Do you enjoy the idea of the dining deals from sites like GroupOn but never get them since you don't have anyone to eat with? Are you sick and tired of eating dinner alone in front of your computer while your cat gives you concerned looks from his perch on your over-stuffed bookshelf? There's a website for that.
Founded in Chicago last year and recently expanded to New York, GrubWith.Us, offers dining deals nearly daily at restaurants across town (we're talking places like The Tea Set and Cho Cho San, not Per Se or Le Bernardin). The catch is that you have to eat your multi-course dinner at communal tables with complete strangers—you must come by yourself.
Daishin Sugano and Eddy Lu founded the site after moving to Chicago to open a cream puff franchise (really) and quickly finding themselves lonely and unable to make new friends.
"It's the most awkward thing," Sugano told the Chicago Tribune. "For women, I'm better off saying, 'You're really pretty; let's go out.' That's so much easier than—particularly with men, since I'm straight—saying, 'I think you're kind of cool. I think we can connect. Let's hang out.' It's just really weird."So in order to meet more people in real life they did what everyone seems to do these days...they started a website. And it has done well enough they've spread out to San Francisco and New York with DC and LA on the way.
The Post recently went to one of the dinners here and the people seemed to have had a good enough time (the conversation reportedly ranged from stories involving Champagne-swilling pet wolves and an explanation of Shinobi Ninja). But personally we find the idea a little scary. After all, while sitting down to dinner with strangers sounds nice it is also the way that many, many, many murder mysteries begin:
