Sobremesa

Sobremesa is lingering over the table in a restaurant after a meal, and is a common practice in Spain. Traditionally this is a time for coffee, digestive drinks (chupitos), and story telling. Spanish people love pointing out that there is no equivalent word in English, but that has more to do with where people do their entertaining in different countries. See below for more on this misunderstanding of American culture.

While it might be common to hang out after dinner at home in the States (and I know it is common among my friends) it is unheard of in an American restaurant. American restaurants expect to turn over a table two or even three times in a service. This means that a party of four (A four top, in the parlance) is expected to be gone from the restaurant in two hours. A couple (two top) should be gone in an hour and 45 minutes.

This does not happen in Spain, where the concept of turning tables is confined solely to the sorts of restaurants that see almost exclusively foreign guests. In Spain it is expected that if you book a table for lunch, you are there for the entire lunch service. This is partially because there is no Spanish equivalent to the “dinner party” idea, especially the casual one. In Spain people sit around after eating and catch up or drink another bottle of wine, or tell stories, in public. Restaurants accommodate this, and that accommodation is the sobremesa.

Is Sobremesa Unique To Spain?

You don’t have to be in Spain long before someone will trot out the adage that English has no equivalent word for sobremesa. They will not present this factoid to you as a linguistic oddity, but as a statement of cultural pride. It is, to many here, as if they had personally invented conviviality. It is, most often, presented as a proof not of a linguistic lacking, but a conceptual one. A supposed proof that Spanish culture (if such a monolithic and unified thing even exists) is superior to any anglophone culture, entirely because a compound word exists. It really is strange to me to think that your culture alone enjoys sitting around after dinner. To think that you alone tarry with coffee after a meal. Or that your people alone have postprandial cocktails. You alone have ever had a big of a chin wag as you linger over the dish strewn table.

The Linguistic Confusion

Indulge me for a moment, and let’s investigate this idea that the things a culture does not value are the things it does not have a compound word for. This is based primarily in not understanding how the English language works. In English there are three types of compound words. Simple compound words are the most basic. Examples like handwritten (escrito a mano) and sunbathe (tomar el sol…). It would be pretty ignorant and culturally chauvinistic of me to imply that Spaniards don’t value handwritten letters or laying out in the sun simply because they don't have a single word for it.

The second kind are hyphenated compound words, like long-term (a plazo largo…) or same-sex (del mismo sexo). These hyphenated compound words are special in that we use them almost exclusively as adjectives. When you place them after the noun they reference, they become the third type.

That third type are called open compound words. In my experience, these are the bane of the ESL student (at least the ones I’ve taught in Spain). It seems very hard for people to wrap their head around the idea of a word that is two or more words. English is absolutely brimming over (rebosante) with these special types of phrasal verbs. A great many of them have single word cognates (palabras afines) in Spanish. Dining Room (comedor), living room (salon), real estate (inmobiliaria), and ice cream (helado) are but a few.

Strangely enough, I have never had a single person in Spain tell me about how Spanish has a word for “a room you eat in” but English doesn’t. No one has ever tried to convince me that Spaniards like townhouses more than the British because the British have to make do with semi-detached instead of adosado. It’s almost as if it isn’t about words at all…

The Cultural Confusion

In addition to the above linguistic difficulties, there is another issue. Relatively few people in Spain have direct experience of any culture other than their own. The number with direct experience of American culture is tiny. This leads to some pretty serious misunderstandings about what American (or British or Australian, or Irish) culture actually is. Now, this type of confusion about American culture (in particular) is rampant across Europe, and is not specific to Spain. This is, in my opinion, the result of the intersection of two different phenomena.

The first is, of course, the hegemonic position of American popular media. Add in a little bit of cultural myopia, and you have a recipe for misapprehension. The United States cranks out a shocking number of films a year, and a surprising number of them involve scenes in restaurants. Indeed, if you only watched American movies, you might get the idea that Americans were pretty much always in restaurants. And that would seem very normal to the average European, who is actually in a restaurant pretty constantly.

The second is the very different ways in which Americans and Europeans actually approach restaurants. For most Americans, a visit to a sit-down restaurant is more of an event than it is for a European, broadly speaking. American dining out is more for marking a special occasion than for having a meal with friends. Whereas for Europeans, a visit to a restaurant is a normal and casual way to get together with friends for a chat and a laugh.