Solo Travel5 min
Eating Alone in Kyoto, and Getting Good At It
Flights are easy. Hotels are easy. It is the eight o'clock reservation that undoes people.
Every woman I have ever talked into a first solo trip has raised the same fear eventually, usually late in the conversation and usually with a slightly apologetic tone, as though it were too small a thing to have mentioned. It is never the flying. It is never the language. It is dinner.
Specifically it is the walk from the door of a restaurant to a table for one, and the belief, which is very hard to argue somebody out of, that the room is going to notice.
The counter changes everything
Japan solved this before anybody asked it to. A great deal of the best eating in Kyoto happens at a counter, facing the person cooking, and at a counter there is no such thing as a table for one. There is a row of people, most of whom are also on their own, all facing the same direction.
I ate at a seven-seat counter in Gion where the chef spoke perhaps forty words of English and I spoke perhaps twelve of Japanese, and we managed an entire two-hour dinner on gesture and enthusiasm. Nobody was performing hospitality at me. It was simply how the room worked.
Four things that actually help
Book early rather than late. A seven o'clock reservation is a room half full of people who are also eating early, and it is a completely different social temperature to eight thirty.
Take something to read that is not your phone. A phone at a table reads as waiting for somebody. A book reads as a decision.
Sit at the bar wherever a bar exists. This is true in Kyoto, in Vienna, in Cape Town and in most places in between.
And accept that the first night is going to be the worst one. It reliably is. By the third you will have stopped noticing, and by the end of a fortnight you will be mildly irritated at the idea of eating with anybody else.
Why it matters more than it sounds
This is not really about food. Dinner is the last hour of the day when there is nothing to do but be somewhere, and a woman who can sit alone in a restaurant in an unfamiliar city and enjoy it has quietly removed the main obstacle to going anywhere at all.
Most of the women who come to us for a consultation are not short of money or curiosity. They are short of somebody telling them plainly that the thing they want to do is reasonable. Frequently, when we get to the bottom of it, the thing they are actually asking about is dinner.
Written by the Red Camellia team. Every trip we write about is one we have taken ourselves.
