Savor Scout › What to eat › Where to eat when catching up with a friend
Where to eat when catching up with a friend
Catching up with a friend you haven't seen in a while is about the conversation. The restaurant should be easy, relaxed and in no hurry to get rid of you.
Search “relaxed, quiet, good for conversation, small plates” →
The best catch-up spots let you linger: a relaxed bistro, a café that turns into a wine bar, a tapas or mezze place where you keep ordering small plates. Somewhere with a two-hour table limit or a queue outside works against you.
Small plates are well suited to catching up. You order a few things, talk, order a few more, and the meal stretches naturally as long as the conversation does.
If the meal is mostly an excuse to talk, a coffee shop or a long walk to a bakery can be better than a restaurant. Choose the format that suits the time you have.
What makes a good place to catch up:
- Relaxed service — No pressure to leave.
- Quiet enough to talk — Low music, soft room.
- Small plates — Order as you go.
- Comfortable seats — You'll be there a while.
- Easy for both of you to reach — A middle point.
Try this search
Savor Scout takes a sentence rather than a category, so the criteria above can go straight into the box. For this, something like “relaxed, quiet, good for conversation, small plates” works — it reads menus and reviews for those specific things and comes back with one place and the reasons it picked it.
Search “relaxed, quiet, good for conversation, small plates” →
What usually goes wrong
Loud bars, restaurants with table time limits, places with long queues and anywhere so trendy you'll spend the evening waiting.
If you're deciding as a group
If it's a group reunion, book a big table somewhere with shared plates and a set menu so nobody has to organise the bill.
What to eat
Worth considering here: Tapas, Mezze, Coffee, Izakaya, brunch.
Related
- Where to find a quiet restaurant
- Where to take friends visiting from out of town
- Where to eat when you're eating alone