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Business & Tech

New Food Networking Service Connects Locals Over Meals

Pizzeria DaMarco hosts first sold-out event for GrubWithUs in Bethesda.

Having a meal at a restaurant with a group of people who don’t know each other has the potential to be awkward. But for Christine Ngo it’s a fun opportunity to meet new people in the D.C. metropolitan area.

Ngo, who lives in Washington, D.C., is one of a growing number of people who use GrubWithUs, an online service which allows people eat a meal with strangers.

“It’s supposed to be a casual, not awkward, way to meet people,” GrubWithUs development director Sen Sugano said. “I was definitely a bit skeptical at first, but you meet the most interesting people and everyone is always just open. It’s really easy to talk to people and really fun. ”

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The company, which began in Aug. 2010 in Chicago, has spread to cities across the country, coming to Bethesda June 29 with their first meal at Pizzeria DaMarco on Woodmont Avenue. When the meal first went on the GrubWithUs website over a week before the event, it sold out in a couple of hours.

“We would like to do meals in Bethesda pretty frequently,” he said. “We want to be in every neighborhood and be accessible to everyone. A lot of users had voiced that we needed to be here so we planned the meal.”

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In the next few months GrubWithUs plans to host a meal at Jaleo as well as other restaurants in the Bethesda area.

While the company doesn’t offer a discount on the meal, they try to offer the best deal with most ranging from $20-$35. The price includes a three course meal, tax and gratuity, but not drinks. To avoid splitting the check at the restaurant, GrubWithUs has its users pay online.  

“We really like to partner with our restaurants and work with them,” Sugano said. “Right now we’re not about profit, it’s about user experience.”

Because everyone else at the table wants to meet new people, the meals tend not to be awkward, Ngo said.

“You know everyone else is open to hanging out or meeting up,” she said. “I’ve met so many people and connected with them afterwards. It’s so easy to talk to people over a meal.”

To continue communicating with the other users at her table after the meal was over, Ngo used the company website’s “meal conversation” where people can talk with one another individually or as a group. Because there’s only an hour or two during the meal, this is where Ngo said she usually gets to know the people she meets.

“This is what I’m foreseeing as the next step of our social networks,” Sugano said. “We’re using online techniques to meet a person in real life. It’s an old thing reinvented.”

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