Services are trying to help isolated remote workers and others find offline friends. 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 DC, 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 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 The Breakfast targeting isolated remote workers and digital nomads ..
