Once upon a time I designed an app that would make it easier for you to meet up for dinner with friends and friendly strangers. Like a cross between a platonic dating app, a restaurant booking app, and Meetup.

It was 2014. I’d just moved to the Bay Area, and I was in a UX bootcamp. The assignment was to make it easier to book a restaurant reservation but that’s not as big of a problem as having people to go out to eat with. So I pivoted the assignment to focus on this instead:

👍🏾 Easier way to book restaurant reservations AND

🤗 Easier way to organize a group of friends to go out to eat AND

😍 Easier way to make new friends who enjoy dining out

40 hours of market research, user interviews, concepting, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing later, I’d created an app concept called Family Style. Here’s how it worked:

What happened next, and friendship-n-dining apps you can use today

I didn't follow through on trying to build it out into a real app, because I didn't want to be an app founder, get VC, hire employees etc, but it was a fulfilling way to take an internal wish and make it feel more tangible.

And then ten years went by and I did a bunch of other things, including researching and writing a book about making adult friendship easier overall. It’s called We Should Get Together.

So imagine my surprise when, last week, a friend and colleague mentioned that she’s excited to try out a new app that matches her up to go eat dinner with strangers. Like what?! It’s called Time Left and it’s currently available in 170 cities across 37 countries. Neither she nor I have tried it yet, but I’ll report back when we do. A part of me has been waiting ten years for something like this to exist. :)

Another app called The Breakfast will match you for breakfast with a different stranger every dang day. An extrovert’s dream come true?

The app EatWith offers all kinds of food-based gatherings: classes, supper clubs, standalone dinners — hosted in homes around the world.

I’ve tried a simpler version of this, that doesn’t require downloading a bunch of different apps: Meetup. Just search for meetups in your area that get people together to go try new restaurants together. The benefit of this approach is that you’ll get to keep seeing the same group of people, and the meetup organizer will do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to choosing a restaurant and sending invitations around.

If you’re not ready to commit to a meetup, or even an entire meal, you can try Tea with Strangers.

Have you tried something any eating-with-strangers adventures before? if not, would you? Tell me about it!

Cheers,
Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships

What to read next

• Want to have an adults-only dinner party or night out? Here’s how to tell your friend not to bring their kid

• Joining an existing conversation or friend group? Blend in without making it awkward

• It’s like a dinner party on steroids: Go make friends at an adult summer camp