Table for One

I have eaten alone at somewhere over two hundred restaurants in six years, which sounds sad written down and is the single best thing I do.

Here is what I have learned, and it took about eighty of those two hundred to see it. You can tell almost everything about a restaurant in the first ninety seconds, at the host stand, before you have seen a menu, and the tell is what happens on the word “one.”

There are three reactions. The first is a flicker — a half-second recalculation, a glance at the book, a slight softening of the voice into sympathy. That restaurant will feed you competently and will seat you near the service station and will clear your plate the instant your fork lands. They are not unkind. They have simply categorized you as a problem of table economics, which you are.

The second is nothing at all. No flicker. “One — counter or table?” That restaurant is fine and will probably be good.

The third is rare and I have seen it maybe eleven times. The host says “oh good, take twelve,” and twelve is the best seat at the counter, in front of the pass, and what has just happened is that a professional has recognized that a solo diner at the counter is free atmosphere — a person who will eat attentively, order a second glass, talk to the cook if the cook wants to talk, and leave a room looking more alive than they found it. Restaurants that understand this are almost without exception excellent, because understanding it requires the person at the door to be thinking about the room rather than the covers, and that thinking runs all the way to the kitchen.

The last one, on Sunday, was a twenty-two-seat place in a strip mall between a dry cleaner and a phone repair shop. The host said take eight. Eight is in front of the grill. I sat down at 6:40 and left at 9:15, which was not the plan, and at some point a cook slid me a piece of fish that was not on the menu and was not on my bill and said “tell me if the salt is right.”

The salt was right. It is always right. They are not asking about the salt.

The internet has given every home cook a thousand recipes and taken away the only thing that ever produced a good cook, which is repetition of one dish until the hand knows it.

Pick something with technique in it — a roast chicken, a plain omelette, a braise. Make it once a week for ten weeks. Change one variable each time and only one. By week four you will stop reading the recipe. By week seven you will start correcting it. By week ten you will be able to cook it while talking to someone, which is the actual finish line, because a dish you can cook while talking is a dish you will cook for people.

Nobody makes content out of this because it is one dish and forty weeks and there is no thumbnail in it. It is also the only method that has ever worked.

A book at the counter gets you talked to. A phone at the counter gets you left alone. These are both valid orders and you should know which one you are placing before you sit down.

I bring the book. Eleven of my favorite conversations of the last four years began with a stranger reading a cover upside down.