We have recently become friends with a new family to our
neighborhood. They have two kids who are
about the same age as our kids and we all get along well. The wife is American, the husband is German.
The husband recently suggested we start following a German
tradition called “Stammtisch”. This is
when the men of the village get together at the local pub or biergarten, have a
beer, and discuss important (and unimportant) matters of affairs. Do I want to participate in an old German
tradition of drinking beer with the guys?...Uh, ok, that kind of seems like a no-brainer.
The taverns in the little German villages and towns set
aside a specific table for just the occasion.
This table, the “stammtisch”, is always left open for the locals no
matter how busy the place might be.
There is also a kind of unwritten protocol about who participates. You don’t just
sit down and declare yourself “a regular”, you have to be invited or maybe “accepted”
as such. Often, the group is comprised
of the 60-and-older men of the town, who have probably lived in the town their
whole lives, probably just as generations of their fathers before them.
What is discussed at these important gatherings of the “tribal
elders”?…..women. (Shocking, right?) Also local politics. The weather.
Property disputes. Old family
grievances. Beer. Local sports teams. Planning for local town festivals and
fundraisers. Status of their children. Etc. I don’t know if this is fact or not, but I
strongly suspect that what is discussed at stammtisch, stays at stammtisch.
I looked up the translation of “Stammtisch”. “Tisch” translates to “table”. “Stamm” has many translations eg. stem, root,
trunk, tribe, clan, regulars, regular patrons.
It’s interesting to me that the same word can be used for those different
meanings and connotations. I think that probably
says a lot about the meaning of the “stammtisch” tradition.
This tradition is more common in Southern Germany, where it
seems most traditions are more commonly found.
The same type of thing is seen in a lot of Italian towns and villages
too, although it seems like it’s usually more a couple of benches in the
central piazza, or maybe a small table at the local coffee bar.
We started our little stammtisch in our local town of
Arcugnano. Just up the street from where
we live is our local birreria/pizzeria.
It’s a 2-minute walk for both my new German friend and I, even though we
are coming from opposite directions. We
come home from work, have dinner with our families, do the kid-nighttime
routine, take a quick walk up to the top of the street for a beer or two, and
then walk home.
I say that like we’ve been doing it for awhile – we just had
our first stammtisch the other night.
And it was a pretty modest one at that, being just the two of us and all. {Since writing the first draft of this post,
we’ve met again and have started to expand the circle with some new blood.}
Also, as I write about the proximity of our local birreria,
it dawns on me that having “a bar/restaurant” in a residential community could
be seen as a detractor in the U.S. Here,
it’s a really nice benefit. It’s clean,
smoke-free, and quiet. It doesn’t
generate tons of new car traffic, people don’t leave trash in the street, there
are no neon signs out front, there is no graffiti, and there are no piles of
cardboard boxes anywhere to be seen.
It’s a family-run restaurant where we’ve come to know most of the people
there. One of the sisters who works
there has children who go to school with Isabel and Josh, so we often see her
at school-dropoff in the morning. It’s
not uncommon for some of the neighborhood kids to go there on their own to play
cards, grab a gelato, or pickup their family’s carryout order of pizza. It’s just a chilled-out place that serves
good food, offers good beer, charges family-friendly prices, and has a very
‘part of the neighborhood’ feel to it – the perfect kind of place to host
Stammtisch.
ct
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