Dining Solo in the Windy City

Greetings fellow diners! 

After months (actually years) of my friends telling me I should blog about my dining experiences, I have finally succumbed to the wonderful world of blogs.

 So why blog about solo dining?  Well, for starters, I think there are far more of us single diners out there than the restaurant industry believes.  If we can only get some of our issues out there for all to see, then perhaps those restaurants that don’t excel at accommodating the solo diner might, just might, get a clue and start treating us better.

 Next, I hope that more people will discover the fun of dining alone.  Far too many people react with instant fear when they consider the concept of . . . gasp . . . dining by themselves, alone, destitute, bereft of friends and comfort, lonely, pathetic,  desperate, pitiful.

 LOL – you get the drift.

 “Not so,” say I.  Dining alone can be whatever you choose to make it.  Sometimes I like to just disappear into a quiet corner of a restaurant to read a good book.  Other times, I like to sit at the noisy bar and engage people around me in conversation.  Still other times, I like to be out in the middle of a restaurant so I can watch the people – kind of like watching a strangely dysfunctional play on stage (but nearly always a comedy, luckily).

 Over the years, I have become instant friends with servers, hosts/hostesses, bartenders and random fellow patrons.  At some restaurants which I frequent, staff members have actually become good friends with me.  

With the right attitude and some clearly achievable expectations, I believe that solo dining can be one of the most enjoyable experiences you can have in a restaurant.  As I keep on blogging here, I plan to cover things like those attitudes and expectations.  At the moment, my mind seems to be dividing up possible blog posts into four broad categories:

1. Solo dining “mechanics” such as making reservations, requesting seating locations, dealing with various staff members, etc.
2. Solo dining attitudes and expectations.  Hopefully, this will help give some best practices into how to have the best possible time while dining alone.
3. Specific restaurant reviews.  This type of post will focus on those places I eat where I have a good, great or even an exceptional experience.  I vow to never post a bad review of a specific restaurant since I believe in karma and wouldn’t want that bad energy to come back and bite me (pun intended).
4. Having said #3 above, what I will do is include postings about my bad experiences in order to illustrate issues that might be a pitfall when dining alone.  I won’t mention specific restaurant names, but I will let you know just exactly what went wrong and how I think it might have been handled better.

Coming soon . . . my first restaurant review.  Until then, “Eat, Drink and Be Merry!”