Timeleft Review

• 11 September 2024

Today I went to a dinner hosted by Timeleft in Seattle. Their tagline is "Dinner with Strangers", and it's exactly that: on a particular night you're told a restaurant to show up to at a designated time, where you'll meet and eat dinner with a curated group of strangers. The rest is up to you!

The app charges a $16 "finder's fee" for signup, and you pay for the dinner normally.

The people at my dinner were wonderful. Everyone was sociable and the conversation flowed smoothly, both when we were conversing organically and when used the app's list of recommended get-to-know-you questions^[1]. My dinner partners seemed genuinely interested in what everyone else had to say, asked incisive followup questions, and shared the space.

The quality of people far exceeded my expectations. Here are some ideas why it works:

• Timeleft appeared to match us by age -- we were all within 1-2 years of each other
• Of 6 attendees, 4 of us worked in software at tech companies, and 1 of the remaining 2 had a conventional corporate job as well. Combined with age, this meant we were all at fairly similar places in life.
• Everyone in attendance had self-selected as people who found the idea of dinner with strangers enticing, and also those who had the agency to actually sign up and show up.^[2]
• The restaurant had a quiet ambience, which was conducive to conversation.

The app does have you fill out a survey with various questions like "How important is humour to you? 1-10" and "Do you consider yourself more of an author's film enthusiast, or a mainstream blockbuster lover?". Presumably they've figured out some way to use this information effectively. But how they use it is a black box -- do they attempt to match you with similar responses, or different? No clue.

Regardless of the reasons, it worked.

A few more details:

• Of my dinner party of six, three had attended a previous Timeleft dinner, and another (mostly distinct) three had recently moved to the city
• The food was passable -- I didn't expect it to be great, since a restaurant interested in partnering with Timeleft is likely struggling to otherwise attract patrons (at least on that night of the week).
• Timeleft explicitly markets itself as NOT a dating app, and none of the people I met appeared to be subverting that expectation.
• After the dinner, you can optionally go to an afterparty meetup which aggregates multiple Timeleft dinner parties. Everyone in our group went, joining the other parties at a bar about a 7-minute walk from our restaurant. I stayed there for about another hour and a half, feeling ready to head home at 10:30pm, about three and a half hours after arriving to the dinner. This part of the night was fine, but I much preferred the intimacy (and lower volume) of the main dinner.

Overall, I would enthusiastically recommend Timeleft, especially to anyone looking to make new friends. It seems remarkably effective for forming getting to know people quickly. I started to feel close to my dinner partners over the course of the night, and as I was leaving many people were exchanging contact information and seemed receptive to continued friendship.

As for me personally, I had a wonderful time and will certainly consider attending again in the future.

--

Update: I did end up attending a second TimeLeft dinner, and I did not vibe nearly as well with the other attendees this time around. There was one person at the dinner who I thought seemed quite interesting, and I wanted to just chat with him, but the dinner-table format means it's not feasible to have extended side conversations.

At the post-dinner afterparty I found a group that was a better fit for me than my dinner had been, but even there everyone was seated around a single table, making it hard to have one-on-one conversations. I guess that's a flaw of this format -- it's well designed to get bits and pieces of interactions with a large number of people, but you probably won't be able to connect deeply with anyone unless you manage to find small-group time with them at the afterparty or you set up time to meet up with them at a later date.

The food was even worse than the already so-so food of the first dinner, which was a bummer.

I still recommend trying TimeLeft, but my second experience introduces some important caveats, the biggest of which is: this is a high-variance experience very dependent on your dinnermates.

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