There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a table set for one. It used to be read as absence: an empty chair, a missing plus one, a reservation that looked to the waiter, like a mistake. Today, that same silence is being read as something else entirely. Presence. Undivided, unhurried and entirely yours. Solo dining has quietly become one of the more interesting shifts in how we eat, and more than that, in how we've started to think about being alone. Japan and much of Europe have long treated solo dining as an ordinary part of everyday life, though they arrived there in different ways. In Japan, restaurants often make