I get why people resist this. Eating alone has been coded for years as something sad, the consolation meal. Most of that is American sitcom logic. In actual food cultures, the counter is where the regulars eat, the chef talks to you a little, the food gets to you faster, and nothing about the experience suggests you are missing out on a better one.
In Tokyo, eating alone at a ramen counter or an izakaya counter is the default, not the fallback. Standing at a bar in Rome with a glass of white and a small plate at 7pm is what people do after work before they go home. Sitting at the bar at Le Comptoir du Relais in Paris instead of waiting an hour for a table is the move — you eat the same food, faster, with a better view of the kitchen, and you get to leave when you want. None of that is sad. Most of it is the better version of the night.
The bar seat is the best seat
When I sit at the bar, I see what the kitchen is actually doing. I see what is going out to other tables, which dish is selling, which one the cooks are stressed about. I get talked to a little by the bartender, who is usually the person who knows the menu best. I get fed faster, because nobody is staging a romance on my behalf. And the bill is almost always smaller, because the bar seat is where they put solo people who are going to order one good plate and a glass of wine instead of a four-course performance.
At a place like Bar Mut in Barcelona, the bar is honestly the only seat I would willingly take. At Bar Pinotxo at La Boqueria, the counter is the restaurant. At Da Cesare al Casaletto in Rome on a quiet weeknight, sitting alone at a small table with a book and a plate of cacio e pepe is one of the least lonely things I have ever done. None of these are pity meals. They are some of the best ones.
What I order when I’m alone
Solo eating has its own grammar. I do not order the most ambitious thing on the menu — the kitchen hates plating one of those for a single seat, and the dish is usually built for sharing. I order one or two small plates, or the dish that the place is genuinely known for, or whatever the bartender tells me to. I almost never get a starter and a main; instead I get two starters, because they arrive faster and they are usually where the kitchen is actually showing off.
I bring something to read but I don’t hide behind it. Half the value of eating alone is being available to the room. People talk to you when you are not sealed inside a phone. The waiter recommends one extra thing because you are clearly paying attention. The regular next to you tells you what they are eating. None of that happens when you are nominally alone but actually inside Instagram.
Solo eating as recon
When I’m new in a city and I’m about to take someone out later in the trip, I almost always go to the place alone first. Lunch on day one, by myself, at the bar. I find out if the kitchen is actually good, what to order, who the nice server is, and whether to come back for dinner with company. The cost is one solo meal. The upside is I never have to sit through the version where I’m optimistically taking a friend somewhere I haven’t personally tested. That meal is always worse.
The bar seat is the cheapest education in the city. Take it.
Where I send people who are nervous about it
If you are not used to eating alone, do it for breakfast first. Almost nobody finds breakfast alone awkward, even in cultures where dinner alone reads as strange. Then graduate to lunch at a counter, in a busy place, where you are clearly not the only solo person there. Then a quiet weekday dinner at a casual neighborhood spot — the kind of small, lived-in room I keep coming back to, like Il Ciocco in Moneglia or the Café du Prieuré in Pully — before you try a Friday night anywhere. By that point you will have figured out it was never the embarrassing thing it was sold as. It is just eating, with a view of the kitchen, with nobody else’s schedule on top of yours.