This month, a hundred odd acolytes of San Francisco nightlife and culture blogger Broke-Ass Stuart will descend upon a to-be-determined neighborhood in groups of five to six to dine with algorithmically-selected strangers. The BAS Dinner Club, which launches April 16, aims to help Brokelings make new friends now that everyone cool is being priced out or moving to Petaluma to have a baby and their own kiln.
“For people who have stuck around in the city long enough, their friend groups wax and wane,” said Stuart Schuffman, the writer and man-about-town known to one and all as Broke-Ass Stuart. “Also, as you get older, it's not as easy to make friends. This takes the pressure off of having to walk into a club or join a class to meet people. It can't hurt to spend an hour and a half with five new people.”
It’s a familiar premise. Digital platforms dedicated to making IRL friendships have been cropping up around the world, and San Francisco in particular. All users need to do is take a personality quiz, pay a curation fee, and agree to a date; the service matches them with like-minded people, picks the restaurant, and makes the reservation. (Not that Schuffman would know: He said he hadn’t heard of, or even investigated, the competition.) However, unlike companies such as 222 (hyper-GenZ), Timeleft (humiliation ritual), or RealRoots (basically an intensive college course on female connection) that are building their own social multiverses, the BAS Dinner Club is pulling from a narrower community and promises little more than a good time.
The personality quiz, while a daunting concept, is only a dozen questions long and largely practical: Any dietary restrictions or allergies? Age and gender?
Users must also select what price range they’re comfortable with, from fast casual, casual sitdown, or upscale dining. It does some mild prodding, but it’s light work compared to competitor 222’s 80-question psychological wringer. What is your friend group like? Do you want dinner to be playful, intellectual, or both? Do you want new perspectives, or shared values? Answer these, and you’re on your way to new broke-ass friends.
Diners will be matched into groups of five to six, and these different groups will eat at restaurants within the same neighborhood. After dinner, all the groups will meet at a bar to mingle with one another (and Schuffman, of course). To start, the dinner club will only host events on weeknights with the aim of bringing some energy to a typically slower night rather than inundating restaurants on a weekend.
In addition to hopefully making new friends, Schuffman hopes to make some money for his independent site, Broke-Ass Stuart. Schuffman, after paying a team of writers and editors, plus administrative and technical fees, pulls just $2,500 a month from the site he’s been running for more than 20 years. In addition to a Patreon, Schuffman is hoping to beef up Broke-Ass Stuart’s bottom line with the $16.99 curation fee that dinner club members will pay.
“It's a win-win-win. Small businesses win because they get traffic and they get people spending money. Readers and participants win because they get something unique and hopefully a great experience. I win so we can make some small revenue for Broke Ass Stuart and fucking stay alive,” he said. “At least, that’s the theory.”
Despite Schuffman having made a career of recommendations and city exploration, DNNR, a program by meetup platform River.io, will be crawling Google Maps for spots instead of consulting him. For now, he’s going to “let the service do what it does.”
Much of Broke-Ass Stuart’s brand has been centered around promoting underground scenes, DIY, and making friends at your local dive, an M.O. that seems at-odds with services designed to optimize the messiness and serendipity out of social situations. But Schuffman says he’s always relied on online platforms to foster community: “I've been doing Broke-Ass Stuart since MySpace, so I've been using digital tools to create community online and offline since 2004, 2005, whatever it is. It's native for me.”
Outsourcing the logistics to DNNR certainly helps his mission to keep his eyes away from the "tyrannical machine that lives in my pocket.” And maybe after dinner, you’ll get your screen time down and your face time up a little, too.
“I remember the time before we had little evil computers in our pockets and our purses all the time,” Schuffman said. “We would just fucking hang out, you know? People do that less and less so I think there's a real thirst for that.”
