Picture the scene. Summer in London has arrived, and you find yourself looking for something to do in the Big Smoke on a balmy evening. Unfortunately, you have no one to make plans with, yet you crave the experience of sipping on a pint while a polite server brings you a meal you didn’t have to cook.
Solo dining used to be associated with the lone business traveller, the person who’s just been stood up or the utterly friendless. But press coverage and polls over the last few years suggest that things are changing. The hospitality industry monitoring company, Open Table has named 2024 as the “year of the solo diner,” thanks to the rise in younger people living alone in cities who are looking for ways to spend their free time. And there are certainly options – some London establishments, like Koya in Soho for example, are proclaimed as havens for those eating alone.
“It’s just you and the food,” says Dan Fahy, 35, a food critic and regular solo diner. “I think there used to be a lot more people who thought it was quite weird to dine on your own,” he continues. “Ten years ago, if I just saw somebody in a pub, I might have felt sorry for them, whereas now I’m more of an adult and I’ve grown up a bit. You realise that some people just like to treat themselves.”
Dan, who has dined at Michelin-starred restaurants across London and the world, acknowledges that solo dining isn’t “for everyone”, but adds that it’s also a wonderful way to meet new people. “I like picking places on my own and I really enjoy it because every time it’s just completely different. You sometimes make friends and you just meet fascinating people.”
Sami Koponen, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, suggests that solo dining is a way for people “to mitigate the marketplace exclusion and become part of the restaurant community”. In fact, he found that solo dining may even include more social interaction through conversations with staff and other diners than “the meals shared between silent couples sitting at the same table”.
“It’s just you and the food”
However, it is far from being “the year of the solo diner”. Dan Fahy feels that things might be getting more difficult for people looking to eat out in their own company. “There are a few issues these days because I think a lot of restaurants are trying to prevent solo diners,” he says.
He has sometimes found it “impossible to book” a table for one, and says there are many places where you can’t book online as a solo diner. Some restaurants, such as Alex Dilling at Hotel Café Royal, have also introduced a minimum spend requirement for solo diners in August 2023.
“[It’s] getting a little bit more difficult, which is quite frustrating,” says Dan. He gets it, though: “Imagine if you’ve got a restaurant that’s got 10 tables and 10 solo diners book in there,” Dan says, adding that this would radically decrease the amount of sales the restaurant can make. Despite the logic behind prioritising groups of diners, he wishes that restaurants would “find ways to make it work” through things like counter seating and extra tables for solo diners.
Is there also a cultural element to solo dining that makes eating alone more difficult in London than in other parts of the world? Dan points out that solo dining in Asia is “a lot more prevalent”, whereas his British friends would be less likely to eat out alone unless they were a “foodie”.
“You just meet fascinating people”
For London-born Francesca de Franco, 45, co-founder of food and drink PR site, Vinocibo, dining alone is a mixed experience and depends on the context. “I used to absolutely hate dining alone at any time of the day up until I hit my late twenties,” Francesca says. “Now I really enjoy having a solo breakfast or lunch.” She adds that breakfast and lunch have a more practical element to them and she wouldn’t feel bad about getting out her laptop in café environments which would give her something to keep her busy instead of “staring into space [with] nobody to talk to.”
For Francesca, dinner alone retains a quality of the taboo, saying, “I’ve never, ever, gone out for dinner on my own.” She adds, “Dinner seems more formal, which in my mind makes it the preserve of couples or parties. I have the utmost respect for those that do go out for dinner solo, and certainly don’t have any prejudices; it just isn’t for me.”
Despite research on the subject suggesting that dining alone is on the rise, it still remains a divisive subject. If you find yourself alone on a summer’s evening, looking to indulge in a solo meal, it seems that you may be just as likely to draw looks of pity as you would be to spark up a conversation with a friendly stranger.
