“We don’t sell loneliness. Please don’t come alone.”
That message from a Chinese restaurant in South Korea, posted on social media on Nov. 10, has stirred the pot among would-be customers, according to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily. The restaurant put up a notice with a number of rules for patrons eating out alone, including requiring solo diners to “pay for two portions, eat two portions, bring a friend, or come next time with your wife.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Around 10% of 170,000 restaurants across South Korea offer single-person meals, according to March data from Nice Zini Data.
Another restaurant in Korea was in hot water earlier this year after its sign banning solo diners from watching social media videos circulated online, according to the South China Morning Post. Korea JoongAng Daily reported in September that several customers at various restaurants have experienced being turned away or forced to order two meals when they have tried to dine alone. And in July, a travel YouTuber said she was pressured to eat quickly and scolded for spending “just 20,000 won” when she ate alone at a restaurant in Yeosu, South Jeolla. Yeosu Mayor Jeong Gi-Myoung issued an official apology after the incident and promised to draft new guidelines for restaurants serving solo diners.
But the trend isn’t limited to Korea. Earlier this month, a pub in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, was the source of ire over its ban on single person entry after 9 p.m. Carl Peters, the owner, said the rule has been in place since the pub opened in 2022 and was imposed in order to “protect customers from mithering,” according to the BBC. In 2023, a number of restaurants in Barcelona’s city center came under fire for reportedly turning away solo diners during peak tourist seasons, as well as setting minimum order requirements for terrace seating and introducing time caps to manage the crowd.
Some restaurants say solo diners are bad for business. “During peak hours, owners need to maximize turnover on four-person tables to offset rising costs for food, labor and rent,” the Korea Foodservice Industry Association told Korea JoongAng Daily.
“From a restaurateur’s point of view, especially in dense urban or tourist corridors, the math can look unforgiving,” Subramania Bhatt, chief executive officer of market researcher China Trading Desk, tells TIME. “If a single diner occupies a four-top at peak time, owners worry they’re losing two or three covers’ worth of potential revenue.”
That’s especially true as many restaurants struggle with higher rents and thinner margins after the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhatt says.
But while they may have had to do purely with economics, the bans on solo diners—whether official or informally enforced—have sparked debates online as social media users have criticized restaurants for discriminating against solo diners and perpetuating long-held stigma around eating alone, despite the phenomenon growing around the world particularly among young people.
One social media user asked of the Korean restaurant’s guidelines, “Why equate eating alone with loneliness?”
“It’s not a niche lifestyle choice; it’s a structural demographic shift,” Bhatt says. “Media and brand narratives around the ‘solo economy’ now frame eating alone as a mark of independence and self-respect.”
“The old stereotype of the lonely, awkward solo diner from the movies is officially dead,” adds Ashley Dudarenok, who runs a China and Hong Kong-based consumer-research consultancy.
Eating alone or eating lonely
Eating out alone has risen in Korea alongside the rise in number of single-person households. Single-person households rose above 10 million for the first time in August, accounting for 42% of all households, according to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. At the same time, high workloads, especially for young professionals in dense urban areas, has taken enough of a toll that South Korea’s government is working to implement a four-and-a-half day workweek to try to reduce burnout. South Koreans have the highest frequency of eating alone for dinner among all G20 nations, according to the United Nations’ World Happiness Report.
But the trend of dining alone is growing around the world. One in five of 1,500 Americans surveyed say they typically dine alone, according to TouchBistro’s 2025 American Diner Trends Report, while a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 lived without a partner, up 29% from 1990.
Young people are driving the trend. According to a survey of 2,000 people in the U.S. in 2024, 65% of Gen Zs and 63% of millennials said they planned to dine solo this year, as compared to 52% of all U.S. consumers. The survey, which was published by OpenTable and Kayak, also found that 60% of people had dined solo at a sit-down restaurant in the 12 months before June 2024, which increases to 68% for Gen Zs and millennials.
In 2023, one in four Americans said they ate all of their meals alone on the previous day, up 53% from 2003, according to the World Happiness Report. The report used that metric as an indicator of growing unhappiness, finding that the more meals people shared, the happier they generally felt. The report also suggested that eating alone increased feelings of loneliness.
“The extent to which you share meals is predictive of the social support you have, the pro-social behaviors you exhibit and the trust you have in others,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a University of Oxford professor and an author of the World Happiness Report, told the New York Times. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global health threat which both worsened and gained attention as a concern after the COVID-19 pandemic.
De Neve also argued that eating alone can lead to political polarization. “The fact that we’re increasingly socially isolated means also that we’re not testing our ideas about the world with other people,” he said. “And the more you sit around the table with other people who might have somewhat different views, the more you start moderating your own views. And the increasing lack of social interaction and social isolation as a result, for a lot of people—amplified by echo chambers—makes people more radical.”
South Korea, where men accounted for 84% of “lonely deaths” in 2024 (although more women than men live alone), is also grappling with a rising number of young men adopting right-wing values, particularly in their perceptions of women.
But some argue that discriminating against solo diners will only drive loneliness. “Pubs and bars are a meeting house,” Christopher Rawlinson, the general manager of another pub in Manchester, told the BBC.
And others say going out to eat, even solo, can be a more convenient and restorative experience for many young people, especially for those trying to fit meals in between or after long work days. According to the OpenTable survey, 34% of people said their main reason for dining out was “me time,” while 20% said the main reason was to be able to eat on their own schedule.
“I think there’s a broader movement of self-love and self-care and really… enjoying your own company,” OpenTable CEO Debby Soo told the Associated Press in 2024. Soo also noted that remote work, which some have suggested has also increased loneliness, has likely increased the number of solo diners.
In other places, like China, people are motivated by “the ‘freedom of choice’ to eat what you want, when you want, without compromise,” says Dudarenok. “Remote work has blurred the lines between home and office, turning a solo lunch into a welcome escape to a ‘third place.’ At the same time, social media is filled with people documenting their solo dining adventures, which removes any lingering awkwardness and turns it into a shareable, even desirable, experience.”
Dining alone isn’t new after all. The New York Times declared in 1985, “Dining alone is no longer viewed as odd.” It’s common enough in Japan and Korea to be termed “ohitorisama” (“party of one”) and “honbap” (“food alone”). And by 2022, 60% of 1,200 Americans surveyed by market research firm Mintel felt comfortable eating out on their own at a casual dining restaurant.
“For too long, dining alone was coded as an afterthought: a hurried lunch between meetings, a lone seat squeezed into a crowded restaurant or the inevitable ‘table for one,’ wrote lifestyle journalist Sasha Mariposa for Tatler Asia in August. But now, solo dining is “becoming a deliberate indulgence, a moment of mindfulness and, increasingly, a subtle marker of privilege and luxury.”
Restaurants adapt to ‘single economy’
Some businesses are embracing the boom in solo diners.
Korean delivery app Baedal Minjok launched a “single bowl” service with no minimum order requirements earlier this year. Within its first two months, over a million users used the service. Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle and Sweetgreen have gained traction alongside the growing number of solo diners. The popularity of “Mukbangs”—videos or livestreams where a person eats large amounts of food while interacting with online viewers—may also be driven in part by more people eating alone, according to some commentators, while some experts suggest the availability of smartphones means some young people may choose to socialize online during meals instead of socializing in-person. A survey of 100,000 respondents in Korea by Baedal Minjok found that more than 90% watch videos while eating alone.
In Germany, where the number of solo diners in the period of August 2023 to July 2024 was 18% higher than the same period a year before according to OpenTable, German press agency dpa reported that some restaurateurs were adapting their seating arrangements and menu options for solo diners, such as by offering more wines by the glass and having tables with both mixed and individual seating.
“As restaurateurs, we have to ensure that a guest who comes alone feels comfortable and that no one looks askance at them just because they are sitting alone,” Cornelia Poletto, a restaurant owner and chef in Hamburg, told the agency in June.
“It’s the blokes on their own that keep this industry ticking over,” Rawlinson, the pub manager in Manchester who welcomes solo customers, told the BBC.
Many restaurants in Japan, where single-person households make up a third of the total, have long had single-seat tables and partitioned booths. Even some karaoke chains now offer single-person booths.
In China, there are around 240 million single adults and 125 million single-person households, accounting for nearly a quarter of all households, according to Bhatt. That has given rise to what some call the “single economy,” Bhatt says, “a consumer class that spends heavily on convenience and self-care rather than on traditional family obligations.” The one-person dining market in China reached an estimated 800 billion yuan in 2024, as more restaurants cater to young professionals in dense cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen who work long hours and fragmented schedules.
That has resulted in restaurants shifting away from only having the traditional Chinese format of shared meals—think hot pot and round-table feasts—and towards having counter seating, narrow two-tops, and partitioned booths, as well as single-serving meals, Bhatt says.
“Haidilao, China’s best-known hot pot chain, has become almost mythic for its solo-dining theatrics: half-sized portions, entire sections laid out for one-person hot pot,” Bhatt says.
Haidilao—as well as some other Chinese restaurants—even offer large stuffed toys to accompany solo diners. “It’s a whimsical, Instagrammable solution to potential awkwardness,” says Dudarenok, adding that restaurants have the chance to “redefine themselves as a ‘third place’ that caters to our modern needs for both connection and quiet contemplation.”
Many people, including a growing number of women, also choose to travel solo, so restaurants showing they are welcome to eat alone makes a big difference—and sometimes ends up being part of the social media narrative that comes after, Bhatt says.
The OpenTable survey also found that solo diners spend 48% more per person than the average diner.
“The winning strategy, in China and beyond,” Bhatt says, is to “treat the solo diner as a premium guest whose time is valuable and whose independence is aspirational. That’s where the culture and the money is already going.”
The post Party of One: As Some Restaurants Bemoan Solo Dining, Others Embrace It appeared first on TIME.
