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Cornell Researchers Show There Are “Skinny Tables” in Restaurants

Just as you always suspected: It’s not your eating habits that make you fat, it’s where you sit when you go out to dinner.

By the door? By the bar? WHICH IS IT???!!

Research out of Cornell University suggests that diners order differently depending on where in a restaurant they’re seated.

Seated by a window or in high light, people ordered healthier foods.

Seated far from the front door, they avoided salads and were 73 percent more likely to eat dessert.

The closer they sat to the bar, the more they drank. As in, within two tables of the bar: an average of three more beers or mixed drinks per four-top than people seated farther away.

Sit by the TV and you’ll order more fried food, they found. Sit at a high bar table and you’ll order more salads and fewer desserts.

Brian Wansink at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab and author of the book that holds these findings, Slim by Design, isn’t willing yet to be too prescriptive about what this all means. Until he is—I’m holding out for that high table by the window, across the room from the TV.

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Kathryn Robinson
Kathryn Robinson
Senior Writer Seattle native Kathryn Robinson, award-winning restaurant critic and senior writer at Seattle Met, has been anonymously reviewing restaurants for over 30 years—first as editor of the Best Places guidebook series, then as staff critic at Seattle Weekly and contributing critic at The Seattle Times and Seattle magazine.  Midcareer she spent a year-long sabbatical studying comparative religion as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University where she had been an undergrad 10 years earlier, gaining a knowledge base she now calls upon for her monthly “Back Fence” column on our collective urban existence and the meaning it holds for our personal lives. In her off hours she is a partner and a parent—which means she has no off hours.