THE FUSE

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Quick: In your family, if you were invited to dinner at 7 p.m., what time would you show up? In mine, we’re parked and piling out of the car at least a safe 5 minutes ahead. Being late was the height of poor manners, and you’d better believe if punctuality wasn’t reciprocated at our house, there were feelings.

Now then, if someone is invited to an 8 p.m. (or, ahem, 20:00) dinner at a friend’s home in Paris, what time should they ring the buzzer? Did you say 8? Wrong! Stick with me here: Think about the last time you hosted a gathering of any kind. Were your intentions to have everything completely ready to go well in advance of the appointed time? Did you think you’d maybe even have time to sit for a minute and maybe actually breathe before hosting duties commenced? Ha! We can skip the part where I point out the obvious that it is highly unlikely that this is the reality.

And there is no stress like the amped up they’ll-be-here-any-minute!!!! variety of running around, still not changed or maybe even showered, yelling at your partner that THE TRADER JOE’S THINGS NEED TO COME OUT OF THE OVEN while simultaneously clocking the giant new cobweb in the kitchen windowsill and wondering why you even thought this was a good idea to begin with. It’s sad, really, because wasn’t the whole point of this thing to spend time with people you like?

When I lived in Paris earlier this year, one of the biggest cultural adjustments was the more relaxed approach to time. It’s hard to shake a lifetime of conditioning, but I really tried when a kind invitation was extended to me for dinner at a fellow journalist’s home, making myself wait eight minutes past the hour before texting that I was in the building. My host was perfectly relaxed, champagne and small bites waiting on the living room table where candles glowed. So nice, I thought, as I sunk into the couch where we chatted for some time before any mention was made of dinner.

This tradition of allowing a few minutes buffer for your host is such a part of French culture that it has a name: quart d’heure de politesse (basically translating to the polite 15 minutes). And whether people know about this unwritten rule or it’s such a baked-in part of life here that it doesn’t bear mentioning. It’s pretty much the law of the land. Paris tour guide Seth Sherwood, a travel writer originally from the U.S. but living in Paris for 21 years now, hadn’t heard the term, but it tracks, he says: “There’s just a general understanding that people will be late. They’ll show up when they show up.”

He’s gotten less punctual the longer he lives in Paris, Sherwood says, but, of course, he knows the cultural pressures of timeliness in the U.S. “It’s also nice knowing inside that if you’re late for a legitimate reason that people aren’t going to be insanely angry with you,” he says.

And why should they be? After all, we’re talking about a dinner party, “it’s not a military operation,” Jane Bertch, founder of La Cuisine Paris cooking classes, tells me. She’s an American who has lived in Paris more than 20 years and recently turned her eye on French customs that we may find surprising in her book, The French Ingredient (which I devoured before my move).

Bertch confirms the practice of the polite quarter hour, noting that her French friends would never arrive on the dot, and it has nothing to do with tardiness. “It certainly is an understanding that it’s rude to get there right on time,” she says. She’s adjusted to this even though she, too, grew up with rules of strict arrival times. Back home, “God, I’m outside 5 minutes in advance, like a shark,” she laughs.

But this tradition is more than just a cultural custom. “The act of dining together in France takes such weight and importance,” Bertch says. A beautiful dinner party is a true affair, with hours spent planning not just the meal, but everything from the seating plan to the cutlery. “You would never stress your host … you’d want to enter in a way that is soft and elegant.” Having hosted a handful of dinner parties in Paris myself, I can completely vouch for that. I want to greet you with a glass of champagne when you arrive, and I’ll be much more welcoming if my heart isn’t racing from that last-minute bike sprint to the bakery.

Now, just because Bertch says arriving on time is “disrespectful” in Paris, this isn’t a license to leave people waiting around for you all night. Being actually late is definitely still rude, according to both Bertch and Sherwood. An hour is a deal-breaker, Sherwood says, so the sweet spot is much closer to that 15- to 20-minute zone that’s gifted hosts. So, why can’t we bring this to the U.S.?

“As the most capitalist country in the world,” in the U.S., Sherwood says we’re ingrained to the idea that things have to be timely and disciplined, and so it’s unlikely it’ll ever really catch on. Still, though, we may be able to find a takeaway in our time-obsessed culture.

Even if it’s not dinner, but a coffee date, as Bertch learned early on in Paris when she would try to slot these get-togethers into precise one-hour blocks, there is something to be said about cherishing and gifting time. “I was being rude and presumptuous about just giving them that hour, and then I’m onto the next thing,” she says. “It’s always much more than coffee. It’s relationship building. It’s swapping secrets, all the wonderful things that if you treat it like an agenda item, it just doesn’t work.” (No wonder she was so kind when I was late meeting her for coffee!).

When you think about it like that, when you try to be conscientious, Bertch says, it may open some doors to how we can give each other some grace. If you can’t bring yourself to intentionally show up late, here’s a thought: Text a few minutes ahead and ask your host how they’re doing, would they like some extra time, is there anything you can pick up on the way? Maybe they don’t actually need the fancy crackers, but could really use your 15-minute detour.

What do you think about this little French custom? Let us know in the comments below!