Dining alone at the Grand Central Oyster Bar

Dining alone in restaurants, like other solitary activities, is a matter of perception. If you feel guilty about it and think you shouldn’t be doing it, it’s dreadful. On the other hand, if you can enjoy it as one of the diverting side dishes to the great shared feast of life, it can be delicious. Dining in company isn’t always an unalloyed pleasure, anyway. If your companion is dull or irritating, or the chemistry of conversation absent, you might as well be alone. And if you are simply too tired to offer another person your full attention, a little solitary sustenance can be just the thing.

One night in New York I was hungry but exhausted beyond sociability. So I took a taxi to Grand Central station, and went to the famous Oyster Bar. It was the perfect place to eat alone. There, away from the gingham-clad tables in the main dining room, seated in rows around the curves of the counters, was a respectable scattering of lone diners like me.

I took my seat at one of the U-shaped counters, facing the furiously efficient Asian-American waitress who manned the space at its centre, dishing out crockery and bags of oyster crackers, serving up food from the kitchens, cleaning up, and taking money.

I ordered a platter of oysters, east coast and west coast, a mixture of sweet and briny. When they arrived, I was glad to be alone. Something as pure and scintillating as a raw oyster demands your full attention. You must sniff it for the whiff of sea breeze, the almost-sound of seagulls and waves breaking. Ease it from its shell, add a squeeze of lemon, a dash of sauce mignonette or even (here) a dollop of ketchup laced with horseradish. And then hold it up, the rough shell against your lip, and let it slide into your mouth, giving yourself over to its icy voluptuousness and the silvery taste of the ocean.

There is something sweetly decadent about being a woman in a restaurant alone, well-dressed and content, enjoying a platter of rugged oysters on their bed of ice. I don’t do it often, but when I do, it makes me feel like a “fast” woman of the 1920s, wearing trousers and smoking cigarettes; or a swashbuckling English missionary of the 1930s, crossing the Gobi Desert on a cart drawn by mules; even, at times, Mata Hari. Eating oysters alone, and enjoying them as much as I do, makes me feel that I am capable of anything.

After the oysters, that night, came the bouillabaisse, a house speciality, which gave me a different reason to be glad to be alone. “Would you like a bib?” asked the waitress. Like a two-year-old child, I put the plastic collar over my neck, so the front, printed with a cheerful lobster, hung over my clothes. In company, it would have made me self-conscious, but here it just gave me licence to throw myself into my supper with rude abandon. The bouillabaisse was crammed with mussels, unwieldy clams, and half a small lobster; all in the kind of tomato and saffron-infused sauce that could have made a bloodbath out of my pale-coloured dress.

I ate delicately at first, but when the time came to deal with the lobster I gave up on good manners, cracking its claws with soupy hands, sucking and slurping, trying to stem the flow of fishy juices down my wrists.

“You’re doing well,” said one of my neighbours at the bench, encouragingly. “Look, no food on your clothes or your face.” But it was messy and wild. 

My feeling of decadence, however, lasted only until I noticed the man sitting almost opposite me, on the other side of the “U”. He was a person of grand proportions, with a regal manner, and before him lay the most outrageous platter of oysters I have ever seen.

As large as a dustbin lid, it was mounded with ice, and studded with oysters of many different sizes and shapes. Also alone, and not obviously in need of sustenance, he began to eat. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, full of wonder, as he quaffed his oysters, one by one, steadily and deliberately, until the great rubbled plain of ice and shells was bare.

I was one of the last people to leave the Oyster Bar that night. The waitress, cleaning furiously, tossed me my bill. “Please,” I begged her, unable to resist the question, “tell me how many oysters that man just ordered.” She snorted, flourishing a hand at the side of her brow in a cloud-cuckoo gesture. “Unbelievable,” she said. “Just have a look.”

She unfolded a copy of his bill and shoved it across the counter towards me. There they were, listed, each oyster by its name and origin, pair after pair, 56 in total. The bill came to nearly $200.

In comparison with such extravagance, my eight assorted oysters and bowl of bouillabaisse seemed suddenly pathetic. I left the restaurant feeling happy, but as wild and daring as a six-year old in her mother’s lipstick and high-heeled shoes, sucking at chocolate cigarettes.

The Grand Central Oyster Bar, Grand Central Station, New York, tel: +1 212 490 6650, www.oysterbarny.com

Fuchsia Dunlop is the author, most recently, of ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China’ (published by Ebury Press in the UK and WW Norton in the US)