Ask around in Brooklyn how somebody met their last three friends and you’ll get a park, a bakery after a 5K, a dinner at a stranger’s table, maybe a night at a club where the bouncer took their phone. You’ll hear about an app less often than you’d think. Some of that is a trend story and some of it is just people being tired. Federal time-use figures reported by Axios this summer put the average American’s daily socializing at about 35 minutes, down from 45 twenty years ago, and Match Group told investors in August that its paying users had dropped around 6 percent in a year. Those two numbers don’t prove much on their own. Go through a week of Brooklyn’s calendar, though, and you start to see where people went.
The places Brooklyn uses to meet people now tend to repeat on a fixed day: a run that leaves from one corner at one hour, a supper club with a monthly date, a phone-free night that happens weekly. Going back a second and third time is how a stranger becomes a friend, and these formats make going back easy.
On Wednesday Mornings, Two Groups Of Runners Head Out From Williamsburg
At seven o’clock on a Wednesday, Another Run Club gathers at Domino Square, runs up through Greenpoint to McCarren Park and ends at a bakery, where the actual talking starts. InsideHook set it up in October 2024. Tanner Garrity, who runs it, said they “wanted to make a wellness community of our own,” which is about as plain a reason as anyone gives.
Peak and Pace runs from Prospect Park and McCarren Park and finishes at a bar in Williamsburg. Owen Akhibi Herrera started it in July 2024 and describes it to Time Out as “a social club that just happens to run.” He’s also firm that “we’re not a dating run club,” though whether the members have read that memo is another matter. Strava’s year-end report for 2024 had running clubs on the app up 59 percent and found that one in five Gen Z users had met a date through a group activity. By the 2025 report the clubs had grown three and a half times over, and nearly half of Gen Z said they’d take a workout as a first date.
If You’re Slow, There’s A Club For That Too
Bushwick Runners, which Katelyn Phillips started, exists for people who would rather jog and chat than chase a time. Nobody gets left at the first corner.
On Wednesday Evenings, Strangers Sit Down To Dinner Together
Timeleft has been running Dinner with Strangers in New York on Wednesdays since March 2024. You answer a short questionnaire, the app puts you with a handful of other people, and you find out the restaurant that morning. Everyone pays for their own plate. The company says it isn’t a dating service. Fine, though nobody is checking what people do once the bill comes.
The homemade version is better known around here. Hannah Berman counted a run of young chefs hosting monthly supper clubs for Brooklyn Magazine, in Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg apartments, in brownstones, in a Greenpoint bar. Some figures from what she found:
- Heirloom Supper Club keeps tickets at about $65.
- that dinner thing sells seats by lottery, which co-founder Sierra Lai said they “modeled after sneaker drops”.
- Stay for Supper’s Lottie Gurvis calls herself “just a chef playing friendship cupid”.
Julian Tineo of Heirloom put the money side bluntly: “you should be able to have a great night out in New York for 50 or 60 bucks.” Anyone who has paid for drinks in Williamsburg lately will understand why the line got quoted.
On Saturday Mornings, Thousands Turn Up For A Free 5K
The Brooklyn Bridge Parkrun costs nothing, starts every Saturday, and drew more than 2,000 people in its first month, ages seven to eighty-something, by Time Out’s count. Afterward a good share of them walk over to Breads Bakery near Pier 1 still in their running clothes. Ben Roach, the run director, said that with the recent running boom “our ethos is to be open to all,” and walkers are counted in the results. For someone who has never joined anything, a free run with no sign-up committee is about the easiest first step available in the borough.
On Weeknights And Weekends, Some Rooms Take Your Phone At The Door
One weeknight gathering in a Brooklyn brownstone asks guests to drop their phones into a metal colander before they come in. Dan Fox hosts it in his apartment, and when Brooklyn Today sat in this April, more than a dozen people spent two hours reading, drawing and talking with their screens in the colander. It is a small thing, a kitchen bowl, and that’s partly why people go.
The clubs have picked up the idea at a louder volume. Green Room opened on Morgan Avenue in East Williamsburg last November with free phone lockers and a strict no-photo policy, and Signal and Refuge keep phones off their dance floors too. The teenagers got there first, mind you. Logan Lane started the Luddite Club in 2022 as a senior at Edward R. Murrow High School, meeting at the Central Library on Grand Army Plaza and in Prospect Park with a few flip phones between them, because she was “fed up with the over-saturation” of a social life run through a screen.
Taking the phone away at the door works because it applies to the whole room at once. Nobody has to be the first person to put theirs down.
Why This Took Off When It Did
Part of it is the social climate of the moment, the general mood of how welcome people feel in a group, which Vivek Murthy was worrying about out loud in his 2023 advisory on loneliness. “There’s really no substitute for in-person interaction,” he said then. Gallup found a year later that one American adult in five had felt lonely for much of the previous day. You can argue about how much weight to put on a survey, though most people in their twenties and thirties in New York won’t need convincing.
The rest is logistics. A club that meets on Wednesdays at seven removes the hardest step in adult friendship, which is somebody having to text first and pick a date. If walking into a group of strangers is the hard part for you, the guide to how avoidance rather than screen time feeds social anxiety explains why the second visit counts more than the first one going well.
Before You Go, A Few Practical Things
Pick something weekly over something monthly, since familiar faces come round sooner. Supper club lists fill quickly, so get on the mailing list before you think you need it. Arrive five minutes early, while people are still standing about. And if you’re weighing up where to live, it pays to count how many of these meet within walking distance; the guide to choosing a Boston neighborhood asks that kind of question about another city, and the singles guide to Philadelphia covers the version for Philly.
