Eating Alone by Design: An Entire Restaurant With Tables for One

Do people have a hard time sitting alone at a restaurant table for 2+? More often than not I prefer to eat lunch alone; it's my time to think, wind down, escape from my constant interacting with others at work, and fully enjoy my meal without distractions. I've never felt uncomfortable or have been treated differently for eating alone. I do it almost every day. It's an experience that's been achievable for some time now and I'm having a hard time understanding why this is noteworthy. It's OK to eat alone, anywhere, maybe except at grandma's on Thanksgiving.

If I'm not taking a laptop, my favorite "eat alone" option is a sushi bar -- especially if it's a smaller sushi bar or a lower activity period, you can interact with your chef.

(Probably the best sushi bar meal I've had was when I had an 0600 flight out of SIN, and was saying at the old Changi Le Meridien; stayed up until 0100 at the sushi bar, split several bottles of soju with the chef, and had about SGD 400 in sushi and alcohol for what they billed as SGD 80. Omakase + alcohol = wonderful thing.)

I wonder if there are other cuisines (perhaps yet to be invented) which would work the same way. The market for dining alone is growing. The teppanyaki/benihana experience sort of works, but not so great alone.

I know the common advice is "never eat alone," but I love eating by myself, and often do so at my desk during the day. I eat slowly, I hate talking while I eat, and I have some frowned-upon habits such as picking out ingredients I dislike from the food. This restaurant seems to be designed for people like me!

One benefit that's not immediately obvious is the lesser likelihood of loud conversation next to you. I work in coffee shops on the weekend, and there is usually 30% chance someone loud will be telling stories at my table. Good headphones are a must, not as suitable at a restaurant.

I think the culinary differences from the USA to another country like China are mostly about history. The Chinese have had a much longer tradition of celebrating and appreciating their chefs while Americans seem to prefer to put a blindfold on and act like animals arent killed for food and chefs like to spit in your meal. Because of our lust for 'mass-market' we've created this tradition of cooks that make minimum wage right out of highschool and only count the seconds in between flips of a frozen hamburger patty. Turns out handcrafted burgers dont scale well.

The enjoyment you may get out of talking to a sushi chef or similar is this mutual respect that if the chef wants to talk to you about software, you are the professional and you've spent your life perfecting it. When you speak to a sushi chef, you expect the same level of competence to go into his food. In other countries often when you go out to eat you don't even know the name of the restaurant, or even care... When you make plans to go there you reference the restaurant by the name of the chef that works there. "Hey, I heard Chef Baca is working at Roberta's Pizza Joint, we should go". When you go to a sushi bar, you expect the chef to give you your sushi exactly how it's meant to be eaten. You dont ask for a side of ranch, or ketchup, which is kind of like walking into an art gallery and asking the artist if he can add some more red brush strokes to his painting because you really prefer it that way.

As an artist, or a chef, I would kindly ask you to leave and take your bowl of ketchup on the side with you.

I like eating alone. My favorite way to eat is to eat while reading something interesting. A good book somehow makes the food more enjoyable.

I think as a culture we socialize too much around food. People meet, date, celebrate, have family get-togethers around lunches and dinners. I think we need a cultural shift where we socialize around doing something together.

I don't understand, I eat alone all the time and would never want a solution as ham-fisted and silly as this. Every eatery in the city has a great bar section for either being alone or meeting strangers.

This just looks silly.

I could think of 100 uses for a come alone eatery:

    Sports bar where every booth gives good access to a TV

    Clean finger foods and a massive desk so you can get work done

    A place that promotes eating while reading with comfy chairs and a quiet atmosphere

But none of them seemed to be applicable to this design. Their food better be phenomenal, because I can't think of any other reason to go to a place like this.

Although I sometimes go to restaurants by myself, my preference is to blend in by sitting at a common table or at the bar/counter, rather than take up a table on my own. It's nice being within earshot of all of the background noise. I think a restaurant of one-person tables would be a bit of a downer.

This is one of the saddest business models I've seen so far. The only thing that beats it are probably the one-person fondue sets (or BBQ sets if you're American) that you sometimes see in supermarkets...

For me, the prototypical "one-person" restaurants are Japanese noodle bars though, where most people sit at the counter and eat by themselves. In general, Japan seems to have embraced this idea of catering to a generation of singles much earlier than the rest of the world, probably due to their high number of single households and low birth rate. Considering the declining birth rates throughout the world this kind of business will become more relevant other countries, too.

Isn't the popular idea to "never eat lunch alone"? I first heard that a few years ago and really took it to heart. Since adopting that strategy, I find myself building stronger connections with the people I work with and expanding my network beyond my coworkers (finding tech-oriented people to have lunch with is hard work where I live, something I don't think I would do if not living by that mantra). While I recognize the value of alone time (and place high value on it in my own life), lunch and dinner are two places where I feel like I'm really missing out if I spend them alone.

The Dutch name "eenmaal" means "once" but can also be read as "een maal" meaning "a meal" or in this case, as "één maal" meaning "one meal". Cute worldplay...

When I was travelling I split off from my friends for a couple of weeks and had to eat alone. I quite enjoyed it actually.

Doing a bit of discreet people watching is always interesting (to me at least) and it was even better being in a foreign country where you can see the differences between your own culture and theirs.

I did feel a bit embarrassed at first but once you sit down and order what you like its fine. No one pays you any attention at all.

Tables for one... you mean desks? They're eating on desks?

I'd eat there and feel bad.

Also, that site is a bloated hog.

Why so much theories and effort to make eating alone look like something superior?

I like eating alone since always, because I like to be kept to my own to think. I need some time alone, only and usually my ipod. It is just a particular need, not a character trait that make me superior, cool, interesting, etc.

I understand why a company (or a industry) would want to make some kind of consumism look like a status indicator - I surely understand why that particular restaurant would want that. But why some journalists also are always trying to dictate where status come from?