ve met them for drinks.

Apero is not quite happy hour

Apero is a little elater, for starters. Happy hours in NYC could start at 4pm or earlier, depending on your workplace (3pm the day before thanksgiving, for example, if anyone was even around), but apero is closer to 6. Apero tends to be a bit smaller, with some really nice snacks, nice cheeses, little salty snacks and sausage, etc., as opposed to the piles of fried food most US happy hours provide.

Arrive late, "Le quart d’heure de politesse," or roughly 15 minutes late. We showed up half an hour late to one and people looked at us like we’d just landed from another planet. Again, in New York, if you show up right when they told you to, you’re kind of weird.

As an American, apero is also small. If your host hands you a tiny bowl of something, take your time with it. That may be the whole menu. Then again, we’ve owned 1 oz serving bowls that went unused for years on end because they were comically small to us, which has been a very typical service dish for us.

Apero is a bit random

It’s one meal where they seem to flex the rules a bit.

My favorite so far was apero at a café near our apartment where the bartender and I started tasting every hot sauce that they had in the place with beer, bread, butter and saussicon. The bartender declared it the “apero du jour” for €3 and about 10 other people joined us. Each persn got a few slice of bread, a few slices of sausage, a slab of butter and an assortment of hot sauces that we kept passing around. It was weird, but a lot of fun, but it also stuck to the rules: it started at 5:30pm, it lasted for about an hour and then people went on their way to dinner.

On the bright side, apero is a great chance to bring out the guilty little snacks: chips, those kinds of pickled olive-meat combinations they have or whatever other small bits seem interesting. Every bar and every supermarket has some kind of “apero” offering and they’re all pretty safe.

if you don’t know what to bring, a good dry sausage (saucisson sec, or just saucisson) is a good idea unless everyone is vegetarian. I usually just bring something that I like. That way, at least one person is happy.

Apero is a great tradition, but it’s casual. If people keep telling you about the rules, you might not be in for a fun time.

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