Print“So what, you just come out into the city and eat at the best restaurants alone?”
The chef peers at me quizzically, his arms folded, desperately trying to determine whether I pose a threat to his restaurant. After all, reviewers and food industry insiders often eat alone to avoid the distractions of conversation and human contact. His suspicion fades when I tell him I’m only 19, neither a Michelin inspector nor shadowy food blogger seeking to pick his restaurant apart. Now, he nods respectfully. It takes guts to eschew companionship, to willingly part with convention, and to risk pitying looks, all for the sake of food.
On Central Park benches and sequestered in New York’s finest dining rooms, stuck in John Jay at odd hours or sprawled across Columbia’s manicured lawns, I ate hundreds of meals alone this year. For a freshman at any university, friendless hours and expanses of silence mark slowly passing weeks. But in America’s most isolating metropolis, where the days are fast-paced and full of strangers focused on their own lives, Columbia students slip into solitude randomly and instantaneously. On my first Friday night at Columbia, unfamiliar faces surrounded me on the downtown 1 train. Even today, stepping outside the gates shifts me into a reality filled with alien and anonymous figures.
At first, I ate alone out of new-student and New York necessity. Over the months, however, I intentionally scheduled meals without companions, obsessively experimenting with different kinds of dining: the pizza shack, the diner, the sushi bar, the Michelin-starred restaurant. Eating alone became addictive, uncomfortable, frightening, celebratory, powerful, and an intellectual experiment. Staring across a table at empty space one evening this April—at no plate or silverware, but at an untouched chair that seemed to vibrate restlessly—I realized that the loneliest moments in life come while eating. Yet I relish the sheer beauty of dining alone, the faint, spiderweb connections I make with the other lonely people inhabiting this sprawling metropolis.
Koronet is the consummate Columbia eatery, a tiny shop on Broadway where unbelievably oversized and oily slices of pizza reign supreme. Before coming to New York, most freshmen have heard rumors of Koronet—late-night forays to grease-bomb an alcohol-saturated stomach, soporific lunches snagged in between classes. My first meal alone at Columbia, I wandered into Koronet and ordered a plain jumbo slice. Dripping with mozzarella, the slice dribbled over the edge of the paper plate as I walked out and sat down on a bench in the middle of Broadway. The molten cheese and boiling sauce took the skin off the roof of my mouth, and I shook, partly bewildered, partly pain-stricken, wholly overstimulated. Yes, I ate alone, but watching fellow students cross the street and taxis hurtle past without care, I felt intimately enveloped in a new web of dizzying connections: the grad student, meeting my eyes with a knowing smile; the white-haired professor, frowning at another academic; the homeless person looking for a bite to eat. Eating this piece of pizza, gulping it down alone, mutated into a communal experience, shared with everyone who ever ate pizza alone, who saw me eating alone, who either despised or envied my wild-eyed joy at bad pizza on Broadway.
Over the months, I formed awkward friendships, forged over other collective moments. John Jay Dining Hall is a notorious spot for freshman bonding, a pickup joint for camaraderie. Those earliest Columbia friendships, the product of arbitrary decisions to sit at a particular table after being dragged down from my floor to suffer through more wheatberries and stir-fry, became my most consistent dining companions.
Sam, the saxophone player from Seattle, always chose an omelette and a waffle smothered in strawberry syrup. Eric, the someday investment banker from Jersey, grabbed as many fries and burgers as possible. And Andrew, another finance-type from Connecticut, would always insist on a trip to HamDel for a Lewinsky instead. But for every hour I spent discussing the art of the waffle or arbitrage trading, I took penalty time, uncomfortably alone, hunched over a plate of garbanzo beans and beef stroganoff. With a poor choice of meal plan, I found myself joining other solo diners in John Jay more often than I desired. However much I vaguely enjoyed the communal sensation of loneliness, those meals were more soul-sucking than any other time I voluntarily dined alone. Ultimately, John Jay’s food possesses little aesthetic value, and sharing in freshman misery made me even sicker than the dirty buffets.
So when incongruent class schedules necessitated weekday meals without friends, I graduated to the diner—usually Deluxe, a bit cleaner and higher-quality than Tom’s Restaurant. A classic symbol of loneliness and urban anxiety in American art, the diner offers a refuge from the city’s dark loneliness and sites of interior isolation. For example, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” depicts a couple leaning on a diner counter. They face the viewer, but stare down at white coffee mugs. The cook, clad in white, engages the man and woman in conversation, but their detachment from the employee and from each other seems evident in their expressionless faces. Further down the bar, one man faces away from the plane of the canvas, manipulating some unseen object in his hands. These sites of humanity demonstrate different modes of urban loneliness. embodied in the estranged lovers, the servile short-order cook trying to make contact, and the solitary man eating alone. All four occupy a bright space, a bubble of light differentiated from the empty cityscape. This illuminated territory, however, encircles lives that remain thrust into darkness: unknowable, unspeakable, and unapproachable.
In Deluxe, I am the man turned away. I order a burger medium-rare, another representation of the loneliness of mechanized America and fast-food urbanism. Slurping down the bloody meat, which is palpably tender and soaks a scattering of fries with juice, I enjoy these broken and disrupted communications. Watching the couple sitting next to me, so obviously unhappy and unable to broach the silence, the chattering waitress working so hard to catch their attention and pander for more tip, I am quietly cast into the foreground. I imagine that the man in “Nighthawks” enjoys his loneliness too: enjoys the beauty of these everyday disruptions, the flaccid apathy of urban relationships.
Although eating alone in Deluxe feels somewhat powerful, this sense of the everyday sublime comes from a shadowy undercurrent of the gritty metropolis. In effect, the diner celebrates the necessity of loneliness in the city, allowing a brief escape from the street and a chance to apprehend the lives of fellow urbanites. Therefore, comparing sushi bars to diners seems logical—both involve a communal eating experience that generates a tripartite relationship between chef, other patrons, and self.
Still, one critical disjunction distinguishes sushi bars from city diners. At a sushi bar, the intermingling of solipsism and community feels like an intrinsic aspect of the eating process, while diners isolate customers in order to facilitate voyeuristic pleasures. Resting peacefully at 15 East, I focus on my food in its totality, each hand-molded piece arriving separately, perfect for contemplation. Every so often the sushi chef speaks, teaching, joking, anticipating my whims. The buzz of conversation drifts amiably past, and I reach for a ball of creamy orange uni resting on rice. Sliding the sea urchin roe into my mouth, I taste afternoons in Florida, a stormy morning in South Carolina, my childhood. The man and woman beside me understand—they have felt this moment too, and share my introspection. My solipsism involves them as well, incorporates their lives into mine, if only for an instant. This entangling of selves occurs without an illicitly voyeuristic undertone, while at Deluxe, I might overhear a pouting couple’s spat. There, the sensation is of participatory voyeurism, an unwanted penetration into an other life. Here, at 15 East, we want to discover each other, albeit in silence, alone and stuck in loneliness.
Beyond the sushi bar and diner, the formal restaurant presents unique challenges to the single diner: whether to sit facing a wall or a different group of customers, how to respond to rude glances and inquiring looks, and how to interact with patronizing or overly accommodating servers. Michelin-starred establishments only amplify these problems, since these pricey restaurants typically cater to an expense account crowd in addition to the occasional special dinner or date night.
Over the course of stomach-stretching meals and marathon eating sessions, I obtain the most exquisite dining-alone highs. Without any outside stimulation to divert my attention from the food, I study an artistically cooked squab at Jean Georges, meditate on an aggressively stinky Vacherin Mont d’Or cheese at Picholine, analyze the indescribable richness of lobster “cappuccino” at The Modern. I also engage in boring endurance sessions, staring at bare walls, attempting to avoid eye contact with the couple at the table next to mine.
I know social niceties demand that I shouldn't listen in on the discussions of neighboring eaters, that I should not judge them as they similarly should not judge me, that I should not rupture the invisible borders and barriers separating my self from them. This temptation to blur the boundaries between individuals actually produces human connection. Indeed, the slightest smile or grimace, a conspiratorial wink with the waitress at the stuffy couple alongside builds a textured fabric of interaction that defines dining alone. In Michelin-worthy restaurants, spaces are ostensibly demarcated—needless to say, the communal dining trend has not hit Manhattan fine dining, with a few exceptions, like Momofuku Ko, for example. Even more than a thoroughly—conducted analysis of a lamb chop or the emotional difficulties of eating by myself, I love cross-table slippage, where established builders collapse into nothingness.
To my left in a recently reopened Michelin spot, a very pregnant woman and her lover-maybe-husband are talking baby. She orders a Cabernet Sauvignon, and I smell the leathery, tannic wine open in the glass. I pick apart a dish of miso-marinated black cod, and listen to their impossibly cold conversation. As her baby bump brushes the starched linen and they discuss hospital plans, I watch her take a big sniff and swallow. A disagreeable, self-righteous sensation rises in my gut, and I too swallow, forcing that need to argue, to criticize, back down into some private recess of my being. This unhappy couple out of Hopper wants to sit with unreadable faces, and I am across the counter.
Smiling, I feel satiated, satisfied with my cod and my imagined dialogues with the diners on all sides. While the loneliest dining moments deny the essential community of eating, I realize that in New York City, one never truly dines alone. Rather, the kaleidoscope of faces and the dishes rotating past constructs an artificial community more real than the isolated metropolis. Eight months after matriculation, I finally understand that the answer to that chef’s question was "No." I am not a person who just comes out into the city and eats at the best restaurants alone. I am a person who dines alone to be with others.