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CBS Says It’s Now Officially Okay to Dine by Ourselves
We no longer need to eat our hearts out about eating alone
By Ed Goldman
I usually prefer dining with someone else rather than alone, provided I like the other person and—extra credit!—the meal begins with the other person announcing, “This one’s on me.”
I’ve eaten by myself so often in my life that I rarely feel awkward—though I suppose if I were at a holiday ball and was the only one at a table set for eight I might decide to spend the evening at the bar. In another part of town.
No reservations
Now, at long last, I’m not alone in not minding “alone.” New data indicate that more people are taking themselves out and liking it.
Hmm. Maybe the way I just phrased that sounds semi-creepy. In my defense, what about the people who respond to a story someone tells about an incident that happened 10 or 15 years ago by teasing, “You’re dating yourself!”?
To be clear, taking yourself to dinner doesn’t mean you’re dating yourself. Not even if you toss in cocktails before and a movie afterward. If you then take yourself home and wonder if you’ll get up the nerve to kiss yourself good night, well, then it may be time to do a seance with Dr. Ruth.
“In the U.S., solo dining reservations have risen 29 percent over the last two years, according to OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site,” CBS-TV’s “MoneyWatch” reports. “They’re up 18 percent this year in Germany and 14 percent in the United Kingdom.”
That usual suspect, the pandemic, is being credited or blamed for the rise in solo supping. But you can’t just run stories like this without quoting someone from academia, can you? Of course not. COVID “‘made social interactions less feasible and therefore less important while eating out,’ said Anna Mattila, a professor of lodging management at Penn State University who has studied solo dining. “And smartphones help some restaurant patrons feel connected to others even when they’re by themselves,” she said.
Hey, no fair. If you’re either engaged in bashful breakfasting, lonesome lunching or deserted dining it can’t include your yammering on the phone. If you’re using your phone to catch up on the news, your investments or a non-interactive podcast, that seems legit. For example, my own podcast is neither interactive nor pro-active. It’s reactive. But even using a variant of “active” to describe it seems deceptive. Like everything else I do to make my meager living, writing and recording the podcast mostly involves my sitting down. So I suppose you could call it nonactive but that would imply inactive, which would imply dormant. Next week on “The Liveliness of Language,” we’ll parse and diagram sentences in real time.
—To return to the table: Do you put any significance in the fact that that an increasing number of Americans are eating alone compared to Germans and Brits? And why don’t we have stats on the French, Sudanese, Samoans and Nepalese?
Theories abound, I’m sure. Europeans are very sociable people, so that takes care of why Germans, Brits and French diners like to have someone across the table from them. Whereas, Sudanese, Samoan and Nepalese people speak complicated languages so maybe they just figure their being able to speak it is enough of an accomplishment, why force others to talk in them?
I almost always take a book or a writing tablet when I eat alone in public. The book needs to be a little dog-eared, to indicate I often read and eat alone and the writing tablet should have a few pages of cursive on them to suggest that I also write and eat alone frequently. Both of these notions probably make it sound as though I’m self-conscious when I dine alone but no more than people who show up with memorized questions and anecdotes to share, fearing if they don’t the meal will be a disaster.
My mom had the solution to this. No matter where you were, whom you were with and what you’d ordered, she could always talk about other meals she’d had, with other people in other venues. She even did this when I cooked for her—and now that I think of it, this may go a long way to explaining why I never mind taking myself to dinner. Check?
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).