In March this year my appetite left me for the first time in my life. My characteristic failing has always been a helpless, freewheeling, incontinent appetite for more or less everything: – food, men, booze – whatever is to hand, really. The problem has been moderating or neutralising it.
The idea of appetite disappearing was unthinkable, a fantasy to envision when I had overconsumed. Imagine not wanting anything; imagine food losing its complex, charged appeal without any effort or restraint. It’s the dream of women with eating issues, the ones who have squandered years anxiously scrutinising calorie charts and glycaemic indexes and BMI scales. Which is to say, many of us.
I lost my appetite for two or three months, in the aftermath of an illness and poisonously strong antibiotics. Rather than enjoying the effortless weight loss, as I guiltily suspected I might, I found I was quite melodramatically forlorn at the loss of one of my primary pleasures in life: food itself, yes, but specifically dining alone. I tried a few times anyway, but it saddened me too much to spend money and find myself pushing steak I could scarcely afford around the plate, the waste and listless lack of interest too depressing.
Eating out alone has been an important part of my life for as long as I was allowed to do anything alone. Long before I knew or cared about food in any substantial sense, I still treasured the action. When I first got pocket money as a kid and was allowed to walk into town by myself, I went to the dinky, cosy cafes and ordered a meal and read my book and felt the thrilling encroachment of adulthood and autonomy. I felt the promise of an inner self taking form.
I remember my pride when I gradually transitioned from the more obvious, trashy treats of childhood – the era of McNugget and pizza supremacy – into the realm of a toasted ham and cheese on brown bread with a bowl of soup, which seemed to me the height of sophisticated adulthood. I couldn’t have described this at the time, but this carving out of time and nourishment for only me was a moderate luxury that assured me I really was a human being; that although it did not feel like it, I had an identity, and one worth sustaining.
This is partly why I felt so dejected at the recent news of Hotel Café Royal in London introducing a minimum spend of an eye-watering £330 for solo diners. The logic is that a lone customer takes up the same space as two, and must therefore make up the shortfall. Regardless of the deranged excess of the figure itself, any punitive measure of this kind towards the solo diner seems to me not only upsetting and insulting but also actually counter to the whole essence of what makes restaurants special and meaningful to those of us who love them. The restaurant later said that there are always one or two tables open for solo dining without a minimum spend – so I suppose I’d better just hope that my favourite way to spend an evening out doesn’t catch on.
A good restaurant acts as a site of refuge from the rest of life. Not to put it too grandly, but for me they are a real source of sanctuary and relief when everything else feels unmanageable. Certainly they are for other things, too, chiefly celebration and communion with loved ones, but I value them most as a kind of clear, calm shade to rest in momentarily before returning to the discomfort of the everyday. Taking away this option is not only cruelly punitive on people who may have no choice but to dine alone, but also chips away at the general consoling civilisation that defines a good restaurant.
Of course, dining alone is a luxury; I often think my parents would be horrified if they could see the proportion of my income that is spent on it. But you needn’t be in Michelin-starred restaurants to achieve the effect. My favoured solo spot is Koya, the Japanese noodle place in Soho, London, where the counter seating means solo diners are almost hallowed above groups. I feel a great, inordinate peace there when I glance around at my fellow lone eaters, all of us with heads bowed over steaming bowls as though in prayer.
And then, I mark my most special occasions by treating myself to something more extravagant. I celebrated the publication of my second novel by going alone to a place so fancy I would never usually squander it on a solo visit, and had a single glass of champagne, an ample plate of mortadella and pickles, and a cheeseboard big enough for two.
I was trying to take a moment in the middle of it all to acknowledge that I had worked hard and the work had meant something. Really, that is what dining alone can achieve: an acknowledgment of one’s own self and a brief endorsement of the idea that the self is not only worth keeping alive but also treating with the kindness we accord others we love. That’s a tradition and impulse worth preserving.
Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London
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