Twice in the past two days the topic of eating alone in a restaurant has surfaced.

This morning I was reading an article which started off with a quotation pulled from Keith Ferrazzi’s book,  Never Eat Alone. The book reveals the steps one takes to become a master networker.

Just yesterday, a friend was telling me about a new restaurant under construction he had visited. He mentioned that it will have a counter where parties of one can sit so they don’t have to eat alone at a table.

Looks like I missed another memo. You’re just not happening if you eat alone in a restaurant. And god forbid if someone you actually know catches you in the act of pranzare flagrante.

If there is a stigma attached to eating alone, if this is the unmistakable emblem of a social misfit, how sad.

Let me confess, at what seems to be the high risk of surrendering an extraordinary secret crunched into the darkest corner of a troubled psyche, that now and then I sort of like to eat alone in a restaurant.

Perhaps I should admit there have actually been times when I have deliberately not reached out to a client or a friend to join me for dinner when I’m out of town.

Being alone is, well, just fine.  And in those situations when you are indeed dining alone not out of choice, but because you don’t have anyone to join you, so what? Why pin the loser’s tail on the solitary dining donkey?

As a bit of a sidebar, people who have racked up significant business travel particularly understand the delights of room service. You decide not to go out or even downstairs in the hotel to eat alone because of the lure of solitary sluggishness in a terry cloth robe, or getting some work done. I get it. And I’ve done it… a bit too often.

But I don’t get this eating alone stigma that people such as Keith Ferrazzi are incubating. I suspect Greta Garbo has a better grasp of all this than Ferazzi.

When I see somebody eating alone, perhaps the woman who is having lunch by herself and reading a book, or the guy having dinner working his iPhone, well, I look at these people and instinctively I like them.

I don’t think they’re losers. I suspect they too appreciate the delights of downtime in a world where solitude seems increasingly difficult to find.

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