You Won’t Know Until Later

The restaurant you won’t go back to, and the endings you forget

Your table for the evening (La Cucina Italiana photo)

The Weirdo

When I was around twelve, my brother and I spent many summer days in different friends’ backyards playing a version of dodgeball I think we might have invented.

Everything was fluid: you could run, be chased, hide behind bushes, push another kid toward the ball holder, deflect or dive out of the way when the ball came at you. When you were hit, you became “it,” the one chasing everyone else.

We could keep going for hours -- sweating, screeching, laughing so hard we teared up -- until our mothers called us home for dinner. Each kid would head back with grass stains on his clothes, dirt under his fingernails, cheeks and hair covered in dust, exhausted. Good times.

One day, one of the kids’ fathers stood at his patio door, deep in thought, hands on his hips, vacantly staring into the yard where we were racing around and giggling. He was surely younger than I am now, but he seemed old -- thinning hair, a slight stoop.

After a while, one of the kids stopped in front of him and asked what he was thinking about. The rest of us gathered to hear.

“One day you kids are going to play together for the last time,” the father said. “Only you won’t know it was the last time until much later.”

Weirdo, I thought.

From my tavolo per la sera in Rome, not long ago

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The unmarked bottle

A phrase I learned during my first years in Rome was tavolo per la sera -- table for the evening. It meant that when you reserved a table at certain restaurants it didn’t matter much what time you arrived or when you left. The table was yours. You could leave after dessert or linger until closing time.

I think the practice still survives here and there -- more in towns than in cities -- but I haven’t heard the phrase itself in years. And of course, when I last heard it, I had no idea it would be the last time.

Eating out in Italy has changed. I don’t remember the last time a waiter set down a few bottles of amaro, limoncello, or grappa on the table, on the house, a satisfying way to end an enjoyable meal.

Homemade amaro in Finale di Liguria (EJL photo)

There was even a time when restaurant owners would present their own after-dinner concoctions, poured from an unmarked bottle with great pride. On a slow night, an owner might wander out of the kitchen, still in an apron, and pull up a chair for a brief chat: What did you order? Where are you from? He’d be flattered if you pointed to the unmarked bottle and gestured for another taste.

I didn’t notice when those traditions started appearing less often. I still know one place in Rome that serves an in-house, complimentary after dinner drink -- a syrupy strawberry liquor that makes me grimace -- and there are a few where the owner or chef will stop by to say hello. But when did that stop being the default?

It’s not just food.

When was the last time you stopped to ask a stranger for directions? Or pulled to the side of a country road after a few wrong turns, spreading a creased map across the hood of the car, tracing your route with a finger?

When did you stop looking up unfamiliar words in a printed phrase book, or loading film into a camera? When was the last time you wrote a letter by hand? When did you last show up at a friend’s house unannounced?

An old-fashioned paper map (Touring Club image)

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What he said

I don’t remember the last thing I said to my father.

In the final months of his life, I traveled back and forth between Italy and Florida every other week and was often at his bedside. I worked on Italy time, but I typed while holding his arm with my left hand.

Time passed with the dull chatter of the hallway and the steady electronic blip of the heart monitor.

When he stirred, I’d immediately close the computer and stand. Sometimes, he’d speak, and I can remember many of the things he said. But I’ve forgotten what I said.

The weirdo was right, of course. Nobody gives you a warning.

An empty table, Cività di Bagnoreggio (EJL photo)

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📌 And another thing

I’ve only come across the credit card screen with pre-programmed tipping options a handful of times in Italy. The suggested percentages are still modest by U.S. standards -- 5 percent, 10 percent, and 15 percent on the last one I saw -- and the staff seemed embarrassed by it.

“O potete anche lasciare nulla,” one cashier in Trastevere told me -- “Or you could also leave nothing.”

That won’t last. Italy has an uneasy relationship with “voluntary” tipping, which was rare until Americans began visiting in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, it’s beginning to chip away at one of the foundations of Italy’s restaurant culture.

I’ve written at length about the virtues of the status quo in the Dispatch before, so I won’t repeat those views here. But I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Hotels are replacing front desks with apps and kiosks. Will you miss the clerk who watches your bags and calls his favorite pizzeria to say you’re on the way and to take good care of you?

The pausa pranzo -- the stubborn, sometimes frustrating mid-day break that encourages people to focus on lunch -- has nearly disappeared in the centers of cities like Rome, Florence, or Venice. Will it become a quaint relic?

Will the clerk at the supermarket or coffee bar be replaced by self-checkout screens? Will restaurant specials on a chalkboard make way for laminated QR codes? Will the use of cash -- for now, the most human way to settle a bill -- fade away as well?

What would you add? Is there something that’s normal in Italy that you think we’ll one day miss?

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