Who Wants to Sit at a Communal Table?
8 min read
The 2010 movie Valentine’s Day is not particularly memorable, but it does contain a brief, pointed bit of dining humor that still endures. Jason (played by Topher Grace) and Liz (Anne Hathway) are at a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant for an early-in-the-game date on—you guessed it—Valentine’s Day. It’s not going well. You see, this place has a long communal table, so poor Jason and Liz are crammed in among the masses, one of a gazillion dates, all lined up like Noah’s animals. On one side of them a couple is loudly, vigorously, endlessly making out. A man sitting next to Liz accuses Jason of drinking his water, then hits on Liz. Jason apologetically calls the place a “zoo,” and he’s not wrong. In romantic-comedy logic, every couple has an obstacle to overcome, and the table, for now, is theirs. The scene works because the problem is broadly relatable: Isn’t eating this close to other people awful?
Yet a decade and a half later—after the sad, pandemic-era plexiglass dividers went up and came down, after the surgeon general declared an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” and as the restaurant business has entered a time of both extreme demand and dangerously thin margins—here we are, being squeezed together again. Restaurant designers in New York, Houston, Philadelphia, and Asheville, North Carolina, told me they’re getting new requests for communal setups, in restaurants from food courts up to and including the kinds of places where diners spend hundreds of dollars and reservations are impossible to secure. Maty’s, which earned a spot on basically every possible best-new-restaurant list after opening last year in Miami, has two long communal tables in its airy, milk-colored dining room. There’s also one at Kann, a Portland, Oregon, restaurant from the Top Chef alumnus Gregory Gourdet, though you’ll have to take my word for it because the place has exactly zero available reservations. Ambra, one of the most sought-after dining experiences in Philadelphia, doesn’t have private seats at all—just a chef’s counter and a handsome, candlelit communal table, described by one reviewer as “a wine-, truffle-, and caviar-fueled party with nine new friends.” It and other hot restaurants—in New Orleans, the Bay Area, New York, and probably a city near you—are making the communal table not just a design choice but a central element of the dining experience.
To understand why, it first helps to understand just how weird this current moment is for restaurants. Wholesale supplies, real estate, and labor are any restaurant’s three biggest line items, and they are all much more expensive than they’ve been in recent history: According to data provided by the National Restaurant Association, food costs are up more than 20 percent from 2019, and restaurant wages are up more than 30 percent. More than half of small-business owners who run restaurants reported in one survey that they couldn’t pay their April rent. More than one out of every three restaurants wasn’t profitable in 2023, and 43 percent of restaurateurs report that they’re still carrying debt from the pandemic.
Restaurants generally have two levers they can pull to maximize profits: Raise prices, or bring more bodies in and out on a given night. Given that many diners these days are exceptionally cost-sensitive, the second option is obviously preferable—especially because interest in eating out is higher than ever, as B. Hudson Riehle, the senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association, told me (and as anyone who’s tried to make a reservation lately knows intuitively).
Communal tables fit more people, and they can make service easier and faster. Even if $100 entrees rest upon them, they evince a more casual atmosphere, which means more casual service, “which is easier to execute with less staff,” Hillary Dixler Canavan, Eater’s former restaurant editor, told me. And communal seating “creates flexibility,” Riehle told me. Lance Saunders, the director of design at Philadelphia’s Stokes Architecture + Design, was a little more candid: “You’re cramming as many seats as possible,” he said. “That is what restaurateurs like: More seats equals more money.”
This is true. But restaurants don’t like alienating their customers. And lucky for them thus far, diners are, maybe surprisingly, not revolting en masse; restaurants “wouldn’t be doing it at scale if it was totally bad for business,” Dixler Canavan told me. Americans, at least some of them, seem to actually want to eat with strangers.
Food people love to talk about how restaurants bring people together. But private tables do so only up to a point. They may place diners within the same few square feet, but they stop short of what academics call “commensality,” from the Latin com (“together”) and mensa (“table”). “On the most basic level, commensality is about eating and drinking together, but it is far more than just a physical act,” the archaeologist Susan Pollack writes. “Underpinning commensality is co-presence”—being together. Almost everyone agrees that commensality is a fundamentally good thing: In the scientific literature, it has been associated with stronger bonds and better health; in restaurants, it can create what Dixler Canavan calls “these moments of serendipity and community,” and what Cami Jetta, a Brooklyn restaurateur, calls “the magic of sharing space.”
Jetta’s restaurant is literally called Dinner Party. The design is homey, the menu is set, and the servers earnestly refer to guests as “family.” The schtick was partly born of necessity, Jetta told me: The space is tiny (roughly 500 square feet), and the kitchen is smaller than many home kitchens—too cramped to cook food to order. Plus, Jetta wanted sturdy antique furniture, and the tables she was finding were big. But the conceit is also ideological; she opened in 2021, “coming out of isolation,” and wanted to create a restaurant that replicated a feeling she hadn’t had in a long time—of gathering around a well-used table in a space that feels like an apartment. Her customers apparently wanted this, too: The place has been reliably hard to find a seat in since it opened.
Food courts, bars, and coffee shops have of course long offered shared seating, as have restaurants in parts of the world with different eating traditions and social mores, particularly in Europe and East Asia. And this isn’t the first time that communal dining has been fashionable in American restaurants. Benihana, which seated up to eight strangers around a hibachi grill, was a sensation in the 1960s; the Beatles and Muhammad Ali reportedly ate (not together!) at the restaurant’s Manhattan flagship. In the ’80s, as fine dining became more casual, and dining alone less weird, white-tablecloth-y places began serving their full menu at the bar. In the ’90s and 2000s, coffee-shop culture—and laptop culture—turned the long shared table into a place where you might spend your entire day.
About two decades ago, communal tables also had a moment—not coincidentally during the Great Recession, when restaurants were trying to lower costs. They were not universally beloved. The Chicago Tribune named communal dining one of the 10 worst dining trends of the 2000s, more annoying than molecular gastronomy or $40 entrees. A New York Post article from 2012 headlined “Don’t Sit So Close to Me!” leads with a diner who was seated at a communal table and chose to leave after a round of drinks. “Communal tables make me think ‘casual, fun conversation over hearty, tasty food,’” he told the Post. “Forty bucks an entree says to me: ‘fine dining.’”
I get it. The thing about other people is that sometimes they are extremely annoying. In American culture, there’s nothing more luxurious than space to spread out, and in dining culture, there’s nothing more fine than having every aspect of the experience tailored to you. Private tables are much newer than communal ones, but they are central to our understanding of what a restaurant, especially a nice one, is.
The first establishments to be called restaurants were almost like spas, as Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore write in Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants—quiet, beautiful, relaxing environments that served restorative broths to single diners at individual tables. This was in marked contrast to “the communal or utilitarian experiences” that had previously defined the way Europeans dined out, at inns, taverns, coffeehouses, and tables d’hote, which served a single meal at a single time at a shared table. “One of the great innovations of the restaurant is that it is about you, the person dining,” Rawson and Shore write.
The most seductive lie restaurants tell is that the customer has the control: You go into a space you’ve picked, sit with people you came with, choose what you want from a variety of options, tip what you want. The control is illusory, and limited, but it’s central to the experience. “So not being the master of your own little table,” Dixler Canavan, the restaurant expert, told me, “pisses some people off.”
The research on commensality has an interesting caveat. When it’s coercive—say, in institutional settings, or during times when political repression has maligned or even criminalized private dining—many of the salutary and social effects of communal eating are negated. Everyone wants to be the boss of their own eating experience, because eating is intimate. As Håkan Jönsson, an associate professor in food technology and cultural sciences at the University of Lund, in Sweden, told me, it’s “the most social thing we do, but it’s one of the most private things we do. When we are eating and drinking, our bodies are literally open to the surrounding world; we are giving ourselves up to the surrounding world. That’s a very delicate thing to do.” Eating is personal, physical, and a little gross; it exposes some of the basest weirdnesses and most embarrassing realities of having a body. Doing it in front of strangers is an act of vulnerability.
But maybe now co-presence is sounding a little better, and corporeal vulnerability a little less scary. A few days before I talked to Dinner Party’s Jetta, I ate at her restaurant alone: just me, my winning personality, and a phone at 4 percent. I sat at a long table with six other people—all couples, two birthdays—and, after about 15 minutes of quiet, found a way to engage in the sort of easy, low-stakes conversation you have with someone you don’t know: about sports, and jobs, and the state of Rhode Island; earthquakes and indoor malls; other restaurants and what they are like. It felt warm and pleasantly aimless. I wasn’t frantically catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in weeks or trying to make a new one; I wasn’t even trying to be impressive in any way. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked for so long with someone with whom I had nothing or no one in common, and who wasn’t also cutting my hair. I was never going to see these people again, but for two hours we were a unit. It was only when the time came to sing “Happy Birthday” that I realized I didn’t know anyone’s names.
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