You walk into Daisy May’s, a barbecue restaurant in New York, hoping to enjoy your time with the juicy pork ribs in a quiet booth. But the restaurant has only with eight large wooden tables, each with eight seats. A young man and woman are feeding each other ice-cream; six reunited friends are drinking and laughing about old times. The only solo diner is staring at the basketball game on the television on the wall.

A communal table at the Kitchen Cafe in Boulder, Colo. (Photo by Huini Gu/CNS)

Any seat in the restaurant means sitting near a stranger.

But that’s part of the point.

Restaurants with communal seating are popping up all over the United States. For many restaurateurs, the family-style table is designed to create a casual, fun atmosphere for people to interact with one other if they choose. But for first-timers, eating with strangers can be more intimidating than relaxing.

“Over the years people become more comfortable with it,” says Ann Lauer of Rick and Ann’s restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s an option; we won’t force it. I don’t think it works at romantic and fancy restaurants.”

It also doesn’t work all over the country. Neal McCarthy, the owner of Miller Union, a new restaurant in Atlanta, introduced three communal tables, which can seat more than 26 people. The idea developed during a brainstorming session before the restaurant opened in November 2009, with the thought of “trying to be a part of the community and create a casual environment.”

But after a year, not too many local patrons embraced the idea.

“A lot of people don’t like it.” McCarthy says. “It’s a matter of space. In the South, it’s less densely populated; people want more space. In places where real estate prices are high, like New York or Chicago, people are more used to common space.”

If they’re used to it, it’s not necessarily by choice. Rick Vidal, 33, a doctor and foodie from New York City, described his most recent experience of eating at a restaurant in down Manhattan, where the tables were so close together it felt like one communal table: “There’s this much space between the tables,” Vidal says, pinching a distance of no more than two inches with his thumb and index finger. “That’s communal. My shoulders are rubbing with another person.’

The terrifying part is not just nudging someone else’s shoulder, but nudging into someone’s private conversation. “You want to give them space and privacy, but you know you can’t,” says Jeff Wang, 27, a marketing executive in New York. “So everybody is just pretending that you have your own space.’

Marya Charles Alexander, the editor and publisher of www.SoloDining.com, says an easy way for a solo diner to break the ice with a neighbor is simply to ask, “What are you having?”

“Being able to dine out alone is an important social skill,” she says. “It also depends on how the restaurants introduce it to the public. Some restaurants host family-style dinners once a week; people have to make reservations to get that.” Restaurants should make it “a very exciting and attractive experience. Start slowly, so as to attract customers at a regular pace.”

Such family-style communal dinners were a big success for The Kitchen, a bistro in Boulder, Colo. The restaurant serves 24 people for its weekly Community Night, where the chef creates “four to five courses based on what’s in season,” says Lara Vann-Dagenhardt, The Kitchen’s manager. “Large groups of friends, families, couples and singles come together in order to give everyone in Boulder a chance to get to know more faces. Nobody knows each other. They cultivate discussions from the table.”

“If you are happy with your food, if it’s beautiful outside, you can’t help but being happy and starting dialogues with people next to you.”

Nina Frankenheim, 69, a Bostonian who spends five months with her husband in Santa Fe, N.M., every year, says their favorite New Mexican spot is a communal seating restaurant called Cafe Pasqual, but they don’t go for the company.

“Your expectation is the best food,” Frankenheim says. “We won’t mind at all sitting with others. My husband and I take it as our private table. There’s no difference in what you are being served.”

The big oval communal table, which sits in the middle of Pasqual, is always set with fresh flowers and a small sculpture by its chef and owner Katherine Kagel, who brought in the oak table 32 years ago. Even in the wide-open spaces of the West, the table has proven its communal magic.

“Of course there are some who bury themselves in newspaper or books, like ducks dipping in the water,” Kagel says. “But you always have travelers from all over the world having wonderful conversations.”

E-mail: hg2284@columbia.edu