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 wonder if there are other cuisines (perhaps yet to be invented) which would work the same way
going to a regular bar / gastropub works exactly the same way.
* it's a bar
* you can be there alone or with people
* you interact with the bartender
* he makes food and drink for you (or bar staff does)
* he drinks with you and bullshits with you
* he can discount your food and you tip him
* you develop a relationship if you go there often
you are assigning undue uniqueness to the sushi bar experience because it's not western cuisine. the actual interaction is not unique. there's also plenty of other cuisines in asia (outside of japan) that work the same way, i.e. street food, noodle bars, etc.
I rarely go to bars with food (or at least, don't order food), and at a lot of bars, the point seems to be to interact with other patrons, which is different from a sushi bar (where that ~never happens).
How about a restaurant where you are always paired up to eat with a stranger (or maybe two strangers). Get to know eachother and its a set price - so you always both pay exactly the same amount; say $25.
Talking to strangers w/o context is something I'd pay $25-50 to avoid, generally. If it were strongly filtered by interest, perhaps, but the problem with 1:1 while eating is you're trapped. The nice thing about a sushi chef (or bartender) is they know when to stop, and what topics to stick to.
The world needs more places where people can just come together without pretense and maybe a common interest and mingle. I, for one, don't get into the club or bar scene, since I'm not a drinker and I'm bad at dancing; and not everyone is religious, so Church doesn't serve that purpose well, either
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!
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?
I went back to read the article twice more after seeing your comment, but I'm failing to understand how you interpreted this piece as an assertion of superiority. I don't see anyone (neither the owner nor author) trying to dictate status. The only assertion being made is that eating alone doesn't deserve the stigma it currently has in society.
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.
Maybe I'm biased but even when my SO or friends/colleagues are nowhere near I just don't go out to eat alone. Or even sit down in a coffee shop.
"Going out" - even if only for lunch or a coffee, for me is a 2+ person thing. When I am alone, I grab something to eat and take it back to the office, home or sometimes sit in a park, although very rarely.
It depends on living / work conditions. I'm in NYC, where tiny kitchens are common and restaurants are everywhere and work hours tend to go late, and going home might be much further between you and where you're going next. So eating out alone is pretty reasonable.
I don't make a distinction with regard to party size. If I want to go out, I go out whether I have someone with me or not. I don't understand why people are so hung up about it. I'll be just as happy going to a restaurant or movie alone as with friends.
Sounds like you've been conditioned to think that way - that it's only socially acceptable to eat out when there are 2+ people.
There seems to be a stigma about single people eating alone, that it's sad and pathetic that they are forced to eat by themselves.
In reality, I think it's the other way around. I think it's sad that people need to have someone else there just to eat out - something that is a one person activity the last time I checked.
Birth rates have been declining and sub-replacement-level in Japan, "rich" Europe, and parts of the US for years (decades, I think) -- Japan and Singapore are particular far along on this. Plus of course the great Chinese experiment of the "one child policy", and Russia's collapse in birthrate in the late 1980s/1990s (largely due to the fall of the USSR).
Even in high-fertility countries, it's been dropping from 5 to more like 2-3, largely correlated with female education and opportunities other than (early, exclusive) motherhood.
(The US would have a negative growth rate if it weren't for immigration, largely from Spanish-speaking nations in the Western hemisphere.)
Population of the earth as a whole is still increasing, but that's largely due to a few parts of the world which have had huge birthrates in the past and a large population under-30 (and under-18, so it will continue for a while.). It's a mean vs. median problem.
Population is one number. Birth rate is a derivative of that. A rate of change in birth rate is the second derivative of population.
Population'' is clearly negative -- the global birth rate IS in decline, and has been since 1950 according to the UN (I don't see earlier stats). Population is still increasing because Population' is positive. (well, actually Birth rate > death rate).
Per country, it actually is a median vs. mean problem; most countries (hence, median) have below-replacement birth rates; there are a limited number of countries with substantially above replacement birth rates, due to both fertility and the demographic composition (lots of young people).
> Population is one number. Birth rate is a derivative of that.
No, its not. For several reasons. Firstly, because the derivative of population is the rate of population growth (persons/unit time) which is not just the rate of births per unit time, but births minus deaths. Secondly, because "birth rate" isn't the rate of births per unit time, but the rate of births per unit time per unit population.
> Population'' -- the global birth rate IS in decline, and has been since 1950 according to the UN
Those statements are only distantly related and only the latter is clearly true. While the birth rate (births/person/year) has been dropping for quite a long time, the second derivative of population with respect to time was around 0 from the late 1980s to recently, with the first derivative hovering at around 1 gigaperson / 12 years, though projections are that that rate of increase is slowing somewhat now. The second derivative of population with respect to time was actually positive for most of the 20th century, with each successive billion people added in a shorter period of time until it leveled off around at the 12 years / billion level. [1]
Use the slider to move the time axis. Birth rates have declined in most of the world during the last 100 years, with a strong inverse correlation between life expectancy / wealth and birth rate. The US still withstands this trend somewhat with a birth rate just above 2.0, whereas most European countries range between 1.3 - 1.7 births / woman (which is not enough to sustain population).
Ever been to an old-style American diner? They also have counters where you can eat by yourself. Counter tables in restaurants are not unique to Japan.
There are also night market food stands which are popular in Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities.
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.
What if you prefer the type of food that comes with more nutrition and simple pleasures than high-cultural ritual and middle-class aesthetic subtleties? I feel like I should be able to eat out and be happy about it without creating such fine distinctions between meals that the lack of an artists touch could potentially induce an unbearable discomfort.
If a chef tells me to leave because I'm putting ketchup on something, though, I'm likely to hit him with the bottle.
When I was visiting my relatives in China I never got the sense that cooks were more highly respected. It's pretty much the same there. The cooks work in the kitchen and you generally don't see their face or know who they are unless they are especially famous. China and Japan also have their own equivalents of "mass market" fast-food restaurants.
With an attitude of "you will take I think you should like and be happy with it," I hope you work far away from anything related to user interface.
>Americans seem to prefer to put a blindfold on and act like animals arent killed for food
I am at a loss on how you possibly come to that conclusion about a country that, aside from Canada, has more hunters per capita than any other Western nation.
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.
Yeah, I know. I don't really have a problem eating alone in a regular restaurant. I think it would feel more awkward in a restaurant where the tables are meant to have only one person.
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 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.
Really? Very few of the restaurants I've frequented in NYC and Seattle had bars. This is probably because I usually eat at inexpensive Asian restaurants if I ever eat out. I've never had a problem just eating alone at a regular table though, so I agree that this idea is kind of silly.
Amsterdam is a very crowded city. Part of what you're paying for here is being left alone to eat in peace, rather than having your meal rushed because the table could more profitably seat a couple. There's no shortage of places where you're welcome as an individual if you don't mind rubbing shoulders with other people, but if you want a little space of your own without necessarily staying at home, your options are quite limited.
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.
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.
No matter what you socialize around, after about four hours or so it will be hard to avoid bringing food into it somehow. Hungry, irritable people don't make for the best social companions.
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.
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.
I don't have a problem with it, but I've lived a largely solitary life. I have friends who would never dream of going to a restaurant alone, though, and would think everybody was watching them eat and wondering what was wrong with them.
I felt a little awkward when I was a bit younger and not as used to it, especially in the large, busy, wide open places. But I've gotten over it, and most lunches I eat alone without thinking about it.
Still if you look around we are definitely the minority. It seems like some people can't stand the thought of eating alone. Sometimes co-workers will practically beg you to go eat lunch with them if they don't have anyone else to go with. I think people place a stigma on themselves about it even though they won't look twice when they see someone else out eating by themselves.
I've definitely noticed a different response from waitstaff when I'm on my own than when I'm out with friends; it seems as though, in the former case, a waiter will tend to be a bit less formal and more friendly than otherwise. It's a little odd, perhaps, but it also tends to result in better service, so I'm not about to complain.
I've never had a problem with it... the restaurant which is the subject of the article itself is just characteristically sneaky Dutch marketing.
Wine and some literature or a notepad for creative flourishes are often better company than people... and can help one to take work and life less seriously. This is a situation in which strong service people can really make a restaurant shine. Also, often I find eating alone I am actually able to meet fellow diners, occasionally single and attractive ones, with relative ease!
Similarly, if feedback is requested by staff or I feel compelled to offer it at the end of the meal, I can be honest and open about my impressions and not have to curtail perspective to avoiding looking like a snob to my dining companions. (An aside, is that IMHO one mark of a great restaurant is one that invites and accepts graciously feedback from its patrons.)
France, Romania, and Los Angeles have the most single-dining friendly cultures I've encountered. Holland does have it but it can be a pain in the ass to find quality restaurants, and very hard to find anything done well that deviates from the European cuisine matrix. Much of Asia (Thailand, South India, China, etc.) has a great single dining culture from a more practical perspective: less white tablecloth, multi-course meals and wine lists - more convenient menus and hands down tasty single person optimized relatively-balanced meals, at least for a portion of their cuisine.
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...
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.
66 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread(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.
going to a regular bar / gastropub works exactly the same way.
* it's a bar
* you can be there alone or with people
* you interact with the bartender
* he makes food and drink for you (or bar staff does)
* he drinks with you and bullshits with you
* he can discount your food and you tip him
* you develop a relationship if you go there often
you are assigning undue uniqueness to the sushi bar experience because it's not western cuisine. the actual interaction is not unique. there's also plenty of other cuisines in asia (outside of japan) that work the same way, i.e. street food, noodle bars, etc.
and i interact with my neighbors at the sushi bar all the time. so does everyone i know who likes sushi. especially when i'm drunk.
The world needs more places where people can just come together without pretense and maybe a common interest and mingle. I, for one, don't get into the club or bar scene, since I'm not a drinker and I'm bad at dancing; and not everyone is religious, so Church doesn't serve that purpose well, either
Not really. The bar gets money from you drinking, not from you talking. That's why they play the music so damn loud.
> I rarely go to bars with food
do you see how you're partitioning japanese things from non-japanese things in your mind, even though they are exactly the same thing?
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?
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.
where did you get that statistic from?
Even in high-fertility countries, it's been dropping from 5 to more like 2-3, largely correlated with female education and opportunities other than (early, exclusive) motherhood.
(The US would have a negative growth rate if it weren't for immigration, largely from Spanish-speaking nations in the Western hemisphere.)
Population of the earth as a whole is still increasing, but that's largely due to a few parts of the world which have had huge birthrates in the past and a large population under-30 (and under-18, so it will continue for a while.). It's a mean vs. median problem.
As you say, population of the earth as a whole is still increasing, and the birth rate is not in decline.
It's not a mean vs. median problem at all.
If it were in decline we wouldn't be facing one of the biggest global issues of over population.
Population'' is clearly negative -- the global birth rate IS in decline, and has been since 1950 according to the UN (I don't see earlier stats). Population is still increasing because Population' is positive. (well, actually Birth rate > death rate).
Per country, it actually is a median vs. mean problem; most countries (hence, median) have below-replacement birth rates; there are a limited number of countries with substantially above replacement birth rates, due to both fertility and the demographic composition (lots of young people).
No, its not. For several reasons. Firstly, because the derivative of population is the rate of population growth (persons/unit time) which is not just the rate of births per unit time, but births minus deaths. Secondly, because "birth rate" isn't the rate of births per unit time, but the rate of births per unit time per unit population.
> Population'' -- the global birth rate IS in decline, and has been since 1950 according to the UN
Those statements are only distantly related and only the latter is clearly true. While the birth rate (births/person/year) has been dropping for quite a long time, the second derivative of population with respect to time was around 0 from the late 1980s to recently, with the first derivative hovering at around 1 gigaperson / 12 years, though projections are that that rate of increase is slowing somewhat now. The second derivative of population with respect to time was actually positive for most of the 20th century, with each successive billion people added in a shorter period of time until it leveled off around at the 12 years / billion level. [1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
http://bit.ly/1jN1Xqc
Use the slider to move the time axis. Birth rates have declined in most of the world during the last 100 years, with a strong inverse correlation between life expectancy / wealth and birth rate. The US still withstands this trend somewhat with a birth rate just above 2.0, whereas most European countries range between 1.3 - 1.7 births / woman (which is not enough to sustain population).
This Wikipedia article is also interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate
There are also night market food stands which are popular in Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_market
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.
If a chef tells me to leave because I'm putting ketchup on something, though, I'm likely to hit him with the bottle.
>Americans seem to prefer to put a blindfold on and act like animals arent killed for food
I am at a loss on how you possibly come to that conclusion about a country that, aside from Canada, has more hunters per capita than any other Western nation.
This just looks silly.
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.
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.
Still if you look around we are definitely the minority. It seems like some people can't stand the thought of eating alone. Sometimes co-workers will practically beg you to go eat lunch with them if they don't have anyone else to go with. I think people place a stigma on themselves about it even though they won't look twice when they see someone else out eating by themselves.
Wine and some literature or a notepad for creative flourishes are often better company than people... and can help one to take work and life less seriously. This is a situation in which strong service people can really make a restaurant shine. Also, often I find eating alone I am actually able to meet fellow diners, occasionally single and attractive ones, with relative ease!
Similarly, if feedback is requested by staff or I feel compelled to offer it at the end of the meal, I can be honest and open about my impressions and not have to curtail perspective to avoiding looking like a snob to my dining companions. (An aside, is that IMHO one mark of a great restaurant is one that invites and accepts graciously feedback from its patrons.)
France, Romania, and Los Angeles have the most single-dining friendly cultures I've encountered. Holland does have it but it can be a pain in the ass to find quality restaurants, and very hard to find anything done well that deviates from the European cuisine matrix. Much of Asia (Thailand, South India, China, etc.) has a great single dining culture from a more practical perspective: less white tablecloth, multi-course meals and wine lists - more convenient menus and hands down tasty single person optimized relatively-balanced meals, at least for a portion of their cuisine.
Also, that site is a bloated hog.