A Table for One, Please

A few months ago, an acquaintance saw me sitting in a noisy restaurant. I had blanked out the nauseating conversation and music with my headphones. I was reading a book. I was sipping on a drink, and before I turned a page, I was taking chunky bites of a multi-layered sandwich. I was alone. The acquaintance in question chose to let me be. She didn’t come up to say hi and interrupt my reverie. It was only later when she chuckled with a certain wonder — “You were reading a book in the middle of all that!” — did I understand that there was nothing usual about what, for me, had become a regular nocturnal feature. Her sheer amazement at this seemingly freakish behaviour was enough to convince me that there’s nothing normal about tables for one.

If all the chairs on your restaurant table are empty, you are likely to be ticked off as the first most obvious stereotype — the depressed recluse with an eating disorder. After seeing you finish a three-course meal with relish, it is indeed possible that the lady in the pencil skirt will whisper to her lover under a napkin, “They should have some Prozac left on her table as condiments.” Men who have chosen to forsake company are often thought to be leery, intrusive and discomforting. Restaurant managers can be much like school matrons when dealing with such crimes of male imposition, just that their articulation of punishment is kinder, “Sir, we have a table in the corner that will be perfect for you this evening.” Food can arrive unusually quickly on tables that have just the one diner. When you’re on your own, you are a bit like that lone motorbike that has decided to go bust in the middle of the road. You’re only blocking traffic.

It might well be a delusion, but I’d like to think that my reasons for eating alone are more varied and that the hospitality tendered to me at my eating houses of choice is based on an enduring and endearing sense of goodwill. I do not choose a certain gastronomic solitude because I am shying away from human company or because life does not allow me the luxury of willing friends. I choose it because there is something compelling to the symmetry of perfectly placed knives and forks, of waiters asking you if you’d like regular or bottled water and of enjoying every inch of your buttered bread in a silence that only an absence of others can afford. Some of my richest thoughts have occurred to me while cutting into a steak that I could never dream of finishing on my own. Snatches of careless conversation have provided more than just gainful entertainment, and most importantly, food is always more dear when you’re the only one footing the bill. Strangely, the etymology of the word companion roughly translates to ‘the one you break bread with’. In my case, it takes just one to break the bread. I consider myself lucky.