A Very Good Sandwich, Eaten Standing Up

Bread, butter, a hard cheese, and a tomato that somebody had salted and left alone for ten minutes before it went anywhere near the bread. That is all of it.

The place has no chairs. It has a shelf along the window at standing height and a rule, unwritten, that you do not take more than about ten minutes. There were four of us at that shelf and none of us spoke and it was one of the more companionable rooms I have been in this year.

What made it good was the salting of the tomato, which is a ten-minute step that costs nothing and which almost nobody does because it requires deciding to make a sandwich ten minutes before you want to eat a sandwich.

I have written a lot about eating alone and the thing I keep coming back to is that the loneliness people expect is almost never in the food. It is in the seating. A room designed for one person to stand in for eight minutes is a kind room. A room of two-tops with one of them holding a single person is not.

A table is a claim. You sit at one and you have declared the size of your party, and if that number is one you have declared it to everybody who walks past looking for a table.

A shelf makes no such claim. Everyone at a standing shelf is a party of one by definition, including the two people who arrived together, because the geometry does not let them face each other. It flattens the whole thing.

I have been at counters for a year now writing about this and standing rooms are the version I would actually design if anyone asked me. They are cheap to run, they turn over fast, and they are the only kind of eating room where a person on their own is the intended customer rather than an inefficiency.

The catch is that they only work for eight minutes. Nobody wants to stand for forty. So this is not an argument against restaurants; it is an argument that most cities have almost nothing between a restaurant and a bag on a wall.

Tuesday's tomato had not been salted. I could tell in one bite. I did not say anything because what would I say, and to whom, and in what tone that does not make me a person who complains about tomato preparation.

The second visit is nearly always worse. Partly because the first one is competing against no expectation at all, and partly because you are now watching for the thing instead of being surprised by it.

I will go again on Thursday. It will be fine. Fine is the actual baseline of a good place and Monday was the exception, which is what made Monday worth writing about.

She had a sandwich from the shelf and a steel flask from her bag, and she poured from the flask into its own cup and drank it standing at the window with everybody else.

In most rooms that sell food this is a small transgression. You are meant to buy the drink. The margin is on the drink; everybody knows the margin is on the drink.

Nobody said anything, and I have thought about why. I think it is because she was a regular and because she bought the sandwich, and because a standing shelf has no cover charge in it — you are not occupying a table that could be earning.

It is a small thing and it is exactly the kind of small thing that decides whether a person comes back four times a week for a year. She will. I have seen her twice since.