A new loneliness cure: Apps that match you with strangers for a meal

SAN FRANCISCO – A sticker on a wall in Lisbon caught Katya Gratcheva’s attention last fall: “No dating or networking. Just breakfast.”

It led the married 52-year-old, tired of the transactional networking she encountered at home in Washington, D.C., to download an app called “The Breakfast.” For a fee, it pairs strangers seeking deep conversation for morning meals in 17 cities worldwide.

Gratcheva, who is Russian, ultimately matched with a young Ukrainian woman whose willingness to discuss the conflict between their two countries felt transformational. “She was able to see a friend in me even though I represent the nation that bombed her country and killed her friends,” Gratcheva said.

Gratcheva estimates that she’s attended about 30 such breakfasts with strangers in the past nine months. She has lots of company: Apps that offer to connect strangers seeking platonic connections are having a moment. Although they share many features with dating apps, they bill themselves as tools for networking or community-building, not for finding romance, with many like Breakfast targeting isolated remote workers and digital nomads.

In July, the dating app Bumble, which also has modes for networking and friend-finding, completed its acquisition of Geneva, an app designed to help people make new friends to spend time with offline. Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said on an earnings call this month that fostering platonic bonds is core to the company’s future business. “What we are hearing from our young users is that they are feeling lonely and disconnected,” she said.

Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Timeleft, an app that arranges Wednesday night dinners for six-person groups in 170 cities across 37 countries, says fatigue with dating apps is driving people toward in-person, friends-only meetups. “We can see that people are craving something that is not a dating app,” she said.

These services are proliferating at a time when loneliness is common and city dwellers report feeling detached from their local communities. According to a February survey from Gallup, 1 in 5 workers experiences loneliness. Fully remote workers are more likely to feel lonely (25%), the survey found, compared to those who work fully on-site (16%) and hybrid employees (21%).

A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that urban residents worldwide are less likely to feel they have local connections. Forty-nine percent of city dwellers reported feeling close to people in their local community, compared to 55% of those in the suburbs and 58% of people in rural areas who report feeling that way.

Raymond Ou is one of those city dwellers who’s had a hard time making friends. The 41-year-old used to attend tech events to meet people, but since he became a broadcast producer at a local television station whose workday starts at 7 p.m., his evenings are no longer free for happy hours or mixers. “I’ve sacrificed my social life for this job,” Ou said over tofu and veggies at a Burmese restaurant in downtown San Francisco, adding that though sacrifice was worth it, he’d still like more friends, especially those with availability during the day.

Ou signed up for the Creative Lunch Club app after seeing an ad on Instagram that promised to connect people in similar industries. In his first three months as a member, he paid $11 to be matched with two others for a small group lunch. On the day of the meeting, one of those Ou was due to meet canceled citing a work emergency – and the other turned out to be this Washington Post reporter.

Ou, who also works as a documentary filmmaker, said he wanted to try the Creative Lunch Club because it offered a space separate from the tech scene, which is ubiquitous in San Francisco. “It’s providing opportunities for different people we want to meet,” Ou said.

Ou said he usually eats lunch alone, making him part of a pattern that spurred Klaus Heller, the founder of Creative Lunch Club, to start the app. “I was thinking this could be a good time of the day … to meet other people or to be used better,” Heller said in a phone interview.

Heller, a freelance social media marketer in Vienna, also had a hunch that people in creative industries would find a lot to connect on. That was true for me and Ou.

Having spent much of my 20s working nights in journalism, I was able to tell Ou that I knew intimately how an unorthodox work schedule can make it hard to have a social life. We also spoke about the challenges of convincing sources to confide in journalists, how we go about cultivating trust with people we’ve just barely met – and bonded over our love of the Japanese clothing brand, Sou Sou. Meeting Ou was enjoyable, but at times I found myself thinking that a larger group would have helped round out the conversation.

Kasley Killam, a social scientist and author of “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier and Happier,” estimated in a phone interview that there are now hundreds of apps trying to address the loneliness epidemic by helping people connect with others – just about every week, she hears about a new one. It’s easy to meet new people while in college or your 20s, Killam said, “but what if you move to a new city or go through a breakup? A lot of people struggle for where to turn for that.”

Damian Jacobs, a 44-year-old lawyer, faced that conundrum after a recent move from Hong Kong to San Francisco. His wife and children are still thousands of miles away, visiting occasionally as the family finalizes its plans to relocate.

Jacobs tried taking himself out to bars and restaurants and striking up conversations with strangers – but that didn’t take. “People at my age tend to be married with kids. They’re not going out to bars on a Saturday night and mingling with strangers,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “I’ve found that places I’ve gone to, folks are much younger than I am, hanging out with their friends.”

Things felt very different at his first dinner arranged via Timeleft. “Everybody at the table is there to meet strangers,” he said. Jacobs paid $25 to access a month of meetups, which combine a different group each week.

After each dinner, Timeleft picks a place for the group to move on to for an optional after-party. At the dinner Jacobs attended in San Francisco’s Japantown, his dining partners, including this reporter, chose a nearby karaoke bar instead. “If you told me I would’ve ended up at a karaoke bar afterward, I would’ve laughed you out of the room,” said Jacobs, who isn’t normally a fan of the art.

Still, he got up on the stage and mouthed the words to “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers with the rest of his dinner-mates, later calling the performance “a testament to the power of peer pressure.”

He’s not sure if he’ll see that group again. But he has a three-month subscription to Timeleft and will be going for another dinner with a new group soon.