There is a bottle of Averna on the counter to the left of Lou Bertillon's stove. It has been there, in some version, since 2017. The current bottle is about two-thirds full, dated on the bottom in Sharpie as opened on April 11, 2026.
Averna is a Sicilian amaro, an Italian herbal liqueur, sweetened and bittered with a proprietary blend of herbs, roots, and bark. It is dark brown, syrupy, and about 29 percent alcohol. It is meant to be drunk after a meal, in a small glass, to settle the stomach and close the evening.
Lou drinks it for both of those reasons and also, she will admit, for a third one she had not articulated until recently: the amaro is the period at the end of dinner. It is the punctuation that tells her body the meal is over.
Without it, she has noticed, she tends to drift back to the kitchen for another piece of bread or a square of chocolate. With it, the meal ends when the small glass is empty.
The glass is a 60-millilitre cordial glass from a set of six she bought at a restaurant supply on Bowery in 2018. She uses one at a time and washes it with the rest of the dinner dishes. The other five are in a cupboard, brought out when there are guests.
The pour is about one ounce, which is closer to a half-pour by Italian standards. She has tried larger pours and found them sleep-inducing in a way that an ounce is not.
She drinks it at room temperature, without ice, without garnish. The bottle stays on the counter because Averna is stable; it does not need to be refrigerated, and a cold amaro tastes less of itself.
She has tried other amari. Fernet-Branca, the famously bitter, almost medicinal one, is too sharp for her after a quiet dinner; she likes it better as a shot at a bar. Cynar, the artichoke-based one, is interesting but vegetal in a way that competes with food.
Amaro Montenegro is gentler, more floral, and is what she serves to guests who do not drink amaro often. Averna is what she drinks alone, because it is what she has come to associate with the end of her own evenings.
The price is about thirty dollars a bottle in New York, and a bottle lasts her about ten weeks at the rate of an ounce most nights. That works out to roughly forty cents a serving, which makes it one of the cheaper closing gestures available in a Brooklyn apartment.
She does not drink it after every dinner. There are nights when she has had a glass of wine with the meal and does not want anything else. There are nights when the dinner was a piece of toast and she does not feel she has earned the ceremony. There are nights when she is going out and the bottle stays on the counter.
But on a Tuesday in June, after a piece of pan-fried fish and a salad of butter lettuce with a lemon vinaigrette, she pours the ounce and sits at the small table by the window with it. The fish was dredged in flour and cooked in olive oil. The salad was dressed at the last minute.
The amaro tastes, to her, of dark caramel, dried orange peel, bitter root, and something faintly mineral at the back of the throat. The bitterness is the part she has come to love most. It cuts the residue of the meal and resets the palate.
She reads while she drinks it. Most evenings the reading is a magazine or the back half of the newspaper; some evenings it is a novel she has been working through slowly. The amaro takes about fifteen minutes to finish, sipped without rush.
The ritual is not Italian, exactly. Italians, in her experience cooking in Italian restaurants, treat amaro as something between a digestif and a small social act. It is poured for the table, often topped up, often accompanied by espresso.
Her version is solitary and unhurried. The bottle on the counter is hers; the small glass is hers; the fifteen minutes by the window are hers. She is aware that this sounds lonely and is reporting that it does not feel lonely.
It feels, instead, like the close of a small day. The dinner was made by her, in her kitchen, for herself, and the amaro is the gesture she makes to mark the work as finished.
She is asked sometimes by friends to recommend an amaro for their own kitchens. She recommends starting with Averna because it is forgiving and because it pairs well with almost any food. If a friend wants something gentler, Montenegro. If a friend wants something bracing, Fernet.
What she does not recommend is buying three bottles and rotating. The point of the house amaro is that it becomes habitual. The bottle on the counter has to be the one you reach for without thinking, and that only happens after you have lived with it for a while.
She has lived with Averna for nine years. The smell of the small glass, by now, is the smell of her own kitchen at 9:00 in the evening, and the taste is the taste of her own evenings ending.
Tonight she will finish the ounce, rinse the glass, and put it upside down on the dish towel beside the sink. The bottle will go back to its place to the left of the stove. The kitchen light will go off. The day will be done.
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