This column first appeared in CityView magazine’s October 2026 edition.
When I think about “sobremesa,” I don’t think about a definition. I think about Sundays. I think about the asado already finished, the plates still scattered across the table, and that wonderfully undefined moment when dessert and coffee appeared, and nobody seemed particularly interested in knowing what time it was.
In a good Argentine family, politics would eventually make its way into the conversation. Opinions were offered freely; voices probably rose a little more than necessary and, as far as I can remember, nobody ever succeeded in changing anyone else’s mind. Yet somehow, the following Sunday, we were all willing to try again.
At one end of the table, there was often a chessboard. My uncles would begin games that seemed incapable of ending. One would move a piece and return to the conversation. Someone else would interrupt to comment on the move. Another cup of coffee would appear, the chessboard would be abandoned for several minutes, and eventually one of them would remember that, technically, they were still playing. I don’t remember who won. Looking back, I’m not even sure it mattered. Maybe those games never needed to end because nobody was in much of a hurry for Sunday to end either.
And there were the mandarins. After dessert, their peels would begin to collect on the table, filling the room with that unmistakable citrus scent, mixing with the coffee, the lingering traces of the asado, and the sound of all our voices. Even today, I can peel a mandarin and, for an instant, find myself back at that table. It amazes me how precisely a scent can travel across decades and geography without asking permission. Some smells seem capable of holding entire places inside them. For me, that was the smell of Sunday, of family, of a time in my life that once seemed as though it would last forever.
It smelled like home. The funny thing is that I don’t remember anyone ever announcing, “Now the sobremesa begins.” There was no need. We simply didn’t get up. The meal was over, but we weren’t. Much later, after living in the United States, I discovered something I found beautiful: sobremesa has no exact one-word translation in English. Of course, lingering around a table after a meal is hardly an Argentine invention, nor does it belong exclusively to Spanish-speaking cultures. Families everywhere have created their own rituals around the table. What fascinated me was something else. Somewhere along the way, we had decided to give a name to that stretch of time that seemed to serve no particular purpose and, somehow, served so many.
Today I understand that the asado brought my family to the table, but perhaps it was never the true protagonist of those Sundays. The food created the occasion. What stayed with me was everything that happened around it: the arguments we never settled, the stories we heard more than once, the unfinished moves on a chessboard, the coffee that seemed to replenish itself, and those mandarin peels still perfuming the table long after nobody was hungry anymore.
With time, I also learned something else: you can change countries without necessarily leaving all your tables behind. Fayetteville stopped being simply the place where I live a long time ago. It is home. And one of the things I love most about this city is how difficult it is to explain it through any single point of origin. Stories arrive here from everywhere.
Families with generations of North Carolina roots live alongside families who arrived six months ago. Our military community has carried people back and forth across continents. Our region has a rich African American history that is inseparable from who we are. Latino, Asian, European, and so many other cultures have become part of a community whose identity no longer fits comfortably inside any one label. Stand in the same grocery store line, and you may hear several accents. Sit down for dinner, and the food on neighboring tables may carry stories that began thousands of miles apart.
To me, that doesn’t dilute identity. It enriches it. Maybe because I was born somewhere else, I learned that belonging does not require erasing the road that brought us here. We carry things with us. Sometimes they are big things: language, family history, and a way of understanding the world. Other times they seem almost insignificant: a recipe, a song, an expression our children have heard a thousand times, a particular way of making coffee, or the habit of remaining at the table after the food is gone. Eventually, those things stop belonging exclusively to where we came from and become part of the life we build where we are.
As I was writing this column and wondering where I find something of that old feeling of sobremesa today, I realized that one answer was right in the heart of Downtown Fayetteville.
Pierro’s Italian Bistro opened in 2002, founded by Daniel Fair and Michael Laurenceau, friends since high school who imagined a restaurant in a downtown that was itself entering a new chapter. There is something about their story that feels especially fitting here.
Daniel brought family recipes rooted in his Italian heritage, and even the restaurant’s name carries a piece of that history: Pierro was the surname of his grandfather Leo, who came to the United States from Italy in 1917. Michael, with his Puerto Rican roots, brought another cultural story into a friendship and a project that ultimately put down roots here. Perhaps that is why Pierro’s feels like such a natural place to talk about sobremesa. Not because Italy, Puerto Rico, and Argentina share the same traditions—they don’t—and certainly not because every human habit needs a cultural explanation. What interests me is much simpler: each story arrived carrying something of its own and found room in Fayetteville.
That is something this city does remarkably well. There is also something about Pierro’s that you feel before you ever stop to analyze it. The lighting is soft, and the room seems to invite you to slow down. The tables are spaced far enough apart to protect the intimacy of a conversation, but not so far that you feel removed from everything happening around you. I like that balance. You hear other voices, silverware, a burst of laughter from another table, the natural movement of a restaurant filled with little stories you know nothing about, and still, the conversation happening directly in front of you feels as though it has its own space.
It is social without being intrusive, intimate without being isolated. And when a place manages to create that feeling, you want to stay. Maybe that is the real luxury of a good sobremesa. Not the décor, not even what we ordered, but the feeling that nobody is pushing the clock forward. We can finish the meal without finishing the conversation. Order coffee. Share dessert. Return to an old story. Change subjects three times. Stay a little longer.
I think about Daniel and the Italian recipes carried through his family, about Michael and his Puerto Rican roots, about this Spanish word I carried with me from Argentina, and about all of it somehow meeting on Hay Street. Suddenly, Pierro’s feels less like an example I selected for this column and more like something I recognize about Fayetteville itself: a city where so many of us have arrived at the table carrying different stories and, without having to surrender them, learned to build something together.
Perhaps that is why I have never been particularly convinced by the idea that belonging somewhere new requires leaving the old place behind. Argentina is still in my voice, my memories, certain flavors, and, apparently, even in the smell of a mandarin. But Fayetteville is in me too. Its streets, its people, its stories, and all these years of my own life that have unfolded here. One identity did not have to evict the other. They did something far more interesting.
They learned to sit at the same table. Maybe good tables work exactly that way. We each arrive carrying something. A recipe that survived generations. A story we have probably told too many times. An accent. A memory. A family tradition. A political opinion that no one is likely to change over dessert. We put all of it on the table alongside the food and, without quite realizing it, begin creating something that no longer belongs entirely to any one of us.
That is why I don’t think sobremesa is really a story about eating. Nor do I want to turn it into a nostalgic longing for some imaginary time when everyone had more time and families were wonderful. They weren’t. Families have always been complicated. My Sundays had arguments, interruptions, differences of opinion, and surely moments when somebody desperately wished somebody else would stop talking. We were human. Maybe that is exactly why those memories still feel alive.
What concerns me more is how easily we can end an encounter the moment its function is complete. We ate, so we leave. We finish our coffee, so we check the phone. We ask, “How are you?” hear “Fine,” and move on. I don’t think technology is the problem; that would be a little hypocritical coming from me when my own phone is probably less than three feet away. I think it goes deeper than that. We have become so accustomed to speed that sometimes we forget people don’t always reveal what matters in the first five minutes.
Conversations need time to unfold. We all know that moment. We have already talked about work, the kids, the weather, how expensive everything has become, and the person we ran into last week. It seems there is not much left to say. Then somebody pours another cup of coffee, nobody gets up, and after a brief silence comes the sentence: “Well… actually…” And suddenly, the conversation we may have needed from the beginning finally starts.
As a psychologist, I could offer plenty of explanations about human connection, but around a table some theories become unnecessarily complicated. We want to feel that we have a place. We want someone to notice when we are not quite ourselves, and we want to tell a story without having to shorten it because the other person is watching the clock. And sometimes we don’t need the person across from us to fix us, analyze us, or offer five excellent solutions. We need them to stay. Maybe that is what those endless chess games were doing without any of us realizing it. They were stretching time. The pieces are different now, and my table is thousands of miles away from that one, but the human need feels remarkably similar.
There is a simple expression in Spanish that I have always thought of as a declaration of love disguised as a question: “¿Comiste?”—“Did you eat?” Those of us who grew up hearing it know that it is rarely only about food. It can mean “Are you okay?” “Are you taking care of yourself?” “Do you need anything?” or simply “I was thinking about you.”
And after all these years here, I have learned that Fayetteville has many ways of saying the same thing. The neighbor who shows up with food when someone is sick. The church that organizes meals for a family going through a difficult time. The person who prepares an extra plate to take home. The chair pulled up because someone arrived who wasn’t part of the original plan. Different stories. Different flavors. The same invitation: There is room for you here.
Maybe that is what we are really looking for around a table. Not only nourishment, but belonging. So, for this month’s magazine, which is the Dining Issue, I am not going to tell you what to order. There are people far more qualified than I am to do that. My suggestion is much simpler. The next time you share a meal with someone and reach that moment when you would normally grab your keys, look at your phone, or say, “Well, we should probably get going,” try staying a little longer.
Please don’t turn dinner into therapy. Don’t prepare a list of profound questions or try to manufacture a meaningful moment. That would ruin the whole idea. Order another coffee. Share dessert. Talk politics if you dare. Start a chess game you may never finish. Peel a mandarin. And let time do what it does. Maybe absolutely nothing extraordinary will happen. Or maybe, just when you thought the conversation was over, the person across from you will say, “Now that we’re talking… there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” And then you may understand why, somewhere along the way, we felt the need to give a name to that stretch of time that begins when the meal ends.
I learned to call it sobremesa. But after so many years of calling Fayetteville home, I don’t think I need to translate it anymore. I only need to recognize it. It lives in a Sunday table I can still smell when I close my eyes. It lives in a restaurant on Hay Street born from family stories that traveled here from somewhere else. It lives in our kitchens, our porches, our cafés, and all those tables where someone still understands that finishing a meal does not necessarily mean it is time to leave. Perhaps some of the best things we offer around a table were never on the menu. A little of our story. A little of our attention. And, if we are lucky, a little more time.
