As an introverted only child, I’ve never ventured away from being alone: I watch movies in bed, cook myself three-course dinners and put on concerts in the shower. But all of these activities are barred by the four walls of my own home, where I don’t have to explain to anyone why I hold my fork weird or why I finished an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting — things that are apparently uncouth to do in public.
Despite this proclivity for solitude, I have always wanted to be a food journalist and restaurant critic, experiencing new cultures and making connections through garlic and butter. Therein lies the problem: The job will inevitably require me to eat out, in public, often alone, for most of my meals.
Bryan Kim, the editorial lead at the New York City branch of The Infatuation, noted that a reality of the job is last-minute plans and constantly taking notes during meals, which can actually be a deterrent for dining partners.
“I’m always looking down at my phone or pretending to follow a conversation when really I’m trying to figure out the exact shade of a server’s chore coat,” Kim said in an interview with WSN. “For a restaurant writer, eating alone can be the better route.”
The utility of dining alone has been around for years: drinking at the airport bar, grabbing lunch between meetings or stopping for a quick bite after class. However, the recent commodification of restaurants on social media platforms like TikTok, along with a post-pandemic normalization of spending more time alone, has led to an increase in solo dining. Restaurants like ramen chain Ichiran, where diners have the option of eating alone in a cubicle-like seat, have increased in popularity, yet many guests can’t sit through the entire meal without looking at their phones. While it’s difficult to unplug for an entire meal, staring at a TikTok reel while shoving fistfuls of New York’s best linguine into their mouths actively distracts diners from the tastes and experiences at hand — technology takes us out of the moments we’re paying to have.
“Instagram, TikTok and the thousands of cooking shows have turned so many people into serious, committed diners,” Kim said. “Eating is a legitimate hobby, and it’s one you can do alone.”
With Kim’s sage advice, I ate alone for the first time at the bar of Gramercy Tavern with nothing but an empty stomach and a $50 bill. I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for four years and seated hundreds of single parties, yet something about being on the other side of the hoststand made me feel unusually vulnerable and exposed. I teetered up to the bar like a high schooler showing a bouncer her fake ID and feverishly felt around the underside of the bar rail for a place to hang my purse, only to give up and hang it off the back of my seat.
After the first few minutes of sweaty palms and erratic glances, I took a breath and allowed the room to envelop me in a symphony of scattered conversations, scuffed shoes scampering around the dining room and pops of uncorking fresh bottles of champagne. I noticed the woman on my left admiring the decals behind the bar, as the one on my right cupped a salt-rimmed margarita like it was a warm, healing elixir.
I ordered the famous Tavern Burger, something that needed two hands and all of my focus to consume. Clocking my struggle, the woman on my left chuckled and asked, “How is it?”
I blushed and affirmatively nodded my head as my mouth was too full to respond in coherent sentences. She smiled and turned to the woman on my right, who also ordered the burger, but was consuming it in a much more tasteful, dignified manner with no aioli spillage and two pinky fingers high in the air. After being successfully humbled, I ended up exchanging life stories with the two strangers, who I later learned were a visiting art curator from Arkansas and a line cook from Brooklyn — something I wouldn’t have done had I been playing sudoku on my phone.
Sitting between two confident solo diners, my anxiety about being alone faded away. In a city as eclectic and chaotic as New York, I wouldn’t blink twice at someone wearing matching costumes with their dog or doing parkour on the subway, so why would I expect anyone to care if I enjoyed a burger and a Diet Coke by myself at a bar?
Contact Bella Simonte at [email protected].
