On Eating Alone
Just because something might be unconventional, doesn’t mean you have to be weird about it
What a cliché! A text about the merits of doing something completely normal, but painted in a light that makes it seem somehow questionable. Or so I thought. There seems to be a vein of thought on the Internet, that pops up once in a while, that consists in people actually acting as if eating alone was strange. Eating alone has formed a good bulk of the foundation on which I build my thinking around food. This I know for sure, so it makes sense to explore further. Besides, nothing substantive and good has been written about it, that I know of. All the search results I came across seemed to be terrible, not useful, or wrong. So let’s go.
It is one of these things I’ve enjoyed as long as I can remember, and I don’t know why. As alluded above, I’ve come to understand that some people find it a weird practice, even if this opinion is encountered rather more often on the Internet. I am not writing for these people, if they even exist. Eating alone allows for the kind of exploration — inside and out, that’s only possible in choice company, otherwise. In this sense it is similar to doing anything else on your own. Sitting in silence, on your own. Where have I heard this before?
I’ve already written about the usual spots, and that moves into a different territory already. In those places you’re probably not alone in the same way anymore. The vibe of the situation changes once you know the staff. Often for the better. And if you choose your places really well, the staff might have enough tact, or be busy enough, to give you some well-deserved alone time, even amidst knowing all of them.
For the longest time I had a heuristic for not going with others to places I hadn’t gone to by myself first. Don’t want to take guests to a bad spot, after all. It wasn’t exactly ironclad, since there are other ways of inferring what’s good. If you have “the Eye”, or good sources otherwise, choosing becomes easy pickings. Eating alone teaches picking a good spot fast.
There are two sides to the issue, then. One, the external, for finding comfortable places to park yourself in; two, the internal, actually making yourself comfortable in bars, cafés, restaurants. Seems obvious, but in practice it ain’t so much so. As a former co-worker remarked, you can pretty much always tell how experienced a diner someone is from afar, by the way they sit and hold their fork. Not that you necessarily need a great deal of experience. It just comes with certain directional markers.
Arguably the first of these is a lower level skill, though depending on your circles, it is foundational nonetheless. It certainly matters less if you’re out on your own, with the express intent of exploring the options, to hell or high water. All experiences are just information in those cases. Choosing correctly starts mattering when other people enter the picture, and you intend to show them a good time. Now there’s a degree of responsibility involved.
The higher level skill is learning to be normal once inside. Barring growing into it, I’d wager eating alone is the fastest, best way of developing this capacity. Discounting actually working in the industry, that is. Knowing what the plumbing looks like tends to drop the pretence. Many ways up the mountain, really.
As alluded to in the previous piece, we often face an initial learning curve, when doing things, and simple exposure seems to be the way through this stage. Doing things alone functions as heightened exposure, as a mental force multiplier. For better or worse. Especially so, if you don’t aim at being distracted, even if it is in vogue. Being alone speeds up the process, given you are moving in the right direction. And since we are talking about something as normal as eating, it’s not a tough ask, is it? Tough to eat the wrong way around, for most of us, at least. No teacher needed for this, even if the parents didn’t show the way.
The whole experience frames differently, when alone. Shame restaurant bars aren’t all that common in Finland. Even on pains of getting ridiculously lofty about the whole thing, I will claim that eating alone is like a panacea for certain affects of the soul, which are entirely too personal to get in to. It’s good for exploring a new city, if you ever find yourself in one. It’s good for getting into some much needed trouble. It’s even good for letting serendipity find you. Just simply fun. And as said, the peripheral qualities it develops will help in future outings. All of it resting on being delightfully normal.
Many of us have likely long forgotten what it feels like to go to a restaurant for the first time. Though you wouldn’t always know just by looking. Some people's vertebrae seem to fuse together the moment they walk in, and I can’t help but think this is due to a lack of exposure. As it is, but what a shame!
As mentioned at the start, I have reasons to suspect the entire “conversation” about the supposed appropriateness of eating alone is probably fake, or driven by otherwise disingenuous motives. There is just something too weird about making completely normal human behaviours seem somehow unsurmountable. Hence, I much rather explore the benefits of eating alone, rather than the act itself. If that really is the bottleneck, I’d be more inclined to say it’s probably indicative of some underlying psychopathology.
That said, doing things alone can act as a multiplier, in whatever direction. With the right intentionality, it’s possible to assist yourself in giving you the capacity for radical normalcy, and it can be rather fast, too. Faster than with other people, my experience tells. And though I dislike explaining myself, “normal” is another word and concept so utterly corrupted beyond recognition, that it demands a few words for its own benefit.
Normal does not mean “usual” (much as it should), nor does it mean “average” (seconded). Rather, it is fundamentally closer to what we might be inclined to call “natural”. Not that this word is without its own share of baggage. But for now, it will suffice to simply see it stripped of Marketingese. Semantic games become boring fast, and I will resort to a working definition of “things that work or persist across time, without requiring the head to be involved in-the-moment”. Refer to the previous piece, and discussion about the “old school” way, if curious about further details.
This, in my experience, is the major benefit of eating — or doing much of anything, alone. It can teach, or at least allow for, operating within oneself, without thought in the moment. Why I emphasise the conditional here is as before. Being alone works both ways: it emphasises tendencies. People can become hermits for all kinds of reasons, and most of these reasons are beyond un-useful. Increasingly so, I’d suspect. Solitude will not inherently solve any issues any more than company does, if these things are received or embarked on in the wrong way. The characteristics of a wrong way being the opposite of what I wrote before: unnaturalness, or even rather, weirdness. Now, recognising weirdness in oneself is in some sense a separate question, and one that requires a great deal of awareness and mental clarity to answer.
Finally we can draw the discussion back to our initial point. Eating alone can teach a person to be — and as an extension act, normal in restaurants. The more fundamental reasons for this are too convoluted to be practical, but I have scratched the surface here. The end result is attractive anyway. We are ultimately drawn to naturalness, when the chips are allowed to fall as they may.
And if you would still continue pressing for a definition of “naturalness” after all this, I would give a blatantly circular answer, and would refuse to elaborate further. If nothing else, being natural in a restaurant will get you better service, and makes the whole bit an overall more pleasant experience for everyone involved. You’re welcome to try for yourself, if you still doubt.
For your health,
O.A. Ruotsalainen