My favourite thing about going to a restaurant, aside from the obvious draw of hopefully great food, is watching other people. I can’t say this nosy streak makes me compelling company, but there is nothing I love more than watching another couple when they’re out for a meal. I like trying to work out if it’s a first date, or a last; if they’re cradling their phones because they haven’t been out since the baby was born and they’re anxious that the sitter might phone, or if they’re scrolling because they ran out of things to say to each other a decade ago and they’re hoping that watching someone else’s happy life on Instagram Reels will numb the boredom.
Lately, I’ve been to a couple of places so snug that you can’t really people watch, or not from a polite distance, at least. This intimacy has shaken me out of my more voyeuristic dining habits and dropped me right into the action. In small spaces, there is no observer and observed, only one big mass of stranger-on-stranger interactions. The downside of this is that you can’t gossip loudly and freely. The upside is that not everyone knows this rule.
After months of hearing great recommendations for it, all of which came with cautionary tales about how hard it is to get a table, I finally managed to book for two at Perro, a Mexican-influenced, British-produce restaurant in Kings Heath, Birmingham. I snagged a dinner reservation at 6.30pm, a mere three weeks ahead of time. On arrival, I could see why booking is harder than getting Glastonbury tickets: it is tiny. We shuffled inside, hungry and pleased to be there, and became two of the 12 diners soon to be happily tucking in.
It felt as if everyone in the place had decided to go to the same party
It is so snug that, essentially, you end up having dinner with 10 strangers. You’re all pretending not to listen to each other, but nobody is under any illusion that you can have a private conversation, so the mood undergoes a palpable shift. It becomes more lively, more consciously communal. A couple tried their luck with a walk-in; when they asked if there was a table, the air cooled with the gentle collective outrage of a room full of highly organised people who had been waiting for this for weeks. The food at Perro is excellent, by the way. I would buy vats of the sikil pak (pumpkin seed salsa) and eat it with a spoon. But that atmosphere made it an extra special treat.
I have never been to a supper club (when I grew up, supper was a bowl of cornflakes or a slice of toast at 8pm, if you were still hungry after tea at 4.30pm). I’ve always felt as if I would be too shy for it, and I’ve always admired those gung-ho and confident explorers who will willingly throw themselves in to a wriggling mass of strangers, in a stranger’s house, no less. I have a similar reaction to it as I do to the words “team-building event”.
But now I am starting to get it. It turns out I may well love this notion of strangers being thrown into something together. A couple of weeks later, I went to a new Ethiopian restaurant called Emaye in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I live. It is a tourist town, for the most part, so the food tends towards the chains, the fish and chips and the pub grub. Emaye is a welcome departure. At the moment, it is in a room above a bubble tea shop. It is a little bigger than Perro, but only by a handful of covers. Again, it felt as if everyone in there had decided to go to the same party. After the food was served, the chef came out to each table to talk about it, not in a “this foam smells like my childhood dreams” sort of way, but more like we had gone round to her house for dinner. She asked if we had enjoyed it. I was so full and happy that I struggled to find the words, but I very much did enjoy it, and plan to become a regular.
Neither of these felt like the sort of place where you would get away with a mindless scroll between dishes, or even a low-key marital bicker, though I did come away from Emaye with detailed knowledge of my table-neighbour’s favourite West End musicals, which you could see as free advice. These small rooms are terrible places to have a top-secret meeting, then, or even a quiet argument, but are great for the cheerfully nosy, and for human connection.