Table For One: Why dining alone needn't be lonely

No date — no problem! Restaurants are luring the lone grazers with quiet spots to eat in peace, says Phoebe Luckhurst 
One is company: Phoebe Luckhurst dines alone at The Shed in Notting Hill
Rebecca Reid

There are two schools of dining. On the one hand, there is the bon viveur for whom food is not merely fuel, for that is a bloodless, joyless way of looking at the world. Breaking bread with friends is the highest form of living — the point of a meal is to share it.

Except it’s not, is it, says the other kind of eater. The point of a meal is to sustain you; people are a distraction. Indeed, if you’re having sharing plates, companions are enemies, as they’re eating food that you could be eating instead.

In private, each camp could level circular arguments at the other indefinitely. But in public, for a long time, the former won and the latter was unacceptable. Anyone who ate alone was a bit weird, or lonely, or had been stood up. But the cultural mores are changing: according to booking site OpenTable, bookings of dinners-for-one have increased by 110 per cent over the last two years. The en-masse meal will never die, but London’s dizzyingly multifaceted dining culture has room for more than one way of doing things.

Firstly, you must define your terms; grabbing a Pret on your tod doesn’t really count as solo dining (even if you eat in). It is normal to get a working lunch alone — maybe you’re busy, or on your way out to a meeting, or hate all your colleagues. Dining alone really means going into a restaurant, pulling up a pew, and taking your time over things. Here there are certain flashpoints of discomfort, which London’s intuitive restaurants are responding to.

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An overly attentive waiter can be a pain when you’re with friends; when you’re alone, it feels faintly embarrassing. At Inamo on Wardour Street, you order on a touch screen so you don’t have to speak to a waiter. This is a New York trend that is migrating over here: Newark International Airport is installing 6,000 iPads over the next 18 months so that users don’t have to sit alone draining their phone batteries.

Taking a table for four when there’s only one of you is another stigma; furthermore, if it’s busy, waiters are likely to pressure you to move on. To solve this, some places have installed smaller dining spots catered to the solo diner. Barrafina’s smart red barstools feel like thrones, while those at beautiful Blixen in Spitalfields have a prime view of the frenetic kitchen.

Entry-level solo diners will inevitably use their phones as a social prop; Dishoom in King’s Cross has free wi-fi (which it excellently calls chai-fi. These are the sort of jokes you’ll love if you habitually dine alone). Russell Norman, the serial foodpreneur behind Polpo, designed his restaurants with solo diners in mind — each has good bar seating and the cosy booths at Mishkin’s in Covent Garden are well suited to those unburdened by company who’ll take up all the room on the squelchy seats.

Of course, it still feels a little weird, and there’s a stumbling block poised as soon as you walk in. I go to The Shed in Notting Hill. “Table for how many?” “One.” Right. I order a kohlrabi carpaccio, seasoned with sunflower seeds and feta, with still water, but worry the disciplined meal looks like the sort of thing a neurotic New York anorexic would eat. I wouldn’t worry about that if I were in company — the healthy choice is neutralised by the presence of other diners. It’s delicious, though.

There’s a rambunctious family having a catch-up meal in the corner; I feel like an orphan, but with none of the bruised glamour of tragedy. Also, none of them seems to care, apart from when my photographer arrives and I look, fleetingly, like I might be a celebrity.

But as I leave after wolfing down my greens, a man arrives. “Table for…?” “One,” he replies. He doesn’t look self-conscious at all, though I still consider an encouraging glance until I realise he’d probably think I was trying to get off with him. Though actually, if I were, it would be a good time to approach him — perhaps solo dining is what us single people need to score dates.

I can see other advantages. You spend most of your time at work and spend the rest with a sprawling cast of housemates — eating alone gives you a chance to catch up on a book or a paper. If you’ve got one of those annoying pockets of time to fill — common for busy Londoners who make plans that don’t quite segue chronologically — then eating alone can pass the time and keep you from mooching around Topshop growing increasingly dismayed by the width of the mannequins’ thighs.

Don’t make a meal of it — go it alone to refuel.

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