How To Eat Alone When Travelling, Overcome The Anxiety Of Solo Dining And Actually Enjoy It

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

Solo dining is one of those strangely specific things that can make even otherwise confident solo travellers feel surprisingly nervous. You can book a flight halfway around the world, navigate an unfamiliar city, figure out public transport in a language you don’t speak and spend an entire day exploring perfectly happily by yourself, only to reach dinner time and suddenly feel a knot in your stomach at the thought of walking into a restaurant and asking for a table for one.

If that sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. Worrying about eating alone is extremely common, especially among first time solo travellers. There is something about sitting by yourself in a restaurant, surrounded by couples, families and groups of friends, that can make you feel unusually visible. You start wondering where you should look, what you should do while you’re waiting for your food and, worst of all, whether everyone else is looking at you and wondering why you’re there on your own.

They almost certainly aren’t.

After more than 25 years of solo travel through well over 150 countries, I have eaten alone in more restaurants, cafés, food courts, street stalls and questionable roadside establishments than I could ever hope to remember. I’ve eaten alone because I was travelling alone, because I wanted to try somewhere nobody else fancied, because I was hungry at an inconvenient time and sometimes simply because I wanted an hour to myself with some good food. At this point asking for a table for one feels no more unusual to me than ordering a coffee.

And along the way I have learned to absolutely love eating out alone as an activity in and of itself. It is a perfect bubble of uninterrupted peace where I can enjoy the meal and be present for it, experience the food instead of just thinking about it as dinner, and do so without the need for small talk or social pressure.

But I also understand why it can feel very different when you haven’t done it before.

Eating is an intensely social activity in most cultures, and restaurants have traditionally been designed and marketed around couples, families and groups. There are strong social expectations wrapped around sharing a meal, and increasingly the research into solo dining is showing that the discomfort many people feel isn’t really about eating alone at all. It is often about self-consciousness, perceived judgement and the fear of what being seen alone might say about us.

And some of that discomfort has been created by the hospitality industry itself.

The good news is that perception is changing rapidly. Solo dining is becoming increasingly common, researchers are finally paying serious attention to the psychology behind it and the hospitality industry itself is beginning to recognise solo diners as a growing and valuable group of customers. Far from being the lonely oddball hidden away at the back of the restaurant, you are increasingly part of a major shift in the way people eat, travel and spend their leisure time.

And once you get past that initial awkwardness, you start discovering the freedom that comes with it. You choose the restaurant. You choose when you eat. You order exactly what you want. You can people-watch, read, chat to someone if you want to or simply sit there enjoying your food and your own company without having to compromise with anybody.

Is It Weird To Eat Alone When Travelling? Quick Answer

No. There is absolutely nothing weird about eating alone when you travel, and in fact it can be one of the greatest pleasures of solo travel. There is a vast difference between being alone and being lonely, and choosing to enjoy your own company can be wonderfully liberating. You don’t need somebody sitting opposite you to justify your presence, complete the experience or give you permission to enjoy a great meal. There are so many cuisines and so many different experiences and places to enjoy them, and choosing to eat alone means you can savour the experience.

It can feel weird at first, especially if you are nervous or anxious, or used to thinking of restaurants as places you visit with other people, and that feeling is completely understandable. But the awkwardness comes largely from the social expectations we have built around eating together and our tendency to worry about how we are being perceived, not because there is actually anything unusual about sitting down and enjoying a meal by yourself.

And increasingly, even the idea that solo dining is unusual is becoming outdated. The number of people choosing to eat alone is growing rapidly, and solo diners are becoming an economic force that the hospitality industry can no longer afford to ignore. Restaurants are beginning to rethink everything from seating and reservations to the way they serve and market to individual diners, not simply because attitudes are changing, but because there is an increasingly valuable market demanding that they do. So no, you’re not weird for asking for a table for one and dining solo. You are just ahead of the curve.

Why Does Eating Alone Feel So Awkward?

Eating out alone is consistently one of the most common concerns and worries for first time solo travellers, and for many people it genuinely does induce a lot of discomfort and anxiety. But why? If eating out alone isn’t wrong and should be something to enjoy, why do so many feel intimidated by it?

The reason is quite simple and there are actually good and perfectly reasonable reasons for feeling this way. This discomfort has been studied extensively across disciplines like psychology, sociology and others, and if you genuinely think that eating out alone feels weird, you aren’t alone. It stems from a huge melting pot of psychological biases and deep seated social norms that have been programmed into you since childhood. You just can’t help thinking that it feels strange because it goes against the norm.

And in many ways it does, that feeling isn’t wrong exactly. Eating out has always been seen and treated in society as an inherently social activity, as a communal ritual that signals belonging, connection and community. We meet friends for lunch, go for dinner on dates, celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in restaurants with friends and family and arrange meals as a reason to spend time with other people. Long before you ever consider travelling alone, you have absorbed thousands of little messages every day of your life telling you that going out for a meal is something you generally do with someone else.

Restaurants heavily reinforce that expectation and are culturally coded as hedonic shared experiences from the moment you arrive. Tables are traditionally arranged for two, four or more people. Reservations ask for your party size. Menus offer dishes to share. Staff routinely ask whether you’re waiting for someone. None of those things are deliberately designed to make solo diners uncomfortable, but they are based on this social norm and collectively they create a very clear social script for what eating out is supposed to look like.

That expectation is so deeply ingrained that when we do the opposite it makes us feel self conscious and nervous. Feeling conspicuous makes what psychologists call the spotlight effect particularly relevant, a cognitive bias that dramatically overestimates how much strangers are looking at us, watching us and judging us.

The reality is most of the time they aren’t. People are always far more absorbed in their own little bubbles, the company they are with or the screen on their phone, that it is highly unlikely most people would even notice you were there. But our own natural biases don’t allow us to think like that naturally, because most people are always trying to manage how we present ourselves out in public. Most of the time that’s useful. It helps you appear confident when you’re navigating an unfamiliar city, encourages you to behave appropriately in different cultural settings and allows you to control how much vulnerability or uncertainty you show when you’re travelling alone. But sitting alone in a restaurant can remove all of the social buffers we normally rely on. There is nobody opposite you to talk to, or no companion whose presence silently explains why you’re there. You can become far more conscious of how you think you appear to everyone else.

Even experienced solo travellers, who are otherwise very happy travelling on their own and perfectly comfortable traversing entire continents without company can still feel distinctly uncomfortable eating out alone. This is how heavily ingrained in our psyche that its hardly any wonder you feel nervous, worried or anxious at the mere thought of eating out alone.

All of these effects can become stronger when you’re travelling because you’re already operating in an unfamiliar social environment. You may not know the local restaurant etiquette, how seating works, whether you wait to be seated, whether solo customers normally sit at the bar or take a table, or even whether eating alone is common in that particular culture. At home you have years of accumulated knowledge about how restaurants work. Abroad, some of those familiar cues disappear at exactly the moment you’re already feeling unusually visible.

Put all of that together and the awkwardness starts making considerably more sense. You are stepping outside a deeply familiar social script, losing the social buffer of a companion, becoming more aware of how you are presenting yourself, overestimating how much attention other people are paying and potentially doing all of it in an unfamiliar cultural environment.

No wonder asking for a table for one can feel strangely intimidating the first few times you do it.

What Does The Research Say About Solo Dining?

The thing is, as awkward as eating out on your own as a solo traveller may feel, you are far from alone in feeling that. Almost everyone does at some point, especially at first. The discomfort is widespread enough that researchers have spent years trying to understand why it happens, what makes it better or worse and why someone who is perfectly comfortable travelling alone can suddenly feel self-conscious at a restaurant table.

It has become such a huge field of study because increasingly, you are less likely to be the only person eating out alone either.

More and more people are dining alone, and crucially, more people are actively choosing to do so. In numbers large enough that the hospitality industry can no longer afford to treat them as the occasional lone customer taking up a table for two. What was once dismissed as circumstantial, something you did because you were travelling or working alone, or worse, taken as evidence that you were lonely and had nobody else to eat with, is increasingly becoming a deliberate and positive choice.

That is a profound shift in behaviour. Solo diners are emerging as a distinct and increasingly powerful consumer group, choosing to spend their time and money on experiences that have traditionally been designed almost entirely around couples and groups. There are now enough of them to drive serious academic research into why they dine alone and what they want from the experience, and enough commercial power behind them to make the hospitality industry rethink how it attracts, accommodates and serves them.

More People Are Choosing To Dine Alone

Solo dining can still be circumstantial, and for solo travellers the reason is usually pretty obvious: you’re travelling alone, you’re hungry and you want to go somewhere for dinner. But beyond the practical aspect of it, more people are choosing to eat out alone. Solo dining is increasingly being recognised as a positive choice for the freedom and autonomy it gives people, because it fits around their lives, because they value some time to themselves or simply because they genuinely enjoy the experience.

Solo travellers have known this for generations. Once people get over that initial awkwardness and nervousness, eating out alone becomes a ritual of self care, but this is a conclusion that the research is only just starting to catch up on, and the industry as a result is starting to recognise that solo dining needs to be understood better.

Solo dining now sits across a substantial and quickly developing body of research drawing on psychology, sociology and other disciplines, alongside tourism, hospitality and consumer research. Academics are trying to understand a social behaviour that is changing remarkably quickly, while restaurants have a rather more immediate incentive to understand the same thing: growing numbers of these people are walking through their doors with money to spend.

Solo dining is no longer a quirky little edge case for the hospitality industry. It is becoming a significant shift in consumer behaviour.

The Solo Diner Isn’t The Problem

A major 2026 study into the psychological foundations of solo dining brings much of that changing thinking together. Drawing on the existing evidence alongside research with hospitality professionals, it looks beyond the old assumption that eating out alone is primarily a problem with loneliness or confidence and instead examines the experience created between the person sitting at the table and the restaurant around them. What it found was that whilst the reasons solo diners feel uncomfortable are varied and well established, the restaurants themselves play a significant role in creating that feeling, amplifying social norms and attitudes and quite often making solo diners feel ostracised, excluded or alienated.

So if you are travelling alone and want to go somewhere nice for dinner, there is nothing inherently wrong with that choice and there is nothing wrong with you for making it. You don’t need to justify wanting to travel independently and you certainly don’t need to justify wanting to enjoy the restaurants, cafés and food culture you encounter while you do it.

And if the experience sometimes feels uncomfortable, the answer isn’t automatically that you need to become better at being alone. The real answer may be that the environment needs to become better at accommodating you.

What Shapes The Solo Dining Experience?

This same study looked at the profiles of solo diners and found that they were extremely varied. One person may be away for work. Another may want an hour of peace after a long day. Someone else may actively enjoy the freedom of choosing the restaurant, the food and the pace of the evening without negotiating any of it with another person. Some solo diners want to chat to staff or other customers, while others have deliberately chosen to be alone because conversation is the last thing they want. This points towards an experience that needs to adapt to different people and different preferences.

The research is increasingly telling the hospitality industry that solo diners are not one interchangeable category of customer with one identical need. A successful solo dining experience depends on how the individual, the physical environment, the social atmosphere and the service interact with each other.

For solo travellers nervous about eating out alone, that takes an enormous amount of pressure off. You don’t have to become the type of solo traveller who sits confidently at a bar making friends with everyone around them, and you don’t have to hide behind your phone to prove that you have something important to do. Your nervousness is entirely understandable, your reasons for dining solo – whatever they are – are perfectly valid, you are not strange or abnormal for doing so and you are allowed to enjoy the experience in whatever way actually makes it enjoyable for you.

The Stigma Around Solo Dining Is Dying

For a long time, the stereotype was painfully simple: if someone was sitting alone in a restaurant, they must be lonely, they must have been stood up or they couldn’t find anyone willing to join them. That was never really the case of course. Any experienced solo traveller could tell you the act of travelling solo, enjoying a meal by yourself, going to the cinema or enjoying a museum visit on your own was one of the true, great pleasures in life.

But historically solo travellers weren’t always the biggest demographic, we often went under the radar, dismissed as either brave and eccentric or weird and lonely, with very little middle ground.

Honestly, part of me liked it that way. I enjoyed being alone, the strange outsider, the one who didn’t fit in. So what if most people didn’t understand that? Decades of solo travel made me value other people’s opinions about as much as the opinion of a mosquito I’m about to swat away.

This did lead to solo travellers being largely ignored as a group, and issues like first time travellers being nervous about dining alone or solo diners being lonely or antisocial were always seen as a cross those individuals had to bear for themselves.

Not any more.

Solo travellers have grown into one of the travel industry’s fastest growing and most lucrative target demographics, with enough spending power that an entire industry of specialist operators, dedicated products and solo-specific services has grown around them. The scale of that market is extraordinary. Industry research valued the global solo travel market at almost $550 billion in 2025, rising to an estimated $627 billion in 2026, and forecasts it to reach more than $1.6 trillion by 2033.

That kind of economic power changes attitudes. The industry itself is scrambling to capture that, which is why you now see entire tour companies targeting solo travellers without any sense of irony at all, single supplements being increasingly dropped, dedicated solo travel operators offering services specifically for those travelling alone, while the restaurant and hospitality industry is increasingly recognising the corresponding growth in people dining alone deliberately. They value the autonomy, freedom and experience of spending time by themselves, and the industry recognises them not as unfortunate exceptions but as customers worth understanding, attracting and designing experiences for.

That is a remarkable shift for anyone who has ever hovered outside a restaurant wondering whether asking for a table for one would make them look strange.

Enough people have felt that exact discomfort for scientists to study it seriously. Enough people are choosing to dine alone for researchers to distinguish between unwanted isolation and deliberate solo experiences. And enough people are spending money doing it for restaurants and the wider hospitality industry to start changing the way they operate.

The science has finally caught up with what solo travellers have been experiencing for years. Now the hospitality industry, wider culture and society itself are starting to catch up too.

Turns out we weren’t Billy No Mates after all. We were trendsetters.

What Are Restaurants Doing About It?

For years, most advice about eating out alone concentrated overwhelmingly on what the diner should do differently. Be confident. Take a book. Sit at the bar. Look busy. Find something to occupy yourself.

All of that is still perfectly valid, up to a point. But now the research, and the need to tap into a significantly underserved and rapidly growing market, is telling the hospitality industry that it should start adapting and doing things differently too.

Research into solo dining now places far more emphasis on creating adaptive comfort, getting the human touch right and developing restaurant strategies specifically around solo customers. That means recognising that an experience designed almost exclusively around couples and groups won’t necessarily work simply by removing three people from a table for four and placing one person there instead.

Restaurants are already responding. Individual and counter seating are becoming more deliberate parts of restaurant design, while some businesses are experimenting with single-person booths, partitions and spaces that give solo customers privacy without making them feel as though they have been hidden away. Reservation systems, seating policies and service approaches are being reconsidered too, while staff increasingly need to recognise that one solo diner may welcome conversation and another may consider being left alone the entire point of the evening.

This isn’t about turning restaurants into rows of isolated boxes or assuming that solo diners are antisocial. It is about giving an individual customer the same consideration that restaurants have traditionally given couples, families and groups, and enough flexibility to let them experience the restaurant on their own terms.

Quite simply, the restaurant and hospitality industry can’t afford not to anymore.

Solo Dining Isn’t Weird. It’s Becoming Normal

If all of that research tells us anything, it is that the old stereotype of the lonely, nervous solo diner sitting awkwardly by the toilets at a table for one is becoming increasingly detached from reality.

Something much bigger is happening across the world. Attitudes towards spending time alone are changing. People aren’t simply becoming more comfortable doing traditionally social things by themselves, they are increasingly choosing to do them alone and seeing that independence as something positive. You can see it everywhere, from solo travel and going to the cinema alone to solo dates, days out and deliberately carving out time entirely for yourself. Eating out is becoming part of that same shift.

Different cultures may give it different names and express it in different ways. One might frame it around independence and personal autonomy, another around ‘me time’, self care or simply enjoying your own company. But underneath all of that is the same profound change in attitude: being alone is increasingly becoming something people actively choose and value, rather than something that automatically needs explaining, apologising for or fixing.

And solo dining is right at the heart of it.

The numbers aren’t creeping upwards at the margins anymore. Restaurant reservation data, consumer research and the hospitality industry’s own figures show a major shift in how people are actually behaving. More people are asking for tables for one, more are doing it deliberately, and they are spending enough money while they do it that restaurants can no longer afford to treat the solo diner as an awkward exception.

This isn’t just a handful of unusually independent travellers deciding they don’t mind having lunch alone anymore, this is an entire societal shift.

Solo Dining Is Booming

Almost one in six full service restaurant visits across Europe’s five largest markets is now made by someone dining alone. That figure has risen from just 9.4% in 2016 to 15.6% today, while expenditure on solo dining increased by an extraordinary 153% between 2010 and 2019. And it is still growing year on year, with UK solo reservations increasing another 14% in just twelve months and solo diners spending an average of £55 per person, 32% more than diners overall.

Those are extraordinary numbers for a group that restaurants historically treated as an awkward exception to the couples and groups they were designed around and one that restaurants are increasingly desperate to cater to.

Millions of people aren’t reluctantly settling for a table for one because nobody would come out to play with them. They are actively choosing to go out, occupying a rapidly growing share of restaurant tables and spending serious money while they do it.

A table for one isn’t an occasional inconvenience to squeeze into the corner anymore, solo diners now represent a substantial and commercially valuable part of the restaurant market, and the industry is increasingly having to compete for their business.

Solo diners haven’t suddenly appeared from nowhere, of course. People have always eaten out alone. What has changed is the sheer scale of it, the willingness to choose it openly and the cultural meaning increasingly attached to that choice. Eating out alone isn’t simply becoming more common because more people have to. Increasingly, people are doing it because they actually want to.

Eating Alone Is Becoming A Lifestyle Choice

Around the world there has been a fundamental societal shift in our relationship with spending time alone.

You can see different expressions of it in different cultures. In South Korea, the honbap movement, literally meaning eating alone, has grown alongside a much broader embrace of doing things independently. In a culture where eating together has traditionally carried enormous social importance, particularly within strongly group orientated and hierarchical social structures, choosing to eat alone can represent something much more significant than simply wanting a quiet lunch. It can be an expression of personal autonomy and independence.

Japan has experienced its own version of this through ohitorisama, essentially the culture of doing things by yourself. What began as a challenge to the stigma attached to being alone has expanded far beyond restaurants into solo travel, entertainment and other experiences traditionally associated with couples or groups.

Across much of the Western world, meanwhile, we have wrapped similar behaviour in the language of ‘me time’, self care, solo dates and taking yourself out.

Different cultures, different labels, different social contexts, but there is a common thread running through all of them. Solitude is increasingly being reclaimed as something positive. There is far less reluctance now to admit that sometimes you don’t want or need company. Sometimes you want an afternoon, an evening or an entire trip that belongs entirely to you.

That represents a huge generational shift. Even twenty years ago, which I dare anyone to tell me wasn’t the 80s, doing traditionally social things alone was far more likely to be seen as strange. Eating at a restaurant alone, going to the cinema alone or travelling halfway around the world by yourself could all attract that same underlying question: Why are you on your own? What is wrong with you? That assumption, that being alone in public required some kind of explanation, is where much of the stigma around solo dining came from in the first place.

Maybe it took the uniquely rebellious nature of the forgotten generation to start breaking away from that. I and countless other Gen X travellers were backpacking solo and walking into restaurants and cafés alone in the late 90s, back when The Beach was contemporary travel fiction rather than nostalgia, largely because we wanted to and didn’t see why we shouldn’t. Our latchkey kid origins had left many of us with a deeply rooted independence and love of individual, unfiltered freedom, and if other people thought that was a little weird, that was their problem. We were more than happy to stick two fingers up to everyone as we walked away and did what we liked.

Gen Z are now taking that attitude and running with it. Where our love for solitude and doing things our own way was often seen as anti establishment, antisocial or just plain weird, even if it was occasionally begrudgingly respected, younger generations are increasingly treating that same independence as perfectly normal. Solo dates, solo meals and deliberately carving out time alone are increasingly being embraced as ways to recharge, decompress and do something entirely for yourself, turning the absence of company from something potentially embarrassing into part of the appeal.

Gen X perfected the ‘leave me the fuck alone’ attitude. Gen Z decided to make it socially acceptable.

And that changing attitude has transformed the value we place on solitude. Going out for dinner by yourself is now increasingly seen as a chance to decompress after a long day, escape the constant expectation to interact with someone, enjoy an hour entirely at your own pace or simply treat yourself because you bloody well feel like it. You choose where you go, when you go, what you order and how long you stay. There is nobody else to accommodate and nobody else’s preferences to negotiate.

For solo travellers, of course, none of this is particularly revolutionary. That freedom is one of the reasons many of us travel alone in the first place. That permission we always gave ourselves to be a little selfish is now being normalised. You can wake up and decide what you want to do that day, change your plans because you feel like it and spend your time entirely on your own terms.

Going somewhere wonderful for dinner and enjoying your own company is simply an extension of that same freedom. If we want to enjoy a meal by ourselves, savour some good food over a bit of peace and quiet, get dressed up, enjoy the ambience of a great restaurant and spoil ourselves for an evening, then we will do exactly that, unapologetically. We don’t need company to justify the experience or permission from anyone else to enjoy it.

Eating out alone doesn’t have to be the awkward necessity you put up with because you happen to be travelling by yourself. It can be the night you finally try the restaurant you’ve been staring at all week, the hour you give yourself to sit somewhere wonderful with no demands on your time, or simply the pleasure of ordering exactly what you want and enjoying it entirely on your own terms.

There is an important difference between unwanted loneliness and deliberately choosing some time to yourself. Human beings need connection, but that doesn’t mean we need company every minute of every day, and enjoying your own company isn’t evidence that something is missing from your life. Solo travel gives you the wonderful ability to move between both worlds, meeting people when you want company and enjoying periods of solitude when you don’t. Sitting down for dinner by yourself can simply be one of those moments.

That isn’t loneliness. It’s freedom.

Why Eating Alone Can Be One Of The Best Parts Of Solo Travel

Solo travel gives you permission to be a little selfish and concentrate wholly and entirely on yourself, and solo dining is one of the best expressions of that. No matter where you are in the world, choosing to eat alone can give you a deliberate pause where you can take some time for yourself, creating a rare sanctuary of unbroken peace and quiet in a fast paced world without outside obligations or expectations. Better still, you control every little detail of the experience. Without the compromises of group dynamics, someone having a gluten intolerance and someone else whining that they don’t like spicy food, you can choose where you eat, what you eat, when you eat, how long you stay and, most importantly, how many desserts you want to order for yourself.

Stripping away the attention and conversation of other people can turn eating alone into a whole new sensory adventure too. You have the time to absorb the atmosphere of that beautiful restaurant or the ambience of a little street food stall with plastic tables, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of the culture all around you. You can focus entirely on the plate in front of you, taste the food more deeply and notice subtle shifts in flavour that might normally disappear into the background of conversation. Instead of the meal simply accompanying the experience, the meal becomes the experience.

There is a freedom in being able to enjoy all of that entirely on your own terms. You can linger over something extraordinary, order another dish simply because you’re curious or sit quietly and watch everyday life unfold around you without having to fill every moment with conversation. And if you do feel like being sociable, travelling alone often leaves you more open to those spontaneous conversations with stallholders, staff or the people sitting nearby that can become some of your favourite travel memories. The difference is that the choice is entirely yours.

That is the real joy of eating alone. Sharing a meal with someone can be wonderful, but so can having the whole experience entirely to yourself. One doesn’t have to be better than the other, and you don’t need to diminish the pleasure of eating with other people to recognise the very different pleasure of eating without them. Sometimes one of the nicest things you can do when you’re travelling is find somewhere that looks amazing, order exactly what you want and simply enjoy being there.

How To Get Comfortable Eating Alone

If the thought of walking into a restaurant and asking for a table for one still makes you nervous, none of the cultural shifts, academic research or booming industry trends we’ve just talked about are going to magically make that feeling disappear. Understanding that something is perfectly normal and feeling comfortable doing it are two very different things.

And that is where a lot of the traditional advice about eating alone can genuinely help.

Take a book or read on your phone. Choose somewhere casual. Go for lunch instead of dinner. Sit at the bar. Pick a quieter time. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things if they make you feel more comfortable or help you take that first step through the door.

Just recognise them for what they are.

They are tools that can make an unfamiliar experience feel easier while you get used to it, not rules for how you are supposed to behave because you have committed the terrible social crime of asking for a table for one. You don’t need to hide behind a book, stare at your phone or sit at the bar for the rest of your travelling life just to prove to everyone around you that you have something to do.

The aim isn’t to become really good at distracting yourself from the fact that you’re eating alone. It’s to reach the point where you don’t feel the need to distract yourself at all.

That may happen immediately. It may take a few meals. It may take a dozen. It really doesn’t matter. Use whatever helps at first, build your confidence at your own pace and gradually start paying less attention to the fact that you’re there alone and more attention to the fact that you’re somewhere you actually want to be.

Because eventually the question stops being how do I get through dinner on my own?

And becomes where do I want to take myself for dinner tonight?

Start Somewhere Easy

If eating out alone genuinely makes you nervous, you don’t have to start by booking yourself a table at the most intimidating fine dining restaurant in Paris on a Saturday night.

Start somewhere that already feels relatively easy.

Go for lunch at a casual restaurant. Grab breakfast at a café. Find a busy food hall, a local noodle shop or somewhere with outdoor tables where people are constantly coming and going. Choose somewhere you’ve walked past a few times and liked the look of, or somewhere you already feel comfortable with. The restaurant itself doesn’t really matter. What matters is making that first experience easy enough that you actually do it.

Then do it again.

There is a well established principle behind this. Avoiding something that makes you anxious can reinforce the idea that there was something threatening about it in the first place, while gradually exposing yourself to it in manageable steps gives your brain the opportunity to learn from what actually happens. You walk in. You ask for a table. You order your food. You eat it. You pay. You leave.

And almost certainly, absolutely nothing bad happens. Nobody points. Nobody laughs. The restaurant doesn’t fall silent when you walk through the door like some bad Western movie. Most people barely notice you at all, and the few who do probably forget about you seconds later.

So next time, push yourself a little further if you want to. Try dinner instead of lunch. Choose somewhere busier. Go somewhere a little nicer. Eventually book that restaurant you’ve really wanted to try instead of choosing somewhere simply because it feels easier to walk into alone.

There is no deadline and no prize for throwing yourself into a situation that makes you miserable. The point is simply to give yourself enough positive, or frankly completely uneventful, experiences that asking for a table for one gradually stops feeling like something you need to prepare yourself for. Eventually, it just becomes something you do.

Use A Prop If It Helps

One of the oldest pieces of advice for nervous solo diners is to take something with you. Read a book, scroll through your phone, write in your journal, plan tomorrow’s adventures or do whatever else gives you something familiar to focus on while you’re sitting there. And if that helps, do it.

Having something to occupy your attention can be genuinely useful when you’re still feeling self-conscious. Instead of sitting there wondering what you’re supposed to do with your hands or imagining that everyone in the restaurant is staring at you, you have something familiar to fall back on. It takes some of the pressure off and gives you somewhere to retreat to whenever that awkwardness starts creeping back in.

Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need a prop because sitting quietly at a restaurant table by yourself somehow requires an explanation.

There is a subtle but important difference between reading a book because you genuinely enjoy reading over lunch and burying your face in one because you’re terrified somebody might notice you’re alone. I still do occasionally read a book while having a meal alone, or I’ll get out my notepad and start writing down ideas for my next novel. There is nothing wrong with doing these things. The same goes for your phone. If you want to catch up on messages, read the news, plan tomorrow’s route or watch something while you eat, go for it. It’s your meal. Spend it however you want.

The big difference is doing these things occasionally, or if they help you with your initial worry or self consciousness, but don’t use them as a crutch, because you don’t need to perform being occupied for anybody else’s benefit.

Think of the book, phone or journal as a comfort blanket if you need one at first. As eating alone becomes more familiar, try putting it down occasionally. Look around. Take in the restaurant. Watch the world outside the window. Pay attention to the food when it arrives. Give yourself the chance to discover what sitting there without anything to hide behind actually feels like.

You might find you don’t need the comfort blanket nearly as much as you thought you did.

Stop Hiding Behind Your Phone

Of all the props we use to make ourselves feel less conspicuous, the phone is by far the easiest to hide behind. It is always in your pocket, gives you an endless supply of things to look at and, because almost everyone else is staring at theirs too, allows you to disappear behind it without attracting the slightest attention. The second that familiar awkwardness creeps in, you can pull it out almost instinctively and suddenly you have somewhere to look, something to do and, perhaps most importantly, a way to avoid feeling as though you’re just sitting there alone.

That makes it a brilliant comfort blanket when you need one. It also makes it the easiest one to become completely dependent on.

There is nothing wrong with using your phone because you actually want to. But if you’re scrolling aimlessly because you feel awkward sitting there alone, or because having your face buried in a screen makes you feel less conspicuous, try putting it away for a while. You have already made the hardest step by walking through the door and sitting down. Give yourself the chance to experience what happens when you stop trying to look occupied.

Look around. People watch. Look out of the window. Take in the décor. Watch the staff moving between tables or the kitchen working if you can see it. When your food arrives, actually look at it, smell it and taste it. Allow yourself to simply sit there for a while without feeling that every spare second has to be filled with something.

That may feel surprisingly uncomfortable at first. We have become so accustomed to reaching for our phones whenever there is a lull in conversation, a queue to wait in or a few empty minutes to fill that simply sitting somewhere and observing the world around us can feel almost unnatural. When you’re already conscious of being alone, that instinct to reach for the screen can be even stronger.

Resist it occasionally.

Realise How Little Attention Anyone Is Paying You

One of the strangest things about feeling self-conscious when you eat out alone is the enormous gap between how visible you feel and how visible you actually are.

You know you’re alone. You heard yourself ask for a table for one, you’re aware of the empty chair opposite you and perhaps you’re still wondering whether you look comfortable sitting there. Because your attention is so firmly fixed on the fact that you’re dining alone, it is remarkably easy to assume everyone else must have noticed it too.

Now actually look around.

Couples are talking, friends are catching up, families are attempting the Herculean task of getting a child to eat something that isn’t beige, someone is agonising over the menu and half the room is probably staring at their phones. The staff are juggling orders, drinks, bills and however many other tables they’re trying to keep happy. Everyone has their own evening going on, and your decision to have dinner by yourself simply isn’t the fascinating social event it can feel like from your side of the table.

To be perfectly blunt, no one cares.

That feeling of being far more visible than you really are is called the spotlight effect. When you’re already self-conscious about something, your attention becomes finely tuned to anything that appears to confirm it. A completely casual glance across the room suddenly feels significant because you already feel conspicuous. Someone looking vaguely in your direction becomes someone looking at you, and before long you’ve created an entire imaginary audience from a handful of people who were probably wondering where their starters were.

Of course people will notice you occasionally. We notice strangers all the time. You might admire someone’s jacket, wonder what they ordered because it looks good or glance up when somebody walks through the door, then immediately get on with your life. Being noticed is not the same as being judged, and somebody looking at you tells you absolutely nothing about what is going through their head. We all know solo travellers are the sexiest people on the damn planet, maybe they’re just taking a moment to admire you? You don’t know.

And this is something experience teaches far more effectively than reassurance ever can. Eat out alone often enough and the evidence starts piling up. Nobody gasps when you ask for a table for one. Nobody spends their evening analysing your social circumstances. Nobody gives a shit about the empty chair opposite you. Restaurant after restaurant, everyone else carries on with their evening while you carry on with yours.

Eventually, you stop feeling as though you’re eating in front of an audience because you realise there never really was one.

And Why The Hell Do You Care What Other People Think Anyway?

It’s true that the vast majority of people won’t even notice you when you decide to eat out alone, but it’s also true that occasionally someone will, and they may even judge you for it.

But so what?

Why would you care what some random stranger thinks about you? You don’t know them, you don’t owe them an explanation or an apology, so who gives a rats arse what they think about what you’re doing? I probably have just as many judgemental thoughts about them, but that isn’t going to affect their evening.

If you want to travel alone, eat alone, get dressed up and take yourself somewhere amazing for dinner, then do it. You don’t need to justify your choices to anyone but yourself, much less some nobody who just happens to be in the same place as you that night. Don’t surrender your choices, experiences or enjoyment to the approval of people who have absolutely no relevance to your life.

I get it. It may take time to genuinely start thinking like that, especially if eating out alone makes you nervous now, but this is an attitude you can build yourself up to in tiny little steps. Bit by bit. The trick isn’t convincing yourself that nobody will ever judge you, but recognising that their judgement has no power unless you choose to give it some. The restaurant you choose, the meal you order and the evening you enjoy belong to you, not somebody sitting three tables away.

So if you want that table for one, take it. If you want the best seat in the restaurant, ask for it. If you want to dress up, order three extra courses and spend two hours enjoying every bloody minute of it, do that too. You’re not there to demonstrate how successfully you can eat alone or prove anything to anybody. You’re there because this is your trip, your evening and your experience, and you have every right to enjoy it entirely on your own terms.

Stop Treating Dinner As Something To Get Through

Once you start feeling more comfortable eating out alone, stop choosing where you eat based on where you think you’ll feel least awkward and start choosing somewhere because you genuinely want to eat there.

When you’re nervous about eating alone, that anxiety can start making decisions for you. You walk past somewhere because it looks too busy, avoid the café because all the tables seem to be occupied by groups, dismiss the little local restaurant because you’re not sure how you’ll feel walking in alone or choose takeaway because sitting down somewhere suddenly feels like too much effort. It doesn’t have to be an expensive restaurant with white tablecloths and a maître d’ to make you feel self-conscious. Sometimes asking for a table for one at the most ordinary neighbourhood café can feel just as daunting.

The problem is that once avoiding discomfort becomes the priority, you can start choosing where and how you eat according to your nerves rather than what you actually want. That might mean missing the restaurant you’ve been dying to try, but it can just as easily mean walking past the chaotic little noodle shop that smells incredible, skipping the café everyone has recommended or taking your food back to your room when what you really wanted was to sit outside somewhere and watch the world go by.

You’re travelling. There are dishes you’ve never tried, restaurants you’ve read about, local specialities you’ve been waiting to taste and places that look so good every time you walk past that you already know exactly what you want to order. Don’t miss any of that because your nerves are making the decision for you.

Food is one of the great pleasures of travel, and some of the best meals you’ll ever have might be in a packed neighbourhood restaurant, an elegant dining room, a tiny family-run place, a bustling food hall or a café with three plastic tables spilling out onto the pavement. If you want to eat there, that is reason enough to go.

And once you’re there, don’t let those same nerves rush you back out of the door. Feeling self-conscious can make you order quickly, eat quickly, skip the extra course you wanted and ask for the bill almost as soon as you’ve put your fork down, as if the objective is to successfully complete dinner and escape before you’ve had time to feel awkward.

Give yourself permission to slow down. Order what you actually want. Have another drink. Get dessert. Sit there for a perfectly reasonable amount of time and enjoy the fact that you chose to be there. You’re a paying customer having a meal, not an inconvenience who needs to finish quickly and surrender the table because you haven’t brought someone along to occupy the chair opposite.

Eating out alone becomes infinitely more enjoyable when dinner stops being something you need to successfully get through and starts becoming something you deliberately give yourself the time and space to enjoy.

Treat Every Meal Like An Experience

There are few better ways to experience a culture than through its food. Every destination has its own flavours, ingredients, rituals and traditions, shaped by centuries of history, migration, religion, geography, trade, family and sheer human creativity. Food tells stories about where you are and the people who live there in a way that no museum display or guidebook ever quite can, and some of the strongest memories you bring home from travelling will be tied to something you tasted, smelled or experienced around a table.

Whether you’re perched on a plastic stool beside a hawker stall in Singapore, tearing into something sizzling from a night market, sitting in a tiny family restaurant where three generations have cooked the same dish, or dressed to the nines in a beautiful restaurant in Paris, you are experiencing the destination in one of the best ways possible, through its food. The food itself matters, but so does everything wrapped around it: the heat rising from the wok, the smell of spices drifting through the air, the clatter of plates, the conversations you don’t understand, the theatre of the kitchen, the rituals around ordering and eating, the décor, the service and the rhythm of the place itself.

Try the dishes you’ve travelled halfway around the world to taste. Order something you’ve never heard of. Ask what the local speciality is. Watch how it’s prepared and how other people eat it. If something being carried past your table looks incredible, find out what it is and order that too.

Take your time, savour it and just take it all in.

You don’t need to rush because there is nobody sitting opposite you to talk to. You don’t need to finish quickly because you’re occupying a table alone. Let the meal unfold at its own pace and give yourself permission to linger over something wonderful, order another course because curiosity got the better of you or sit for a while after you’ve finished simply because you’re enjoying where you are.

The Spanish have a wonderful word for this: sobremesa. It is the time spent lingering around the table after a meal, enjoying the ambience, the conversation and the simple pleasure of not being in any hurry to leave. It is deeply rooted in Spanish social life, but there is no reason the spirit of it has to disappear just because you’re eating alone. You can linger too. You can sit back, enjoy where you are and allow the experience to last a little longer simply because you’re having a bloody lovely time.

In fact, travelling alone can make this kind of experience even richer. There is nobody demanding your attention, nobody else’s tastes to accommodate and no conversation pulling you away from everything happening around you. You can give the food, the atmosphere and the place your complete attention and treat yourself like the guest of honour at your own table. You can elevate your meal into an intentional act of self-respect and cultural immersion, savour each bite and come away with a far richer experience than you would have otherwise.

Eating your way through another culture is one of the great privileges of travel. It is meant to be enjoyed. These aren’t inconvenient gaps between the things you came to see and do. They are part of what you came to see and do. So give each meal the attention it deserves. Savour the food, savour the atmosphere and savour the simple fact that, for this brief moment, you are sitting somewhere else in the world and tasting a tiny part of what makes that place what it is.

And enjoy every mouthful.

Learn To Enjoy Your Own Company

Being completely at peace with your own company gives you a rare and formidable kind of freedom. When solitude doesn’t frighten you, and you don’t need constant company, attention or external validation to make you feel fulfilled, you become far harder to pressure into doing things you don’t want to do, far less willing to tolerate relationships that add nothing to your life and far less concerned with fitting yourself around other people’s expectations simply because you’re afraid of being left alone.

If you thought the Gen X tolerance for bullshit was already virtually non-existent, imagine what happens when you add that level of self-possession.

That doesn’t mean becoming antisocial or deciding you never want company again. Sharing a fantastic meal with someone you care about can be wonderful, just as travelling with the right person can be. But so can being alone. That’s the whole point. Their company can enhance the experience, but their absence doesn’t diminish it. That is enormously liberating.

When you genuinely enjoy your own company, you get to choose who enters your life and who gets your time based on the value they bring to it, not because you need somebody, anybody, to fill the silence. Solitude stops being an absence and becomes something valuable in its own right: time to think, recharge, follow your own interests and exist entirely on your own terms. That self-sufficiency creates a quiet mastery over your inner world, a confidence that comes from knowing your happiness, experiences and sense of self aren’t dependent on somebody else being there.

There is something almost dangerous about that level of independence. You don’t have to wait for someone else to want the same things you do, be available when you are or approve of the choices you make. You can travel because you want to travel, go somewhere because you want to go and walk into a restaurant because you want to eat there. Other people can join you and share those amazing experiences, but they are never a prerequisite for having them.

Eating out alone may seem like a tiny thing compared with all of that, but learning to sit comfortably at a table by yourself is an expression of exactly the same independence, because you don’t develop that kind of freedom by being afraid of a table for one.

What If A Restaurant Makes You Feel Unwelcome For Eating Alone?

As important as it is to overcome your own anxiety about eating out alone, it is equally important to recognise when that anxiety isn’t actually the problem, the restaurant industry itself is. Not every uncomfortable experience means you need to work harder on your confidence, care less about what everyone else thinks or get better at enjoying your own company. Sometimes you can walk into somewhere perfectly happy to eat by yourself and still be made to feel awkward, unwelcome or somehow less valuable because there isn’t another person walking through the door beside you. If that happens, perhaps it isn’t you who needs to change.

Obviously, the type of place you’re eating in makes a difference. Nobody at a hawker stall or street food stand is worrying about the commercial potential of the empty chair opposite you, and at food courts, markets and other communal spaces you may simply grab whatever seat is available. The problem of systemic solo diner shaming tends to become much more obvious in restaurants and other serviced dining environments where somebody else decides whether you can book, where you sit, how you’re accommodated and, consciously or otherwise, how valuable your custom is considered to be.

Solo diners have spent a long time fitting themselves around a hospitality industry that wasn’t really designed with us in mind, and sometimes that starts before you’ve even walked through the door. You search the app for a reservation for one and there is nothing available, change the booking to two and tables mysteriously appear. You arrive and the request for a table for one is met with surprise before you’re automatically directed towards the bar or squeezed onto the least desirable table by the bogs while better ones sit empty. Or worse still, you’re made painfully aware that certain seats are for groups or that the empty chair opposite you could theoretically contain another paying customer. At the other extreme, someone may even decide that because you’re alone you must desperately want company and try to shepherd you towards the bar or manufacture social interaction you never asked for.

I still remember many years ago having to stay at a resort for work and wandering into the on site restaurant for my evening meal, only to be looked at like the antichrist when I said I was alone. I was actually questioned on it, as if I had somehow forgotten I’d left an invisible family by the pool, before being encouraged towards a communal table full of teenagers who apparently didn’t want to sit with their families. The restaurant’s solution to a man wanting dinner by himself was, apparently, to put me on the children’s table.

I’m a grown arse man, there was absolutely no fucking chance I was going within twenty feet of that table, and I’m sure you can imagine my response as I walked straight over to a nice table on the balcony and plonked myself down.

We’ve all experienced it to some extent. Bad service is bad service no matter who you are or how many people you walk into a restaurant with, but for nervous solo diners that can add an extra layer of discomfort that is entirely unnecessary.

Now, I do understand the economics. I’ve been eating out alone around the world for decades and I’ve never expected a restaurant to sacrifice all common sense at the altar of my independence. If I wander into a packed restaurant at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, see a queue forming behind me and demand a table for six because I fancy spreading out a bit, I would be the one being an arsehole. Restaurants have reservations to honour, limited space to manage, tables to turn and bills to pay, and of course they have to think commercially about how they use the space available to them.

But consideration works both ways, and being reasonable doesn’t mean being grateful for whatever scraps of hospitality you’re offered. If I walk into a half-empty restaurant on a quiet Wednesday evening, I’m not sitting at the miserable little afterthought of a table beside the toilets while perfectly good tables sit empty. I’m not being hidden behind a pillar because apparently the sight of someone happily eating by themselves might disturb the ambience, and I’m certainly not going to inhale my dinner at record speed because the restaurant is fantasising about the hypothetical second customer who could have occupied the empty chair opposite me and wants the table back. I’ll happily be reasonable about the realities of running a restaurant, but I expect the restaurant to be equally reasonable about the reality that I am a paying customer.

And not only am I a paying customer, statistically I am part of the demographic that spends more per head than any other. Couples included. So damn right I expect the place I have chosen to eat at to treat me with the respect due any other customer, solo or not.

It may seem like a minor problem in the grand scheme of things, but this is one of the major reasons eating alone is such a daunting prospect for so many first time solo travellers in the first place. You can work on the fear of being judged, learn to stop hiding behind your phone, realise that nobody is paying anywhere near as much attention to you as you imagined and finally build up the courage to walk through that door and ask for a table for one. The last thing you need at that point is for the restaurant itself to reinforce the very stigma you’ve just worked so hard to overcome.

One genuinely bad experience can validate all those fears remarkably quickly. Somebody makes you feel like an inconvenience, you’re given a dreadful table, treated differently because you’re alone or rushed through your meal, and suddenly that old self-consciousness comes flooding back. You leave thinking that you knew eating alone was going to be embarrassing, when in reality you may have been doing absolutely fine until somebody else made the situation uncomfortable.

If you were perfectly comfortable eating alone until you were treated like an inconvenience, your decision to eat alone wasn’t the problem. If you were given an unnecessarily poor table, treated dismissively, rushed or made to feel inherently less valuable than the couple who arrived behind you, you haven’t failed some test of solo travel confidence. The restaurant has failed to provide a good experience for a perfectly ordinary paying customer, and there is no reason to turn somebody else’s poor service into evidence that there is something wrong with you being there.

And this is where restaurants need to start adapting. The answer isn’t simply to squeeze a few tiny tables into spare corners and declare yourself solo friendly. Booking systems can allow reservations for one instead of mysteriously discovering availability only when a second imaginary diner appears. Restaurants can offer more flexible seating, counters and genuinely comfortable single-person spaces alongside ordinary tables. Staff can stop treating a request for a table for one as an unusual logistical problem, and bar seats or communal tables can be offered as choices rather than automatically deciding that this is where people eating alone belong.

More importantly, restaurants need to stop assuming that every solo diner wants the same experience. Sometimes I might happily sit at the bar and chat to whoever happens to be there. Sometimes I might enjoy a communal table and end up spending the evening talking to strangers. At other times I might just want a good table, three courses, a decent glass of wine and blissful peace and quiet. Other solo diners will have their own preferences, and none of those choices is any more or less legitimate because we’re eating alone. Good hospitality means giving solo customers options rather than deciding what we must want based entirely on the number of people who walked through the door.

The industry is increasingly adapting because solo diners are no longer a niche group that can be treated as an awkward exception. We are a rapidly growing and commercially valuable customer base, and restaurants that understand that are going to become increasingly good at competing for our business. Those that continue treating one diner as inherently less valuable than two might eventually want to look again at that empty chair they’re so worried about, because the person sitting opposite it is statistically spending more per head than anyone else in the room.

So if you are made to feel uncomfortable when you’re eating alone, ask yourself where that discomfort is actually coming from before you automatically blame yourself. If you’re nervous, work on the nerves. If you don’t like the table you’ve been offered when perfectly reasonable alternatives are available, ask for another one. If you’d rather have a table than sit at the bar, say so. Don’t rush through a meal you’ve paid for because you feel guilty about occupying space, and don’t accept being treated as a lesser customer simply because you’re travelling alone.

If a restaurant genuinely makes it clear that your custom is somehow less welcome because it comes from one person instead of two, you don’t have to persuade them otherwise. Take your disproportionately large bill somewhere that actually wants it. You have a responsibility to challenge the fears and insecurities that belong to you, but you don’t have a responsibility to change perfectly reasonable behaviour to compensate for somewhere that is shit at serving solo customers.

The First Table For One Is The Hardest

The hardest part of eating alone for the first time isn’t the fact that you’re sitting somewhere enjoying a good meal by yourself, it is everything you’ve built up around the experience beforehand. It is the decision to actually go, the self-consciousness that suddenly appears from nowhere, the nagging temptation to grab something and take it back to your room instead, and that irrational feeling that doing something millions of people do every day is somehow going to become a major public event simply because you’re doing it alone. Anxiety is very good at turning perfectly ordinary experiences into enormous obstacles before we’ve even attempted them, and solo dining is a perfect example of that.

Then you actually do it, and reality has an annoying habit of being far less dramatic than you first thought. You might pull up a plastic stool at a hawker stall in Singapore, grab a table in a busy food court, sit outside a little café watching the world go by or finally try the restaurant you’ve been eyeing up since you arrived. Whatever form that first solo dining experience takes, everyone around you will continue getting on with their own lives while you order something, find somewhere to sit and discover that this supposedly intimidating act of eating alone is, when stripped of everything you’ve projected onto it, simply you having something to eat.

That doesn’t mean every trace of self-consciousness will magically disappear the moment you sit down, but it doesn’t have to. Those feelings are completely natural and there is nothing wrong with having them. They’ll change as experience gives you a little more perspective. For those first few meals you might still wonder where to look, feel strangely conspicuous or instinctively reach for your phone because having something to occupy yourself with feels easier. That’s okay too. None of that means you’ve somehow failed at solo dining, because there is no performance to perfect and no standard you have to reach. The whole point is to give yourself enough experience to discover, at your own pace, that eating out alone isn’t anywhere near as bad as you thought it would be. Some people get that straight away, for others that takes a bit of time. Don’t rush yourself, you’ll get there in your own time.

And as that self-consciousness starts to fade, you’ll finally have the space to actually enjoy the experience. You start noticing the different cuisines being served around you and taking in the sights, sounds and smells of wherever you are eating even before your food comes out. Instead of monitoring yourself and wondering how you look to everyone else, you become absorbed in where you are, what you’re experiencing and, most importantly, whatever delicious thing has just been put in front of you.

And that is when eating alone can stop being something you tolerate and become something you genuinely enjoy, because food is one of the great pleasures of travel and deserves far more of your attention than the imaginary opinions of strangers. Food gives you a delicious, immersive shortcut into a destination’s culture, history and community, all through something as simple and universal as sitting down to eat. It should be savoured, it is there to be enjoyed. So enjoy it. You travelled all this way to experience another part of the world, and being there alone is no reason to deny yourself one of the richest ways of experiencing it.

That first meal alone may feel like a huge deal right now, and that’s okay. Go anyway, give yourself permission to feel awkward if you feel awkward, and give the experience enough time to become ordinary. Because there is a very good chance that eventually you won’t think of eating alone as something you have to endure because you are travelling solo. You’ll realise it is something amazing that you get to do because you are travelling solo. You’ll find somewhere wonderful, order something delicious, take your time over it and enjoy one of the greatest pleasures travel has to offer entirely on your own terms, not because you have to eat alone, but because you’ve discovered that sometimes you genuinely want to.