Friends,
I’ve been thinking a lot about Tommy the Tomato, who made a guest appearance in the series finale of And Just Like That. In case you missed it, the episode found Carrie Bradshaw eating dinner alone in a Japanese restaurant. She’s seated in a booth, given a tablet to order (something she could not seem to figure out, kind of odd), and then also, given a companion: a human-sized stuffed (in season) vegetable, Tommy the Tomato! “So you don’t have to eat alone,” as cheerfully explained by the hostess.
The entire experience leaves Carrie feeling rattled and reflecting: without Big or Aiden, or the dashing Duncan, she faces the reality that she may spend the rest of her life alone. Legit concerns, and ones I have had myself. And the hostess of the restaurants does too. But not on her watch! With her big, soft, squishmallow, she will save and soothe all single lonely women from the daunting darkness of dining in the company of no one other than yourself – because eating alone is something to be scorned, a shameful act full of misery and loss, a sad woman eating a sad meal! How devastating! Oh my. So much to unpack here.
Carrie and I, we are in the same “boat” if I must call it that, though I am not sure ours is sinking. I am single too, and oftentimes I find myself on a weekend or evening without my kids, and a desire to try a new restaurant, or a film or a play. So, here’s what I do. I get dressed up, do my hair, put on the Scarlett Johansson lip gloss I got as an impulse purchase on Instagram (it really does work), and I go out and do whatever it is I want to do, all by myself. I have a book for company, or the newspaper. I like to read and eat and people watch. To be honest, I usually do it at the bar of a restaurant, because it feels safer there, less vulnerable to the judgment I feel people make about a woman eating alone – LONELY! LOSER! NO ONE LOVES HER! (or maybe that’s what is swirling around in my head), but last weekend, just before the Tommy the Tomato episode aired, I did something I’d never done before. I had dinner alone, at a table.
I was out on Shelter Island and my friend who was supposed to join me got COVID, so I was solo. I wasn't going to cancel the trip last minute – I wanted a weekend away – the last one before my kids returned from sleepaway camp. So I went. Friday night my friend Helen joined me at Léon 1909 (one of the best meals of the summer), but on Saturday I was on my own. I had made a prime brunch reservation at Sunset Beach and really wanted to go and sit a while, and enjoy the beautiful day at Crescent Beach. But it’s such a scene there and I was nervous to go alone; I’m not gonna lie. But I put on a cute outfit (as cute as it’s gonna get at this stage anyway), and waited in a line behind throngs of couples and massive groups of even numbered pairs.
The host checked me in, not batting an eye when it was just me, and walked me up to a prime table for two up on the deck in a side-by-side banquette, where the space next to me remained empty. My kids were in camp, my mom was okay, and I felt an immense gratitude for being able to take myself out for such a nice meal. I had my Keith McNally memoir, it was the most beautiful day.
I ate slowly, taking my time, reading, watching the parades of nuclear families, tables of two digging into their phone, not their own company, and groups of friends, brown from spending summer probably on some sort of yacht, pouring pink wine from oversized magnums. I relaxed, had a plate of scallops crudo, a nicoise salad, and another glass of wine when a gentleman approached me to say how chic I looked, how European with my wine and book.
In the meet cute of the rom-com version of this scene, he would be a handsome single guy about my age, asking if I liked the McNally memoir. He’d make witty conversation and we’d end up spending the day frolicking in the water in a movie montage set to a Laufey song. In the real life version, this lovely man, there with his husband for the weekend, gave me a Bravo! “I love that you’re sitting here alone looking so glamorous with your wine and your book!,” he said. “It’s so European of you!” He was so nice, and we chatted for a bit, but also, it made me feel a little like I was an exhibit in a museum? An aberration that needed commentary?
And yet, I am not an aberration. The Times’ Priya Krishna did a piece on this a few months ago, which reported that reservations for solo dining in the United States have risen by 64 percent since 2019, according to data from OpenTable, and 21 percent from 2022 to 2023, according to Resy. The increase in eating alone is probably even greater, given that many people simply walk in. But it still feels heavy, loaded, to have to respond, when a hostess asks, Table for Two, for me to say: “Oh, it’s just me.”
After my experience dining solo, I interviewed Gianna Biscontini, the founder of Dining Solo DC, a site for women who dine out alone and don’t want to be treated like damaged goods. Gianna is 43, divorced with two doggies. She’s a behavioral analyst and therapist who runs Expanded Women’s Health and Wellness and is a frequent solo diner and traveller. “I study gender conditioning, and I have eaten by myself around the world,” she told me. “You notice people who maybe carry shame or hesitancy. They walk in with the beliefs and stories about what it means to be a solo woman in the world like ‘I am sad or lonely.’ I want women to feel good going out alone.”
The decision to help women find restaurants that made dining solo seem like something to be celebrated not shunned came from a particularly upsetting experience at a restaurant. “It was around the holidays and I was feeling sad, because my dad had passed away and I’m not all that close with my family. I wanted to wear my new dress. I pictured myself at a table in the window. When she turned up at the restaurant, it was quiet, with only about one in ten tables seated. The ones in the window were empty. The hostess offered her a seat at the bar or the communal table, since she was eating alone. “The communal table faced a wall and that was not what I wanted,” Gianna recalled. When she asked for the window table she was told it was reserved. She took a seat at the communal table, where she couldn’t people-watch, and felt dismissed, particularly when she overheard a couple come in without a reservation, but the host seated them in that very window table she had asked for.
“I felt so bad,” she recalled. “I am usually a super joyful happy human and I felt ashamed, and like a loser. I had not felt like that before dining out alone. I went for one experience and I got another and didn't eat alone again for a while.” As someone who studies gender – she is the author of “Fuckless: A Guide to Wild Unencumbered Freedom,” she also felt the treatment woud not have come to a man in the same position. It’s about our beliefs that we are meant to be sexy, to be small, to be less,” she said. “If I were a man in a suit would I have gotten that window table that I wanted. I would have gotten reverence and respect.”
Eventually, Gianna decided to go out alone again. It was the night of what would have been her father’s 90th birthday and she took herself out to celebrate his life. At this restaurant, she said she was treated like a queen, with a visit from the sommelier and made to feel welcome and comfortable, the complete opposite of what had happened months before. She came home and immediately bought the Dining Solo domain. “It was the complete opposite experience at this other place and it lifted me up enough to continue to put myself out there at other restaurants.”
Now on Dining Solo DC, she will chronicle her dining adventures and offer ratings for the best restaurants to eat at solo. She hopes it becomes a resource for women but also that it helps move the needle so that restaurants embrace tables for one. “A restaurant is a business and you want a sustainable business model, you need a refresh of the solo diner model. I am a full person and I like to take up space and it’s a table for two. I will likely have a three-figure check no matter what and I tip well. We deserve being at a table and having that experience whether we are with someone else or on our own.”
She’s absolutely right. We deserve to eat out with no one beside us or across from us without stigma. We certainly don’t need to be paired with Tommy the Tomato, like a toddler in need of the comfort of a stuffed animal to keep the monsters away. Sure, we all have our demons, the voices inside us that say we are less than, we are alone, we are not chosen. But we need to banish those voices, and restaurants can help. They can work to make diners eating alone feel welcome, cherished, as they do every couple and quartet that strolls in the door.
I know my life will take turns, and some of them will lead me to a table where I will be eating alone and others to where I will be sitting across the table from a man — maybe I’ll be falling in love, or maybe I’ll be wishing I were alone with a book and my scallop crudo.
Society has conditioned us so that being a part of a couple offers a halo of happiness just as being a single woman dining alone is attached to a stigma of shame. I hope that starts to change, and perhaps it only will as more of us decide to go out to eat with no one but our fine selves. Perhaps Carrie Bradshaw said it best, in the very last line of And Just Like That. Sitting at her computer, facing the open window as she did when she was single in her 30s, she wrote. “The woman realized she was not alone. She was on her own.”
Beautifully written as always and I love the way you seamlessly weave in the story of Gianna…brava!
Andrea - Your writing is always excellent and sometimes inspiring, but this is utterly beautiful and moving.