There is a particular kind of freedom in walking into a restaurant alone in a city where nobody knows you. No coordination, no compromise, no conversation unless you want it. No performing the social rituals of a shared meal — the negotiating of the bill, the diplomatic agreement on a restaurant that nobody actually wanted. Just you and whatever the city puts on your plate.
I have been eating alone in strange cities for fifteen years now, and the meals I remember most vividly are almost never the best food. They are the meals where something else happened — a conversation, a silence, a view from a window, a decision made between courses that changed the shape of the trip. Here are four of them.
Istanbul, 2014
The restaurant was in Karaköy, down a side street that smelled like fish and diesel and, faintly, of bread being baked somewhere I could not see. I had been walking for six hours and my feet had made the decision to stop before my brain got involved. The place had four tables, no English menu, and a waiter who looked at me with the particular expression reserved for tourists who have wandered off the approved route.
I pointed at what the man at the next table was eating. It turned out to be grilled mackerel with onions and a salad of tomatoes and sumac that was so simple it felt like an argument against every complicated meal I had ever eaten. The bread arrived in a basket lined with newspaper. The tea came in a tulip glass without being asked for.
The man whose plate I had pointed at introduced himself as Kemal. He was an architect. He ate here every Thursday. He told me that the restaurant had no name — it was just the place on the corner, and if you needed a name to find it, you were not the right kind of customer. We talked for an hour about buildings and cities and the particular melancholy of places that are being renovated into something they never wanted to be. He paid for my tea before I could object and told me to come back on a Thursday.
I never went back. But I have thought about that mackerel at least once a month for eleven years.
San Francisco, 2017
A counter seat at a ramen place in the Tenderloin, eleven o'clock at night, jet-lagged and vibrating with that particular energy where you are too tired to sleep and too wired to be still. The restaurant was full of people who looked like they were also between things — between flights, between jobs, between the person they were yesterday and whoever they were becoming.
I sat next to a woman who was reading a paperback with the cover torn off. She was eating methodically and did not look up when I sat down. I ordered the tonkotsu without looking at the menu because it was the only word I could pronounce with confidence, and when it arrived it was so aggressively salty and rich that it felt medicinal, like something prescribed for the specific condition of being alone in a strange city at night.
The woman with the paperback eventually looked up and asked me where I had flown from. Bombay, I said. She nodded as if this were an entirely normal thing to hear at a ramen counter at eleven on a Wednesday. She was a nurse. She had just finished a double shift. The book was a detective novel and she was reading it for the fourth time because she liked knowing how it ended.
We did not exchange names or numbers. When she left, she said enjoy your trip and that was the entire social contract, perfectly executed. I finished my ramen, walked back to the hotel in the fog, and slept better than I had in weeks.
Lisbon, 2019
A tascas in Alfama — the kind of place where the menu is whatever the cook made that morning and your only choice is between fish and not-fish. I chose fish. It was sardines, because everything in Lisbon is sardines, grilled on a plank and served with boiled potatoes and a carafe of white wine that tasted like cold sunlight.
The restaurant was the size of a large cupboard. There were maybe eight seats. The family at the next table — Portuguese, three generations deep, a grandmother who presided over the meal like a benevolent dictator — kept looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and something that might have been pity. A man eating alone is not a celebrated figure in southern European culture.
The grandmother eventually sent over a plate of pastéis de nata from a box she had brought with her. A gift from a stranger, offered without explanation, accepted without hesitation. This is a thing that happens when you eat alone — people feel responsible for you in a way they would not if you had a companion. You become slightly public property. Your solitude is interpreted as something that needs fixing, and the fix is almost always food.
I ate the sardines and the custard tarts and drank the cold wine and watched the light change on the wall tiles across the street and thought: this. This is why I travel alone. Not because I prefer loneliness, but because companions require consensus, and consensus is the enemy of stumbling into a cupboard-sized restaurant and being fed custard tarts by someone's grandmother.
Kyoto, 2022
A kaiseki counter in Gion, seven courses, just me and the chef and a silence so complete I could hear the knife on the cutting board two rooms away. I had booked this meal months in advance, which is not something I typically do — my best meals are accidental — but a friend had insisted with the specific urgency reserved for restaurant recommendations that are really about something larger.
He was right. It was not a meal. It was a performance, in the best sense. Each course arrived as a small composition on a plate chosen to complement the food, the season, and — I suspected — the mood of the room. The chef did not speak English and I did not speak Japanese and the absence of language made everything sharper. I paid attention to the food in a way I never do when conversation is available as a distraction.
There was a course of grilled fish — I do not remember the species — served on a ceramic leaf. It was four bites of food. It took me fifteen minutes to eat because I kept stopping. Not because I was full, but because I was trying to understand what I was tasting, and every time I thought I had it, something else appeared. A whisper of smoke. A citrus note that was not quite yuzu. Something vegetal that had no name in any language I spoke.
When I left, the chef bowed. I bowed. Neither of us had said more than ten words to each other in two hours. It was the most complete conversation I had in Kyoto.
Why Alone Is Different
I am not making an argument for solo travel as a lifestyle. I like eating with people. I like the noise of a shared table, the arguing over dishes, the particular joy of watching someone taste something extraordinary for the first time. Most of my best meals have been with other people.
But eating alone does something that eating with others cannot. It forces you to pay attention to the food, the room, and the city in a way that is impossible when you are managing a social interaction at the same time. Your senses are not divided. There is no performance — no need to have an opinion ready, no need to be interesting or entertained. You can just sit there, eating, and the meal becomes the entire experience rather than the backdrop to one.
The food, I have found, tastes different when you are paying full attention. Not better, necessarily. Just more.