JOHN F. Kennedy once entertained a group of Nobel prizewinners, calling them the most distinguished gathering of intellects to have dined at the executive mansion, 'with the possible exception of when Mr [Thomas] Jefferson dined here alone'.
JFK meant this as a tribute to Jefferson's remarkable mind. But I prefer to dwell on the scene of the great statesman enjoying a solo dinner by candlelight at an immense mahogany table.Hong Kong's lavish tastes would have suited Jefferson; he employed a French cook and one of Europe's finest maitre d's.
No doubt old Tom dined marvellously, enjoying the peace and quiet while contemplating his chef's work, and possibly making notes for a treatise on smoked squab [pigeon] which will one day come to light. Solitary dining is maligned. It bears the stigma of its distant cousin in the sexual realm: harmless, pleasurable, yet somehow embarrassing. It takes a brave man or woman to dine alone at a top-class hotel grill, and face the stares of waiters and patrons.
Traditionally, only rich, grumpy eccentrics dine by themselves; restaurants are for excursions a deux, or multiples thereof. And at Chinese restaurants, in a city where people do everything but have appendectomies in groups of 12, one encounters an enigmaas well as a stigma: how do you enjoy a balanced meal of say, meat, vegetables and soup, without ordering enough to feed four? Few grumpy rich people are that eccentric. Who dines alone unashamed? Secret agents. Axe murderers in solitary. Count Dracula, in a sense. All are social outcasts of one type or another. In Chinese and Western society, those who eat alone in restaurants are to be pitied. Gunter Grass got to the heart of this absurdity in his novel The Flounder: he wrote of a people who were ashamed to eat publicly, though they convened to perform bodily functions that we relegate to small porcelain-lined rooms.
Nevertheless, for the free spirit, solo dining has its advantages. One is the absence of the need to talk. Conversation is an art much like photography; for every worthy practitioner there are millions who produce little or nothing of value. Their attempts are the verbal equivalent of the underexposed, blurred snapshot with the subject's head cut off.And since they make use of the same set of organs, dining and speaking are, like the phone-fax-message machine, a clumsy combination, more trouble than they are worth.
Say an old friend ropes me into trying out a new Middle Eastern restaurant with him. I am about to take my first bite of fillet of braised sea bream when my friend says, 'So, what have you been doing since 1967?' Unless I follow my instincts and ignore him, I'll be talking for most of the evening, between occasional mouthfuls of room-temperature couscous. There are other benefits to being alone: if your table manners lapse, your mate will not alert you by poking a spiked heel through your instep.
Neither will calorie-counters or timekeepers shame you into declining dessert or coffee.Resolved, then, that solitude is preferable for those who like to concentrate on their meal. It is a sublime pleasure, which should be enjoyed, like everything in life, shamelessly. Since you will be concentrating on the food, choose a good restaurant. Hong Kong's service ethic makes dining alone here less problematic than in Western cities.