This happens to me way too often.
A lot of times, I will go to restaurants alone. Usually it is because I have nobody to go with and want to get out of the house. So I will go to a restaurant and do homework or the like.
The first thing I hate is that I always seem to get "just one?" or something similar when I go someplace sitdown.
A really bad experience happened recently. I went to a 50's themed diner for the first time. It was decorated with a whole lot of "kitsch" stuff, and I sat down and spent a lot of time looking around and taking everything in. Apparently I looked very odd, because when the waitress came over, she said with concern "are you ok? with this really frightened look on her face.
Um, yes?
If I am alone, I normally spend about 10 minutes looking at a menu. I just read everything.
At this restaurant, they had a handout going over the history of the restaurant. I was reading that when the waitress came back. She asked me if this was my first time. I said yes, and then she reached over, took out the menus and put them in front of me, and said "These are the actual menus, that is just a handout". I wanted to explain that I knew that, and was just reading the silly handout, but she was gone. I noticed when she got back behind the counter she started talking to other workers and gesturing towards me.
So anyways, I ordered, did my homework, and ate my food.
I paid with credit card. When I got the check back, under TIP I wrote "Treat your customers with respect."
_________________
I am indeed a "proud aspie".
There are 10 kinds of people in the world- Those that understand binary, and those who don't.