On Eating Alone

I have eaten alone in forty-seven countries. I have sat at sushi counters in Tokyo at midnight and at brasseries in Paris at noon. I have ordered thali in Chennai and tapas in Barcelona and a single plate of pierogi in a Krakow basement where the waitress seemed genuinely concerned for my mental health.

Solo dining is a skill, and like all skills, it can be learned.

The beginner makes mistakes. The beginner brings a book, or worse, a phone, and hunches over it like a shield. The beginner apologizes to the hostess—just one, I am sorry—as if the mathematics of seating were a personal failing. The beginner orders too quickly, eats too fast, leaves too early. The beginner treats the meal as something to survive rather than something to inhabit.

I was a beginner for years.

The first time I ate alone in a proper restaurant, I was twenty-two and freshly heartbroken. My friends, well-meaning, had filled my first two weeks with group dinners and movie nights and you will get through this pep talks. On day fifteen, I could not bear another voice. I went to an Italian place near my apartment and asked for a table.

"For how many?" the host asked.

"One."

He looked at me the way one looks at a stray dog. The table was in the back, near the kitchen, where the noise and traffic would discourage lingering. I ordered spaghetti carbonara because it was the cheapest pasta on the menu and I wanted to leave quickly. I ate it in silence, watching the couples around me laugh and share bites from each other's plates, and I felt a loneliness so total it seemed to have color. A kind of bruised violet, pulsing at the edges of my vision.

"The mistake is to treat the solo meal as a rehearsal for company. It is not. It is its own form, with its own grammar and its own rewards."

It took me a decade to learn this. A decade of practice meals, of growing comfortable with my own face in the reflection of the wine glass, of learning to order what I actually wanted rather than what seemed appropriate for a party of one. I learned to ask for good tables—window, if possible—and to decline the check until I was finished. I learned to eat slowly, to taste, to notice the music the kitchen made when service was going well. The sizzle, the call-and-response of the line cooks, the particular silence of a plate being wiped before presentation.

I learned that solo diners are not invisible. We are, in fact, highly visible. The restaurant staff watches us with a mixture of curiosity and concern. Are we food critics? Are we traveling salesmen? Are we widows, runaways, eccentrics? We disrupt the social script of dining, and disruption always draws attention.

I began to use this visibility.

I dressed better for solo meals. Not formally, but intentionally. I wore clothes that made me feel like a person who had chosen this, rather than a person who had been abandoned to it. I ordered wine by the glass and then, sometimes, by the bottle. I spoke to the servers. Not excessively—never excessively—but genuinely. What do you recommend? What do you like here? I became a regular at places where the staff learned my name and my preferences, and the loneliness of the first meal receded like a tide going out, slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day the beach was simply dry and you could not remember where the water had been.

The great solo meals stay with you. A bowl of pho in Hanoi at 6 AM, the broth so clear and complex it seemed to contain the entire history of the spice trade. A piece of grilled fish in Lisbon, simply prepared, the charred skin crackling between your teeth while you looked out at the Atlantic and thought about how many people had stood at this edge of the continent and looked at this same water and felt this same solitude, which was not loneliness at all but something older and more honest. A slice of tarte tatin in Lyon, the caramel almost bitter, the apples dissolving on your tongue, the pastry so flaky it left crumbs on your lap that you did not brush away because who was there to see?

I have eaten alone in forty-seven countries, and I am not done. There are meals ahead of me that I cannot imagine, in places I do not yet know, with flavors that do not yet have names in my vocabulary. The table for one is not a waiting room. It is a room of its own, fully furnished, with a view that changes every time you sit down.

The beginner thinks: I am alone because no one wants to eat with me.

The practitioner knows: I am alone because I want to eat with myself, and that is a desire as real and as valid as any other.

Order what you want. Take your time. Look around. The world is full of people eating together and missing each other. You are eating alone, and missing no one, and that—when you learn it, when it becomes natural—is a kind of freedom that no company, however beloved, can provide.