The first time I ate alone at a bar — a real bar, in a place I had actually made the effort to book, ordering from a menu I was not skimming — I was thirty-one. I remember what I ate. I do not remember what I read. I remember the barman, who did the correct thing, which was to leave me alone.
Eating alone in public is a competence, and it has to be learned in exactly the order I am about to describe. Otherwise it is not a competence, it is a rehearsal for loneliness.
1 · Book the table.
Not the walk-in seat at the back. The proper table, or the proper bar spot at a proper bar. Do it in your name, in the same voice you use to book a table for four. Do not say a single. Say a table at eight, please, for one. Yes, at the bar is fine. Say it like you are saying the number in the salary piece three dispatches ago.
2 · Bring one object.
A book, a notebook, a magazine. Not a phone. The phone is a panic button, and if you bring a panic button to a bar, you will press it, and the meal will be over before the second drink. Bring the object. Open it before the menu arrives so the room understands you have furnished your own company.
3 · Order first.
Before you look at the room. Before you have taken off your jacket. Before you have decided whether you are the kind of woman who eats alone in this place. Order the wine. Say exactly what you want. If you do not know, say what you would order if it were Tuesday and you were with a friend. It is Tuesday, and you are with the friend that you are. Order for her.
A woman ordering the sea bass for one, at eight, on a Tuesday, is not lonely. She is early to the rest of her life.
4 · Do not read the whole time.
The object is a doorway, not a wall. Read a paragraph, then look up. Watch the bar. Watch the waiter pour a Barolo three seats down. Watch the woman two tables over, who is on the second date and pretending to know what a Barolo is. Do not judge her. She is you, three years ago, and she is doing fine.
5 · Order the second course.
This is the moment. The single-diner instinct at the end of the main is to ask for the bill and be out of the room by nine-fifteen. Do not. Order the second course. The little plate of cheese, the tiramisu you would order if you were with the friend, the espresso and the small biscotti. The second course is what makes the meal a meal rather than a fuelling. It is also the moment when the barman decides, in his private way, whether you are a woman he will remember.
6 · Tip more than you would.
Ten percent above your normal. Not because you owe the room — you don't — but because the room did the small correct thing of not treating you like a problem. Reward the small correct thing. It is how the room stays a room where a woman can eat alone.
7 · Leave before you want to.
By six minutes. Not five. Not ten. Six. The meal should end slightly before it wants to end. This is the difference between an evening you will do again and an evening you overspent. You leave with a small residual appetite for the room, which is how you know you will come back.
On the walk home — which, if you have chosen a good bar, is the walk from the piece two dispatches back — you will feel a specific thing, which is neither loneliness nor triumph. It is the feeling of having spent an evening with a friend you are not sick of yet. Your competence, in the end, is this: you keep good company with yourself. Everyone else you invite is a bonus.