Dinner with strangers and killing off the local

Credit: Club Storiboard Instagram

Two years ago, I worked in a small refurbished gastropub in West London called The Eagle, where a waning number of rosacead regulars drank throughout their working day, as they ostensibly had for centuries.

Every night at 11pm closing, after I sheepishly called last orders, this band of brothers loudly pronounced the death of the local – a forgotten paradise where citizens reigned supreme and chips only ever came once-cooked. 

My friends, like me mostly London transplants in their 20s, also mourn the loss of consistent community in the city. But, rather than hole up in local pubs, young professionals are being encouraged to meet people further afield, by ads promoting dinner with strangers.

Apps launched last year like Timeleft and Storiboard, present the supper club as a triumphantly middle-class cure for the city’s loneliness epidemic. Through targeted Instagram ads that I try not to take too personally, they promise connection for lonely Londoners.

Dinners work under a simple premise: in a city of nearly nine million people, there are thousands of lifelong friends who you will likely never meet. These apps promise to help you meet them by matching like-minded strangers through a “personality algorithm” – a few questions about your music taste and political beliefs.    

Pressured by my algorithm and the sorry selection of yellow label dinners in Sainsbury’s, last night I got on the 38 bus from Islington to a restaurant in Piccadilly to dine with four other lonelies. I put my backpack on the aisle seat so no one would sit next to me.

London is a lonely city. Last year, the Belonging Forum reported that 35 per cent of Londoners are sometimes or often lonely, seven per cent higher than the national average. Young people aged 16-24 are the loneliest age group.

Dinner clubs like mine claim to “reshape the way we connect”, advertising that anyone from anywhere could show up at your table in a beige, low-light restaurant in St. James’s where the cheapest dish, a palm-sized bowl of orange cauliflower, costs £9.50.

When I arrive, three others are seated: Walden, a technician from Kuwait, Ganesh, a consultant from Rochester, and Edgar, an engineer from Mumbai. An aspiring Polish actress named Lynn arrives soon after.

We exchange nervous anecdotes about the difficulty making new friends as an adult.  

“London is a transient city,” Edgar says. “In Mumbai, building community is much easier.”

Walden has struggled since moving to the UK during the pandemic. Halfway, he invites us all on a trip to Portugal in May, promising “£450 all in”. We stare at our water glasses.

Lynn is mostly quiet. She orders the cauliflower and nothing else.

Ganesh has been to one of these dinners before, he had fun but hasn’t stayed in contact with anyone. He says he rarely speaks to his neighbours and finds having dinner with strangers easier because he never has to see us again. I try not to take that too personally either.

But therein lies both the pull and fundamental problem with these supper clubs: if it doesn’t work out, there’s always another dinner. They sideline real, consistent commitment to local community, which is always time-consuming and often hard work, by promising easy, imaginary friendships on the unmoving horizon.

Friendships are not built overnight, in clean, granite restaurants, but forged in the fires of necessity and maybe hundreds of hours spent mutilating cardboard coasters in sticky-tabled bars. But the pub is no longer where we go to meet our neighbours – the people that might lend us a hoover or feed our fish when we’re away. Last year, London lost more than one pub a week. The local is dying, and dinner clubs are moving us on far too quickly.

As our conversation grinds, I think of other dinners happening across the city. Knowing London’s vast population, it’s hard to be satisfied with my hodgepodge table of five. Chances are there is someone “better” than Edgar sat opposite me, at another less painful dinner in SoHo. I think about trading my table for four improved strangers by answering my questionnaire differently next time. Would I have met my next best friend already if I liked country music just a little bit more?

Walden brings up Portugal again and Lynn asks for the bill. I commit to playing Toby Keith on the bus ride home.

Dinner with strangers instructs us to trade depth for breadth. With nine million hypothetical friends to search through, it makes little sense to limit ourselves to the regulars in our locals – we should be looking for more, newer and better. In the face of this gigantic search, both The Red Lion and my table of five don’t stand a chance.

My dinner ends and we all exchange Instagram handles. We promise to think about Portugal.

I get off the bus and see the same pub I pass every day at the end of my street. I stick my head in, then turn and walk home. I bet The Coach & Horses has a better crowd.