, but this is clearly absurd. It is a bid for further power on the part of cooks and waiters who – with their foams, fusions, drizzles of balsamic and impertinent wines at £150 a throw – consider themselves key players on the world stage. This needs correcting. As has been said before, if these people were all so fabulous, you'd be serving them, and not vice versa. Elsewhere, people welcome single diners. Apparently, half the tables at London's top-end Hotel Café Royal are often taken by lone eaters. On New York's Lower East Side, the vegetarian Dirt Candy favours the solos. Each February, owner Amanda Cohen holds a solo diners' week. 'I hate Valentine's Day,' she explains.){kind=link}
Restaurants in the Catalan capital have sparked an outcry by discouraging solo diners to maximise profits
With what should we credit Barcelona? Not much, I’d say. It has on its CV a position at the forefront of the vast over-valuation of football players, the world’s ugliest cathedral – the Sagrada Familia resembles a proper church but made of wax, which is melting – and a Catalan independence movement quite as irritating as those in Basque country and Scotland.
To these, we must now add a move by city restaurateurs to discourage, even stamp out, single diners. Single diners, it is said, are bad for business. By themselves, they take a table which might be allocated to a couple – or, in the unlikely event that the single person takes a table for eight, an entire group. In the city centre, lone eaters are reportedly finding themselves turned away – notably if they want a terrace table – or, in at least one case, asked to dine in 20 minutes, max.I’ve learned not to expect a great deal of Barcelona (if you remember Cobi, the “humanised Pyrenean mountain dog” mascot of the 1992 Olympics, you’ll doubtless agree), but this is clearly absurd. It is a bid for further power on the part of cooks and waiters who – with their foams, fusions, drizzles of balsamic and impertinent wines at £150 a throw – consider themselves key players on the world stage. This needs correcting. As has been said before, if these people were all so fabulous, you’d be serving them, and not vice versa.
Elsewhere, people welcome single diners. Apparently, half the tables at London’s top-end Hotel Cafe Royal are often taken by lone eaters. On New York’s Lower East Side, the vegetarian Dirt Candy favours the solos. Each February, owner Amanda Cohen holds a solo diners’ week. “I hate Valentine’s Day,” she explains.
The fact is that, across the world – except apparently in Barcelona – many places remember the Covid years when no-one at all showed up. Given half a chance, restaurateurs would have gone round prising single diners from their settees, the home-baking of banana bread be blowed. These people struggled and many are struggling right now. Inflation, soaring interest rates and lack of personnel haven’t much helped. I still look upon dining out as charitable work in favour of distressed restaurant folk.