The painting was first displayed on Valentine's Day 1927 at the opening of Hopper's second solo show, at the Rehn Galleries in New York City.

But the latter possibility seems unlikely, for there is a small empty plate on the table, in front of her cup and saucer, suggesting that she may have eaten a snack and been sitting at this spot for some time.

[7] Art critic Ivo Kranzfelder compares the subject matter of this painting (a young woman nursing a drink alone in a restaurant) to Édouard Manet's The Plum and Edgar Degas's L'Absinthe.

[8] The presence of a chairback in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas suggests that the viewer is sitting at a nearby table, from which vantage-point a stranger might be able to glance, uninvited, upon the woman.

In an innovative twist, Hopper made the woman's legs the brightest spot in the painting, thereby "turning her into an object of desire" and "making the viewer a voyeur.

Hopper would make the crossed legs of a female subject the brightest spot on an otherwise dark canvas in a number of later paintings, including Compartment C, Car 293 (1938) and Hotel Lobby (1943).

"[4] Troyen continues on, however, to note a number of features which would have made the restaurant identifiable to a New Yorker of the 1920s: "They were clean, efficient, well-lit and—typically furnished with round Carrera marble tables and solid oak chairs like those shown here—genteel.

By the time Hopper painted his picture, automats had begun to be promoted as safe and proper places for the working woman to dine alone.

Thus, "the figure’s quiet, contemplative air," which is "out of step with the city’s energy, its pace and its mechanized rhythm,"[4] is made even more noteworthy by the particularly busy spot in which she has chosen to sit.

Sometimes, as in Railroad Sunset (1929), Nighthawks (1942) and Office in a Small City (1953), it is still possible to see details of the scene beyond even after Hopper has guided the viewer's gaze through two panes of glass.

Another favourite technique—used, for example, in Conference at Night (1949)—is to use bright light, flooding in from the exterior at a sharp angle from the sun or from an unseen streetlight, to illuminate a few mundane details within inches of the far side of the window, thereby throwing the deeper reaches of the view into shadow.