Why I’d never dine out on Valentine’s Day – even as a food writer

Overpriced set menus, hushed dining rooms and romance by spreadsheet – Valentine’s Day can make even great restaurants feel strangely unromantic. Food writer Hannah Twiggs makes the case for opting out

I love Valentine’s Day. This is important because any criticism of how people choose to spend 14 February risks sounding like bitterness. None of that here. I am unapologetically pro-romance, aggressively pro-grand gestures and entirely supportive of anything involving good wine and unnecessary quantities of butter.

I just would never, ever dine out on Valentine’s Day.

This is not an anti-restaurant stance. Restaurants are one of life’s great pleasures. I adore them. I have built a career and a relationship around them. I will happily trek across London in the p***ing rain for a new trattoria.

For many couples, they are the backdrop to courtship. The nine-to-fivers treat meals out as punctuation marks in structured weeks – Friday nights, birthdays, celebrations. There is something genuinely romantic in saving the occasion for when it actually feels like one.

For parents, the equation is different. Staying home may not be remotely restful if you share your space with small children. For them, eating out is an escape, quiet, adult time. And then some have saved up for this one evening for months and booked somewhere meaningful. That too is romance. Thoughtfulness always is.

But Valentine’s Day transforms even the best restaurants into something faintly unsettling.

Set menus of oysters, steak and chocolate fondant – the holy trinity of enforced seduction – replace spontaneity. Themed cocktails appear. So does surge pricing dressed up as unmissable deals, because nothing says “I love you” like a bargain that isn’t one. None of this is irrational. Restaurants are managing demand on one of the busiest nights of the year. Yet as a diner, the effect can feel oddly joyless. You are not just going out for dinner; you are participating in a mass cultural ritual with prix fixe pricing. Romance, by spreadsheet. A finance bro might swoon.

Dining rooms take on a peculiar intensity: tables of couples sitting slightly too upright, conversations slightly too careful, everyone acutely aware that this is supposed to be A Special Night. The noise is either too loud to swap stories about your day, or so unnervingly quiet that every conversational lull feels amplified. The service, too, is either slow enough to briefly confront the existential horror that there’s nothing left to say after 20 years, or brisk enough that you feel as though you’ve been swept onto a romantic conveyor belt, another couple efficiently processed by the love factory. Someone, somewhere, is breaking up over burrata.

‘The entire evening feels scripted and structured by someone else’s idea of romance. And love, in the end, has very little to do with choreography’ (Getty/iStock)

The entire evening feels scripted and structured by someone else’s idea of romance. And love, in the end, has very little to do with choreography.

Which is why I prefer to opt out.

My partner and I are both food writers and we spend an inordinate amount of our lives eating out. Tiny violins, I know. For us, staying in is the real luxury, and there is often very little theatre to it. There is as much romance in beans on toast, soup and roast chicken as there is in steak, carbonara twirled in a pecorino wheel or some architecturally unstable pink dessert.

Sometimes our evenings are spent collapsed in front of brain-rot television with a bottle of wine cooling in the fridge. Other times, we lean into ceremony – table laid, candles lit, record player murmuring away. Both feel romantic in their own way.

But the real dirty dancing happens in the kitchen.

I am the sous chef to my partner’s chaotic head chef, and we are both the pot washers. I do the prep – it pains me to watch him butcher an onion – and the sides, having discovered his definition of “salad” was a bag of uncooked spinach. He cooks and creates a heroic quantity of mess, I clean and somewhere in between we spend hours talking about, well, nothing.

It is these evenings I look forward to the most. Not the three-Michelin-star tasting menu. Not the hip new sushi counter. Not the trattoria in the rain.

No, romance does not live in choreography. It lives in spontaneity. Not in eye-watering bills that seem like grand gestures, but in the small, ordinary things you do for one another – taking care of dinner, handing over a glass of wine when they get in, talking about nothing in particular.

The most romantic evenings are rarely those most aggressively labelled as such. They are simply the ones that feel like your own.