A recently opened restaurant in Amsterdam addressed the long-standing stigma of dining out solo by offering only tables made for one.

At Eenmaal (which means "one time" in English), diners flying solo ate in comfortable silence, far from the pity-filled gaze of fellow diners and servers. There was no clearing of excess tableware, or the need to mutter "table for one," with a sheepish grin.

Instead, the pop-up restaurant was built and designed to break the taboo of eating out alone - particularly in fine dining restaurants.

While it's not uncommon to eat alone at fast-food or casual eateries, Eenmaal proposed a four-course dinner for guests over two days at the end of June, where diners contemplated their plates, such as white asparagus with chamomile butter, in voluntary solitude.

Meanwhile, dining solo is a reality for business travelers who traipse the world, solo leisure travelers and lone wolves with gourmand palates.

But the advent of free wifi has turned smartphones and tablets into dinner companions and is giving more diners the courage to dine alone.

A website called Invite for a Bite was also developed to help solo female travelers find a dinner companion, a culturally sensitive topic that inspired the sarcastic Gawker article, "If Women Stop Eating Alone, Who Will We Pity in Restaurants?"

In it, single female diners are likened to the high-powered Liz Lemons of the world, in reference to the neurotic, workaholic career women portrayed by Tina Fey on the NBC show "30 Rock."

And Bon Appetit magazine's asked travel writers to provide helpful tips on how to dine solo, whose advice ranged from avoiding date-night eateries, eating at the bar, and just sitting alone with your thoughts, and thinking about random things like "Who is the Jimi Hendrix of the tuba?"