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I love the unspoken rules around dining out; admittedly, even more so when they make me feel like I’m earning a gold star for good decorum. I like dressing up for the occasion; I like waiting obediently at the host stand (See? I’m not pushy like other diners); and I enjoy the martyrdom role of reorganizing the table’s contents as the meal unfolds (distributing food if we’re sharing small plates, consolidating finished plates, pouring carafes).
My adherence to a certain kind of behavior around the rituals of dining, however, goes out the window when it comes to seating. Specifically, when the option arises for one kind of seating arrangement that’s usually deemed corny: dining side by side.
“Oh, so you’re side-by-side people” a server at a cocktail bar recently remarked when my partner and I opted to sit not across from each other, but next to each other at our table. Maybe the observation was harmless enough, but it scratched at the unspoken shame around the act of sitting next to your dining companion, whether romantic or platonic. Naysayers may call it cringe, or perhaps even codependent dining — a perceived act of PDA, one or two tiers short of fully making out at the bar (which — surprise! — I am also a fan of).
To the haters, I’d ask: Haven’t you ever given in to the corniness of love? And not just love with a person, but with the liberating idea that maybe you shouldn’t care what other people think (or how they sit, for that matter), really, and that you deserve to imbue the most routine of dinners with the same romantic energy as a couple feeding each other spaghetti alle vongole on a beach in Positano?
I recently had the pleasure of checking out Cynthia, a seasonal tasting-menu restaurant in New York City’s West Village, where I was seated at a side-by-side table with my Eater colleague Nadia Chaudhury. The settee was plush, the couch and table just big enough for two, and chic curtains were suspended from the ceiling to half-obscure the sides of the table for even more privacy. “My partner and I try to sit side by side in any restaurant we can,” Cynthia’s founder and general manager told me by email about the design choice, “so it was really a merge of the constraints of the space, while also trying to build the perfect table that I would want to sit at […] for those unique little cubbies [in the restaurant’s layout].”
To my surprise, a good number of my own colleagues also stood up for side-by-side dining when I surfaced the topic in Slack (“Is it really that corny?”). We talked about how nice it is to actually be able to hear your friend in a loud restaurant without shouting. Eater editor-in-chief Stephanie Wu also brought up the fact that your dining companion (meaning: their H&R Block 2009 Team Building Picnic T-shirt) also won’t be in the background of any food pictures, if you’re sitting next to each other and are the type to document each dish.
Somewhere in all of this, I’m convinced that the steely, buttoned-up pilgrim roots of this country are to blame for the side-by-side shame, because this certainly isn’t as big of a taboo for the French, for example. When I sit next to my friend or partner at a restaurant, I am no longer a one-woman island of propriety. I feel more like part of a team, like the two old man Muppets that serve as the Greek chorus for every Muppet movie. I’m having dinner, but most of all, I’m in cahoots. And isn’t that better?
In the words of Coolio, “Life is too short to not have fun; we are only here for a short time compared to the sun and the moon and all that.”
