Solo restaurant bookings rose 23 percent in a year

Book a table for one this weekend. Not someday: a real place, a real time, a confirmation number in your inbox by tonight.

In a study published in 2015, Rebecca Ratner of the University of Maryland and Rebecca Hamilton of Georgetown ran a simple test on a college campus. People walking by were asked one question: would you like to tour an art exhibit?

The people walking alone were less interested than the people walking with a friend. Guess who enjoyed the exhibit just as much once they actually went in? The solo ones.

The paper is called Inhibited from Bowling Alone, and it ran in the Journal of Consumer Research. A big part of the culprit, in surveys from the United States, India and China: people worried strangers would think they had no friends.

•••

I know that fear from the inside. The first spring after Danny went quiet, I didn’t eat in a restaurant once, because the psychic I believed most had said April and I was saving the good places for when he got back.

I turned down a job in Savannah that same spring on the same logic. Nobody asked me to. I volunteered my whole calendar to a man who wasn’t using it.

Now look at the weekend in front of you. Mercury goes retrograde tomorrow, joining Venus, and by Saturday morning the ring-light oracles will be telling you, in one phrasing or another, to stay home and stay available. Small detail they leave out: a free Saturday night is exactly when the 11pm reading gets bought.

Why the first one feels impossible

Ratner’s surveys found people had no trouble running errands or working out alone. The resistance showed up for the fun things, the ones that look like leisure to a stranger at the next table. “I think we associate ‘alone’ with ‘lonely,’” Ratner told the university’s magazine.

Which brings me to a number that ought to cheer you up. OpenTable reported this July that solo reservations rose 23 percent over the past year, and 3 p.m. tables for one are a trending slot. The stranger you’re worried about is increasingly at a table for one too.

“But I’ll just sit there thinking about him.”

Maybe. Probably, the first time. You think about him at home too, and at home nobody brings you bread.

Am I saying dinner alone fixes a broken heart? I read cards for a living, and I’m not about to sell you a cure in a different wrapper. A plate of shrimp and grits is a meal, not a ritual.

The first table I ever booked for one was on a Tuesday, after a client cancelled, at a place on East Bay Street. I brought a paperback I never opened and watched the tourists photograph their crab cakes. It was fine. By dessert it was good.

Rosalind, the friend who once told me I’d gotten boring, wanted to hear every detail. Boring people don’t get asked what they ordered.

And whatever he decides, the woman who already knows how to spend a Saturday is ready for either answer. If he comes back changed, you bring a full life to the table. If he doesn’t, release is a full outcome, and you’ll already have practice.

•	Pick one place you’ve been saving for two.
•	Book it for a quiet hour, a Sunday lunch or a 3 p.m. table.
•	Bring one thing to hold: a book, a sketchbook, a crossword.
•	Stay through one full course before you decide how it’s going.

01	What have you been saving to do with him that you could do this weekend by yourself?

02	Whose opinion are you picturing when you imagine sitting alone at a table?

03	What would you order if nobody else had a vote?

The rest of this Friday is yours, and so is the table. Judge sulks when I eat out without him, and I go anyway.