BY JAMES NOLAN
From Gastronomica
Poet, fiction writer, and translator James Nolan lived in many exotic places—Spain, India, China, South America—before moving back to his native New Orleans a decade ago. From that citizen-of-the-world perspective, he makes a pithy point about American dining-out habits.
Let me finally admit it: I hate eating alone in most American restaurants. This is particularly vexing because I live in the French Quarter, which visitors to my native New Orleans think of as a culinary paradise. And with reservations—in both senses of the word—it can be, if you’re part of a well-heeled gang out for a jovial night-on-the-town of dining with jazz in the background. But I’m not talking about my cousin’s birthday dinner bash next Saturday, but tonight, a harried, workaday evening when I should be busy correcting galley proofs well into the wee hours.
Sorry, but I don’t want to have fun every night of the week. I’m a hungry bachelor, one who has never gotten used to the concept of food as show biz. As I say to the street musicians approaching my outdoor café table whenever I’m back visiting San Francisco, “I’m from New Orleans—please don’t entertain me.”
Just feed me.
Every evening, the choices facing the hungry single person aren’t easy: either the often tiresome steps of shopping, prepping, cooking, and then cleaning up involved in making a nutritious meal for one, or the shameful practice of eating convenience food—whether take-out, order-in, or frozen-and-nuked—usually at a granite-topped kitchen island. I’m hardly ever in the mood for the pricey fussiness of solitary “fine dining,” and even if I did drive, the gastric suicide of fast food has always been out of the question. Sadly, the drugstore lunch counters, automats, and late-night diners ubiquitous in the black-and-white movies of my parents’ era are long gone, although you can still pick up a package of ramen noodles at Walgreens.
What’s left for people like me, those who love to cook, do so almost every day, but eventually grow weary of putting together a decent solo meal night after night? Aren’t we one-person households supposed to be a growing demographic?
Few American restaurants cater to the single diner unless they’re run by recently arrived immigrants, many of whom are bachelors themselves starting new lives in the United States. Asia, Middle Eastern, and Latin American restaurant owners understand the concept of a table for one, at which you might eat unself-consciously next to other hardworking single diners like yourself: a Chinese tailor between shifts, a Pakistani taxi driver, or a Mexican roofer.
In an American-style restaurant, on the other hand, a single diner will be seated at a table for two that waiters call a “deuce,” usually behind a potted palm, near the swinging kitchen door, or around the corner from the restrooms. It’s either that, or you’ll wind up next to a boisterous party of eight singing “Happy Birthday,” alongside a married couple silently dueling, or sharing the awkward intimacy of two people on a first date as their knees inch toward each other’s under the table. Of course, just because we’re single doesn’t mean we’ve taken monastic vows. Sometimes we’re only too happy to be part of a jolly restaurant party or to stumble through our own clumsy first dates. But not every night, the meat-and-potatoes of our weekly eating habits. Which is why, rather than suffer these indignities in restaurants, we’d prefer to stand at the kitchen island scarfing take-out or microwaved grub.
For much of my life, I lived in Barcelona, Madrid, and San Francisco, and these days I sorely miss the neighborhood bachelor restaurants I frequented in these cities: clean, utilitarian eateries that functioned as extensions of my own apartment and were similar in some ways to boardinghouse dining rooms. These places were economical, served home-cooked food, were set up with rows of double tables meant for one, and staffed by unobtrusive waiters who were probably the chef’s brothers-in-law. As a matter of fact, everyone working there often came to the big city from the same village, either in rural Spain or Asia, and so offered a degree of community to the similarly displaced. The efficient but distant servers understood exactly what you wanted: to order, eat, read the paper, drink a few glasses of house wine, pay, and leave, without having to put on a party hat, listen to them recite in tedious detail the evening’s specials, or pretend you were having the time of your life.
This, of course, was when the working class still could afford to live in these cities, and for various reasons many of them ate at least one meal a day out alone. In Spain, their workplaces were often close by, and so the suited bureaucrat ate lunch at a table right next to the bricklayer in his blue jumpsuit. The office-worker scanned newspaper headlines, the bricklayer stared at the TV blaring in the corner, and nearby a lone shaggy student was bent over a book.
And then there was me, after teaching my university classes or rattling around inside my apartment all day. We diners nodded, made eye contact with each other, and at times exchanged pleasantries, but otherwise respected each other’s privacy. If we lingered over a coffee or cognac with an after-dinner cigarette—back when you could still smoke in restaurants—we might chat with the waiter as he bused tables. After all, we saw the same server three or four times a week, although we never exchanged names. No, this was a business, and he wasn’t exactly a friend. Rather, the waiter was more like your mailman, someone who knew more about your tastes and habits than even those closest to you. On Fridays, one dashing waiter in Madrid, black hair slicked back like Ramón Navarro’s, always seemed to know I’d order the cod, salmon, or trout. He never asked my name, religion, or even my nationality, but perhaps he’d noticed the Sainte Vierge Miraculeuse medal dangling around my neck.
Good walls make good waiters, so please, I pray to la Miraculeuse every time I’m seated in an American restaurant, don’t tell me your name, just take my order. And there’s no need for you to hover over the table, asking every ten minutes “Is everything okay?” or threatening to whisk away my half-finished dinner unless I’m “still working on it” here in my mastication factory. And don’t wave that wooden dildo packed with peppercorns in my face.
Of course, American servers must be obsequiously entertaining and intimate because of the feudal economics of tipping, those sham roles of lord and servant long since vanished from European restaurants. And this has occurred on a continent, ironically, where real lords and servants abound, and class distinctions are closely observed. Yet in the labor-union economics of restaurant dining, everything in Europe is more equitable and democratic. There the waiter receives an automatic fifteen percent of the take from all of the tables in his section, in addition to a base salary. This is why, except in small family-run restaurants, the waiters traditionally have been men. It’s a respected profession in which the waiter can actually support a numerous family on the steady income he earns. Most diners leave behind on the table a few coins from their change, either as noblesse oblige, a reward for a special kindness, or simply to get rid of a few heavy metal euros. But nobody expects it, and if you don’t leave any coins, no hard feelings.
Along with the automatic fifteen percent service fee, the tax is also included in the price of each menu item, whether it’s an à la carte or a prix fixe meal. So diners, whether alone or in groups, don’t have to ruin their digestions by sweating over arithmetic when the bill arrives. And unless somebody in a group springs for the check, it’s considered boorish beyond belief not to simply divide the bill by the number in the party. If you decide to argue about who needs to fork over more or less dough because of a dessert or extra glass of wine, no European will ever dine out with you again. Even today, I avoid going to restaurants with Americans who spoil a lovely dinner by ending it with an animated conversation involving addition and subtraction, never my strong suit.
The single diner in a European restaurant will often flip through a newspaper or book, or if it’s a working-class bistro, watch the news on a TV mounted in the corner. In Spain, news broadcasts are timed for the lunch and dinner hours—2:00 and 9:00 p.m., respectively—so there’s always something happening on screen to elicit a collective groan, cheer, or complaint, especially during soccer matches or elections. This entices the lone diner out of his shell and conversations often flow between tables. Nowadays, of course, here as well as in Europe, once seated, many diners immediately take out their things and start playing with them. For better or worse, glowing iPhones, those bottomless wells of self-absorption in public, have usurped the cigarette pack as personal place markers on the restaurant table, always close at hand.
Unaccompanied women often dine alone in European restaurants, where they are treated with courtly respect and discretion. I’ve seldom observed women dining alone in American restaurants, and have never doubted why. In her “Paris Journal,” M.F.K. Fisher nails it: “I do not enjoy eating alone in American restaurants. . . . I am suspect: all single women are either lushes or on the prowl, good waiters and restaurateurs have assured me. So I am put near the bar if I look like a quick pickup (which I don’t), and behind an aspidistra or a service table if I look like a troublesome drinker. . . . In even ‘good’ places I am served in a cursory way, something to be got through.” Fisher then goes on to detail the delightful meals she ate alone in Paris restaurants, and concludes, “I am glad I am here, and alone here.”
Savoring her words makes me feel not so alone in my nostalgia for the civilized atmosphere of single dining. Short of boarding a plane, what wouldn’t I do tonight for a table for one at la Sanabresa or el Bierzo in Madrid, Bilbao or L’Havana in Barcelona, or Henry’s Hunan or Yuet Lee in San Francisco? This April I’d loved to have been dining at la Sanabresa on Calle Amor de Dios seated alone at my table facing the TV newscast when King Juan Carlos abdicated his throne. I can only imagine the hubbub of shocked commentary exploding around me as I dove into my favorite first course of berenjenas rebozadas (deep-fried slices of eggplant), continued through my second of pata de cordero asado (roast leg of lamb), and finished with the usual crema catalane (crème brûlée). Or I could have skipped the food and would have paid the twelve-euro prix fixe just to eavesdrop on the heated family conversation.
In these bachelor restaurants, the bond between single diners and owners runs deep. This spring, visiting my old North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco, I made a beeline for Henry’s Hunan on Sansome Street, where I’d often eaten dinner alone before teaching evening classes at the Chinatown campus of City College. Now, at the most un-Chinese lunch hour of three in the afternoon—over the years, my appetite has stayed true to the Spanish schedule—I found myself seated next to only one other customer in the empty restaurant, and he and I nodded, acknowledging with a smile that we’d both ordered the same dish. An African-American, perhaps also with Southern roots, he was eating the spicy house-smoked ham, as close to soul food as you can get in a Chinese restaurant and always my own favorite. In the middle of his meal, he glanced at his watch, patted his pockets, and told the Chinese waitress that he’d forgotten his wallet in his cab. Then the taxi driver offered to leave his iPhone as security for the bill while he ran back to retrieve it. But since he was obviously a habitual customer, the waitress wouldn’t hear of it. A few minutes later, he sprinted in to pay and then leave with a carton of leftovers, reminding me of how many nights I’d raced from a table here to my classroom.
Tonight, back in New Orleans, on the day Juan Carlos’s son Felipe is crowned the new king of Spain, I trudge into my kitchen, swing open the fridge door, and try to imagine what ingredients I can possibly scrape together to make an interesting meal before I get back to work on the galley proofs. What about a shrimp couscous, I wonder, using homemade shrimp stock from the freezer, pre-peeled Gulf shrimp, plus some raisins, a handful of pitted olives, cilantro, Aleppo pepper, and canned garbanzos? That might last me for three days, and even though I’ll probably tire of it after the second, I go through the halfhearted preparations. Yet how much more enjoyable it would be to tuck today’s newspaper under my arm and take a brisk stroll, only to wind up sitting at a table for one among clattering dishes in front of a freshly prepared meal at an unpretentious restaurant like la Sanabresa or Henry’s Hunan, places that have always been like my second homes.
Except that there I don’t have to do the dishes.