Happy Hour in Italy Makes Your Money Go Further

Americans are generally quite familiar with the idea of Happy Hour. It’s usually a great thing - you get huge portions of good food for pennies on the dollar, as long as you buy a drink. Which, after many an American workday, is a much needed thing anyway. Happy Hour is a fantastic way to stretch your dining dollar, and Italy has its own version: the aperitivo, a pre-dinner drink that comes with snacks or, at many bars, a whole buffet.

In 2007, a Happy Hour menu with real food was still a novelty in Rome. Elizabeth writes about one place in Rome that’s doing Happy Hour here, and notes that they’re not just doing what we might call “bar food,” but honest-to-goodness real food. She says that after 6:30 you can pay €10 and get a drink with a plate of food. It’s buffet style, and you can choose from pasta, rice salads, sandwiches, shrimp, etc. Elizabeth adds that there’s an important cultural difference between Italy and the United States which is honored in this Happy Hour menu - it’s not called “supper” for a reason:

It’s not called “supper”, although that is what it is for those off to a concert, but an “aperativo”, [sic] thereby circumventing the “non si fa” rule about never putting all of your food on one plate, which is ok for an aperativo [sic] but not for a meal - marketing genius.

You might remember my post about how the concept of “potluck” is a foreign one in Italy, and it’s partly for this reason - Italians don’t pile all their courses on one plate. As Elizabeth says, “non si fa” - meaning one just doesn’t do that. So the Happy Hour folks have gotten around this aversion to mixing different foods by calling it an “aperitivo” instead of a meal. She’s right, that’s just genius.

At any rate, if you’re looking for an inexpensive alternative to dinner out, the aperitivo is now easy to find in every Italian city, from Milan, where the big buffet spread caught on first, to Rome and Naples. Ask your hotel where the locals go for aperitivo (some call the bigger buffets apericena), usually from about 6:30pm, and you’ll get a drink and a plate of food for less than a restaurant meal.