Online, photographs of solo dates have become a genre unto themselves. One wine glass, one plate, and a notebook beside the cutlery. People have started photographing these meals and posting them on Instagram, turning private moments into shared ones and aloneness into aspiration. In Delhi, the Instagram account @tableforonedelhi documents meals eaten alone across the city. At one level, it functions as a recommendation. At another, it records a woman eating alone as a rejoinder to the waiter who asked if she had been stood up. In Bengaluru, a woman set out to document 50 solo dates and found, by the end, that she had also documented a city. What begins as a meal alone becomes, over time, a kind of cartography, a woman mapping the city on her own terms, one table at a time.
“I am not talking about laptop-and-lunch. Deliberately taking the time to spend quality time with yourself leads to surprising outcomes,” says Anupama S, a Bengaluru-based clinical psychiatrist, who has watched postpartum depression dismantle modern women. “Motherhood is often accompanied by the slow disappearance of preference, appetite, and the sense that one’s own desires carry legitimate weight in a household reorganised entirely around the needs of a new life,” she says. She began prescribing solo dates, two a week. Within a month, the effects were visible, she says. While depression does not resolve on restaurant tables, women were returning to places they had loved before the pregnancy, sitting alone at a table they had chosen themselves, in a room whose noise and light they had selected, ordering food they actually wanted. “Going out alone to face the world as a new mom is a bigger deal than a spa or other self-care rituals,” Anupama says. A spa happens to you while you lie still. The bar, the restaurant, the solo evening in a room of strangers is an experience that you construct yourself, one decision at a time. Where to sit. What to order. Whether to stay. Whether the next drink is worth it. For women already lost inside the seamless service of early motherhood, where the body exists primarily as a resource for another person’s survival, these are not small decisions. They are the mechanism by which one remembers oneself.
Eating alone is a ritual for many, says Arijit Bose, who walks into Miguel’s in Goa every Monday evening and orders a steak and a Manhattan. “I turn my phone off and enjoy talking to strangers and making them laugh. I need those two hours to myself every week,” he says. The people who feed cities for a living are often the most deliberate about eating alone.
Radha Arumugam, a 50-year-old manager at a multinational auto firm, had eaten every meal of her adult life in the company of others. With husband, children, in-laws, colleagues—the Indian table as it has always been arranged, for everyone, and for no one in particular. Then her younger son left for Canada, her daughter for the US, and she found herself, one Thursday evening, sitting alone at a restaurant on Nungambakkam High Road. She had not planned it. The hostess showed her to a table, and she ordered the fish curry and a glass of wine, and sat there for two hours feeling, she says, as though she had discovered a room in her own house that had always been there and that she had simply never opened. She goes out almost every week now, sometimes to the same place, sometimes somewhere new. “All my life I ate what the family wanted,” she says. “South Indian on weekdays, something lighter for my husband’s digestion on weekends. Now I order what I want, and I sit with it, and it is the most peaceful two hours of my week. I don’t care—for once—who is watching.” In Chennai, where the culture of eating is communal and bound up with hospitality, she says the hardest part was the first five minutes. The looking around and wondering what the others thought. “It passes quickly,” she says. Arumugam has started recommending it to her friends, women in their 50s, many of whom are surprised to find that there is something left to discover about themselves at a table.
What is happening at the table is also happening on the road. Solo travel has become one of the fastest-growing categories in global tourism, driven by the same hunger that sends Radha Arumugam to Nungambakkam on Thursday nights and Arijit Bose to Miguel’s every Monday. The desire is not just to be alone. It is for the self that only shows up when no one else is making demands on it. Young people are booking solo trips the way an earlier generation booked package holidays. So are people in their 50s, newly unencumbered, discovering that the world looks different when you travel through it on your own terms. The solo dinner and the solo journey come from the same place. A person deciding, sometimes for the first time, that their own company is worth the occasion.
Dining and Cooking