Table for one.
Laura Silver
I, like many strong, independent women I know, pride myself on not needing other people to create the life that I want. In the words of Destiny's Child, "Depend on no one else to give you what you want / ... I depend on me." So why then do I keep finding myself bitching about various restaurants I've not got around to visiting yet, simply because arranging dinner with other busy and powerful women can be a military operation and I've long tired of what amounts to expensive small talk over steak with strangers from dating sites?
Well, because it's easy to feel like a bit of a twat when you walk into some trendy ramen place and try to casually ask for a table for one, isn't it? But it shouldn't. If I can hold down a job in a competitive market, get through a full issue of the New Yorker before a new one arrives, or, you know, just keep my cat alive, then having dinner alone in a restaurant shouldn't really be such a big challenge.
In order to try to prove that dining alone is probably not the taboo we might think it is, I spent a week going to a variety of London restaurants, some casual, and some not so, entirely on my tod. The rules were: no books, no staring into my phone, and no ordering a swift starter before scuttling off like a scaredy-cat into the company of others. Here's how it went...
Laura Silver
