Don't Call Me Late for Dinner
My tummy can't get used to French time
If I eat dinner later than 7:30 p.m., which is just a couple hours before my bedtime, I get agita. This has made it difficult to adopt the late dinner hour here in France.
I’m really trying, but I just can’t seem to get used to it.
While it’s possible to find a restaurant open as early as 6, and even some that offer service continu (continuous service), doing that makes me feel like I’m on a bus trip from the senior citizen center. The 4 p.m. seating might be popular at Cracker Barrel, but it’s not a thing here in France.
Dining out in France is a lovely experience. What makes it so special isn’t just the quality of the food, but also the way the French have elevated grabbing a bite to eat to a social and almost spiritual level. It is a blend of subtlety, timing, conviviality, mindfulness and celebration. There are family holiday meals in France that last all night. You are even free to linger for hours over an espresso at a café. The server won’t bug you to leave because these times of eating and drinking are sacred here.
Sacred and time consuming. Late nights push everything else off schedule. They screw up the next day’s early-morning routine. It rattles me to miss the relaxing pre-dawn hours I set aside to meditate, exercise, feed the birds and do Wordle.
If the dinner hour was the only benchmark we used in choosing the location for our home abroad, I would have picked a Scandinavian country, where they sit down at an hour that respects the digestive system of a certain age. In France we fall somewhere between Norway (dinner about 4 p.m.) and Spain (dinner starting around 10 p.m.) While most restaurants here begin serving about 7 p.m., the truly fashionable don’t even think about showing up before 8.
And before dinner, you need to set aside time for apéro. Apéro involves a drink —alcoholic or not — and maybe a little nosh, with friends or coworkers. You can partake at a café, bar or at home. The term, short for apéritif, comes from the Latin verb aperire, which means “to open.” Having an apéritif is believed to open your appetite in preparation for dinner.
Well, my appetite is open 24/7. Also, while the apéro tradition is quite enjoyable, it does stretch out the whole eating ritual even further, guaranteeing that we’ll reach agita hour.
We’re just lucky we didn’t choose Spain.
Things got messed up for them in 1942, when General Francisco Franco — in an effort to bond with his pal, Hitler — changed the country’s time zone to sync with the Nazi clock. Moving Spain out of its appropriate geographical zone pushed meals and train schedules forward by an hour. Spaniards never switched the clocks back after the war, and now, still operating in the wrong time zone, they eat a very late dinner. The siesta deal they have going on just pushes dinner even further into the night.
Norway and Spain are on the extreme ends of European dinner hour. There’s such a wide range of when people eat here that the publication of a dinner-hour map of Europe a few years ago went viral, inspiring the joke, “A Norwegian and a Spaniard go to a bar . . .”
Studies have shown that eating late can impact digestion, weight gain and metabolism, putting late diners at risk for diabetes, obesity and metabolic disorders. And poor Spain: everything getting pushed later to Nazi time means not only do they eat later than the rest of the continent, they also work later. The difference in working hours has had a negative impact on productivity and work-life balance.
I am fully committed to life in France, but I couldn’t help wondering what country best suits my daily waking and eating routines. So I took a deep dive into the daily schedules of various European countries. I even found a nifty chart that spells it all out.
I learned from the chart that I get up even before the Swedes but eat breakfast with the Spanish. If I could get used to the meat-heavy menu, I’d enjoy eating dinner with the Swedes and Germans, then hanging around for some TV and Internet viewing. If I have time, I’d love to pop in on the Italians to see what they’re getting up to during those 15 minutes between TV and sleep.
To complete my research project, I spent an excessive amount of time designing a column chart of my own daily routine.
We solved the problem, here in the south of France, where restaurants usually open for dinner at 7, but as you noted, most people actually start arriving at around 8-8:30. We stopped eating dinner out, with occasional exceptions. We started making lunchtime our big meal of the day. We arrive around noon or 12:30, enjoy a nice lunch, sometimes a glass of wine or two, sometimes just sparkling water, and we have a long leisurely lunch. We are rarely hungry at "dinner time" and if we are, we combine an evening walk with our little dog, and head over to a cafe that has an apero menu. We have a glass of wine and maybe a light "apero" type munchie. One evening, I didn't even bother with the wine. I ordered a cup of tea. And that's it. If we're meeting friends, we have sorta eased them into doing lunch with us instead of dinner. It works for everyone. If we don't do lunch out, I'll cook at home, and make what we call "linner", a combination of lunch and dinner and we'll eat somewhere between 3 and 4pm. This avoids anyone out in the world finding out we are sorta "old" and we're staying away from the late dining, that just lies there like a blob in our full stomachs, as we're getting ready for bed.
This is fabulous! Was a especially intrigued with the factoid about Generalissimo Franco, Hitler in the time zone alignment. Thank you for digging it up. :-)