While most of us wouldn’t think twice about going for a coffee alone or being a solo diner in a café at lunchtime, eating your evening meal in a restaurant alone is a different matter.
Eating a solitary dinner out is mainly about confidence.
If you feel self-assured enough, you’ll probably be happy eating alone at the Chiltern Firehouse on a Friday night. There are some dining spots, however, that go out of their way to make the single diner feel more comfortable and at home when flying solo.
The Stopped Heart is Julie Myerson’s ninth novel (she has also written one novella and four works of non-fiction). It may just be her best book yet as it manages to be both a page-turning thriller and a serious exploration of how abuse works. If that sounds off-putting, it shouldn’t be – whilst her subject matter is child abduction and murder both now and in the Victorian era, she is at pains not to titillate her readers.
We knew a few years ago, when we saw Rosario Dawson and Danny Boyle dining at the pop up Shrimpy’s that changes were afoot in King’s Cross, and these days it’s transformed itself beyond all recognition. Here are our current top recommendations for eating and drinking in the area throughout the day.
I meet David Nicholls for coffee at his house one weekday morning. We talk about Henry James and he tells me that he read Portrait of a Lady last year. The novel obviously had an impact on him as he quotes from it in his latest, rather wonderful novel, Us. I want to get to the nub of what he enjoyed about the novel this time round which had eluded him in the past. He is just about to tell me when a nice man from a security firm pops his head round the door.
Multitudes is the first book of short stories from the prizewinning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell. The collection is eleven stories strong and each of the stories seems to describe a character in peril so that holding one’s breath whilst reading them sometimes feels unavoidable.