Friend-making platform matches Seattleites with strangers for dinner

Inside a Ballard Japanese restaurant last month, I had dinner with five complete strangers. I’d shown up alone, and nervously, but after a server guided me to our table, I was enthusiastically greeted like I was an old friend. 

In fact, the six of us 一 20-somethings who’d signed up for this mystery dinner through the meetup app Timeleft 一 hadn’t even seen photos of each other. As we concentrated on learning new names and followed emerging conversation threads, dozens of other Timeleft groups, in Seattle and beyond, were likely having similar experiences. 

Timeleft operates in over 60 countries, using a short personality quiz to match strangers together for dinner every Wednesday. Seattle’s dinners are hosted in three city regions between Magnolia, Capitol Hill and Ballard, with a $16 sign-up fee. They’ve drawn new transplants and longtime locals looking for face-to-face connection in an era of pervasive screen time — or just a social night out experiencing the city’s food scene. 

French entrepreneur Maxime Barbier originally launched Timeleft in 2020 as an app that allowed users to make and share bucket lists about their “Timeleft” on Earth. It went through several iterations before evolving into its current form, matching strangers for dinner, which exploded in popularity this year. Since January, it’s jumped from operating in two cities to 275, in countries from Peru to South Korea. The U.S. is Timeleft’s largest market, constituting about 55% of its sales.

Timeleft isn’t the only friend-making tool taking off. From Wyzr Friends, an app for people ages 40-plus that arrived in Seattle this March to Geneva, an app for finding “your people” that Bumble acquired this summer, platforms connecting strangers platonically seem to only be getting more popular. 

They’re gaining traction in a time when loneliness is commonplace. In an early 2024 poll from the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of adults said they experience loneliness at least once a week, with higher rates among young adults aged 18-34 and single people. Remote workers and those living in urban settings also tend to experience more feelings of loneliness or disconnection than those working in-person and suburban or rural residents. 

Barbier was struck by how the “super simple” concept of bringing strangers together for a meal has taken off.

“I think what we are missing the most is just to have human, offline interaction,” he said. That need “is literally everywhere in the world.” 

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Dining with strangers: the Timeleft experience

To sign up for a Wednesday evening dinner in September, I took a 10-minute Timeleft personality quiz, which asked about my self-motivation, creativity and spirituality, among other questions. The algorithm aims to match dinner guests who may answer similarly to some questions (“Do you like to talk about politics?” for example) but tries to create mixed groups in other ways, such as balancing the number of self-identified introverts and extroverts.

After submitting the quiz, my computer screen confirmed that I’d be matched with a dinner group in my chosen part of Seattle. The details, including the restaurant, would arrive Wednesday morning. I found this slightly nerve-wracking 一 I’m not very spontaneous, as I told the personality quiz 一 but also sort of fun, like a surprise party.

The eventual update gave just a few details about my tablemates: our professional fields (health care, retail, etc.), nationalities (American, Armenian and Iranian) and zodiac signs. 

The limited information made me nervous when I arrived alone at Moshi Moshi Sushi & Izakaya, unsure of who I was even looking for. But once a server helped me find the table of friendly faces, the get-to-know-you conversations that ensued felt natural 一 like any impromptu connection that sparks when you hit it off with someone at a party or in a bar. 

Perhaps because “North Seattle” was the obvious thing we had in common, we talked about our favorite spots (such as the Ballard Farmers Market, which one person described as his “place of worship”) and random local happenings (remember when a Meridian Park gathering to eat garlic bread went viral on TikTok?). A few folks bonded over their similar jobs in environmental consulting, and one offered to connect me to his friend, who’s also a journalist. 

Timeleft provides plenty of structure, like suggested conversation prompts on our phone screens, an after-party location (in our case, a nearby bar) and a way to stay in touch with other dinner guests through the app. While such nudges could be useful, my group seemed to prefer to forget about the app and let things unfold. Conversations took off organically, we unanimously opted for Salt & Straw instead of a bar after dinner and, at the end of the night, someone passed around their phone to create an Instagram group chat to stay connected . 

The experience reminded me of a complaint my roommate, who moved to Seattle from the East Coast, has shared. In places like New York City and Boston, she’s ranted on a few occasions, it was easy to go alone to bars and restaurants and strike up conversations with new people. But in Seattle, it seems like people stick with their own groups when going out, making her solo outings less fun. 

Timeleft seemed to create that feeling of spontaneous connection, albeit with more structure. I’m not sure how much the notorious “Seattle Freeze” plays into experiences like my roommate’s. After all, there’s demand for Timeleft in lots of other cities, too. But for those of us who, for whatever reason, aren’t having as many delightful, chance encounters with warm strangers as we’d like, Timeleft might be the nudge we need to experience some of that magic. 

Why are Seattleites trying it? 

Timeleft attracts all sorts of folks looking for connection, Barbier told me on Zoom: people who are new to town, single people open to finding love (though the app wasn’t designed for dating) and foodies excited to socialize while trying new restaurants, for example. 

For some, the structure it provides is a big plus, especially in a period when remote work, social media and dating apps keep many of us glued to devices. 

Thirty-five-year-old Eva Hansen, of Kenmore, noticed the impacts of pandemic-spurred social isolation and a remote job catching up to her in recent years. Although lockdown measures had lifted, Hansen felt that people didn’t seem to be going out as much and she felt stuck in a sense of complacency, “settled into sweatpants and hanging out at home.” 

Noticing a negative impact on her mental health 一 “a blue, sort of ‘Groundhog Day’ feeling” 一 she started pushing herself to get back out there.

In July, she signed up for Timeleft’s monthly subscription (going for $26 per month), thinking the financial investment would motivate her to stick with it. It’s like committing to a gym membership, Hansen said, but for social wellness. 

She’s made a few budding friendships and, while some dinners are more fun than others, Hansen feels the overall experience has improved her mental health.

“I just think that there’s so much benefit to getting out of your comfortable social circle,” she said. “It’s great to just meet people from all different backgrounds and experiences and careers.” 

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Nicole Piggott, a 32-year-old art therapist who met Hansen through Timeleft, gave the friend-making platform a shot as part of her 2024 goal to meet more people. She’s lived in Seattle for a decade, but many of her friends have recently married or had kids, making them less available for weeknight outings. 

After going to just one Timeleft dinner, she’s joined a kickball team with a woman she met there and stayed in touch with several others. The group is now considering having a reunion dinner. 

Piggott likes that Timeleft’s focus is platonic connections, though it could lead to romantic matches, too. 

While Timeleft isn’t geared toward finding love, founder Barbier and some users see it as an antidote to the modern dilemmas posed by dating apps 一 which, for some, have become the default way to meet new people. 

On dating apps, users are often set up to make superficial decisions based on physical appearance, Barbier said, and to spend lots of time online creating profiles, swiping, messaging people and planning dates. 

With Timeleft, there’s no filtering by height or job title, and there are few steps between signing up and going to dinner. With the emphasis on the in-person gatherings themselves, it was designed to be “a shortcut” to human connection, Barbier said. 

“You click, you meet … [there’s] nothing in between.”