FAST FRIENDS

Jared Nissim was tired of eating alone in Manhattan, so he founded a club for people like him and watched it take the US by storm. We've had speed dating - now 'speed friending' is coming our way. Aisling Ryan reports.

New York may have been voted the most polite city in the world recently, for its frequent use of "please and thank you", but when you think of the Big Apple, the image of complete strangers chatting over lunch does not easily spring to mind. It did though, for Jared Nissim, founder of the Lunch Club, who has lunched with several thousand strangers in the city in the past few years. The Lunch Club, which has grown from a small-scale effort to get to know the community in New York's East Village, to a network of more than 10,000 members, is a club for people to meet and make friends. Its name belies the range of activities on offer, which include yoga, pizza-making, pub quizzes, walking tours, horse-racing and . . . well, lunch.

The concept, that "eating alone is boring", has been embraced coast to coast in the United States with Lunch Club chapters springing up in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In April this year, the London chapter opened with a "hectic but fun" gathering of more than 100 people sharing dim sum in Covent Garden.

The first Irish Lunch Club event is set to take place in Dublin's Odessa Club next Saturday at 1pm.

Now a full-time project for Nissim, the Lunch Club has expanded far beyond his intentions in 2001, when he put an advert on the internet, asking if other East Villagers working from home were keen to meet up for a mid-day break. "I had been working as a technical writer for a couple of years and spending all day by myself, going to lunch by myself. After a long time doing that, I had an epiphany: "Eating alone is boring!" So I put an ad on the Craig's List website, looking for complete and utter strangers to come and meet me for lunch. I wasn't trying to start a club or create an organisation. I just wanted to meet some people."

At the time, Nissim says he was determined not to walk more than two or three blocks from his apartment. Little did he know then, that his first two lunch companions would multiply into thousands, that interests would develop beyond the culinary, and that he would find himself, almost five years later, developing Lunch Club chapters across the globe.

Nissim concedes that timing (the club was formed in the aftermath of 9/11) may have had a bearing on the phenomenal reaction to the club. "I think there were a lot of seeds planted, 'let's be peaceful and improve the world around us', kind of stuff."

He also feels that 9/11 gave him a personal incentive to create a positive community around him, given that he was then contracted to a firm located in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. "When I turned on the news that morning and I saw a giant hole in the side of my office building, my initial reaction was 'holy shit, everybody I know is dead'."

Fortunately Nissim's office was below the impact level and his colleagues survived the attack. However he says, like for many people in New York, it changed things. "It helped me realise that life is short and we have to create our own meaning. It's up to us to create a life that's worth living and a world that's worth living in. We can't look to the government to make it happen. It's we as individuals who have to take that responsibility on ourselves, to change the world around us. If we all did that, to whatever degree, the world as a whole would improve."

In hindsight, Nissim admits that his first attempt to lunch with strangers was a modest affair. "Two guys showed up. It was a little awkward, but it was nice. We sat and had lunch and got to know each other." Believing the idea was a good one, he persevered.

"I put another ad on the website Craig's List and a bunch more people contacted me. Then I had another gathering the next week and four or five completely different people showed up. Then I started to build a mailing list. Other people started getting word that I was doing this and they were e-mailing me saying, 'Why don't you do these on the weekend, because I work nine to five?' So we added Sunday brunches." Eight months into it, about 1,000 people had joined the weekly lunch event. It had become a club, and Nissim was "the guy organising it".

The mission of the club is to bring together people from all walks of life, to sit down and get to know each other. Membership is free and events average between $10-$20 (€7.84-€15.68). Nissim is very clear on the website and in event e-mails that the Lunch Club is not a place to find a date, although he accepts that romantic relationships may grow out of friendships made at an event. "Everyone's looking for love, and I would never suggest that you shouldn't meet someone at the club and fall in love with them. It's just your motive for coming to the club . . . I would like for it to be pure, in the sense that you are coming to meet new friends, to expand your world, to get plugged into society."

He met his girlfriend at the club's Brooklyn Bridge hike, but points out that up to then he had been a "stickler", and his relationship followed more than three years of singledom. "The minute I met her we had an instant connection. Now we live together." Having spent summers as a child on his family's kibbutz in Israel, where the communal dining hall was central to the work day, Nissim is comfortable eating with strangers. However, he understands the fear involved in showing up to an event with persons unknown. The beauty of the Lunch Club, he says, is that "people have already declared their intentions", that is to have fun and make friends, so it is a "leap of faith" which is bound to pay off.

It's a leap of faith taken by Nissim himself with each event. He recalls a "meet Craig" event with the then elusive founder of Craig's List, Craig Newmark. "It was the freakin' coldest day you can imagine," Nissim laughs. "Over 100 people signed up. We booked this Chinese restaurant in Union Square. We're all eating. I'm introducing Craig to everyone. All of a sudden a pipe bursts above the restaurant and water starts draining in . . . and it's not pure water, it's brown water, and no one really knows what the hell that is." Nissim's can-do attitude saved the evening when a friend suggested a restaurant in the East Village. "They said we could take over their back room, so there was this big exodus of 100 people walking down the street with Craig Newmark."

To date, the most headline-grabbing event has been "speed friending" which Nissim inadvertently invented when he adapted the rules of speed dating to suit the platonic style of the Lunch Club. Participants are labelled as "movers", who rotate to the next station at the five minute bell, and "sitters" who remain stationary. Nissim admits that it can be "a bit exhausting", but Brad Stonberg, a New York trader, found it an interesting way to meet new people. "For me, the Lunch Club is all about building community, and speed friending is a quick way to help create community. I do have a lot of friends, but I always enjoy more."

Like Stonberg, Lisa Darcy, also from New York, met some potential friends. "To be honest - and a few of us discussed this - there were some people who made you feel that the five minutes flew by and some who you felt you would rather have a pin in your eye than spend the whole five minutes with them."

Dee Baptista was attracted to the event's clear agenda. "Ironically, in a city with eight million people, it's hard to meet new people to hang out with. Speed friending is an event where you know that the purpose of everyone in the room is to meet new and interesting people. I'm engaged, so it's good that it's made crystal clear that the purpose isn't to find dates." Chapter organisers must have a "pioneering spirit" to make the club work in their city. And for the Irish chapter Nissim requires someone who is "very energetic and outgoing, who really believes in the mission of the club, someone who has a good business sense, good event planning sense and people skills." Nissim has someone helping to prepare the first Dublin event, but is still looking for a full-time Dublin organiser.

With no advertising on the Lunch Club website and having turned down funding from a large investor, Nissim says he would rather "bootstrap it" than compromise the value of the club. For now, his goal is to see that the club constantly fulfils it mission, adding: "It would be ideal to see a Lunch Club chapter in every major population centre in the world." With the membership continuing to grow apace, it may only be a matter of time before the spirit of the East Village enters all Irish cities.

It's the afternoon in New York's West Village, heads bent in concentration, white knuckled, and frowning. This is a Lunch Club knitting gathering. Needles move at full throttle as beginners and experts spin their yarn under the watchful eye of instructor, Alyisha. Conversation flows easily between the seven strangers, and somehow includes discussions on the availability of free condoms, whether there is a god, and spiralling rent costs, in a matter of minutes. Jared Nissim looks on, eating cookies he has provided for the group, describing what he sees as "that magical thing".

The crowd agrees that they are here first and foremost because of their interest in knitting, and are keen to know when the next class will be held. A look of satisfaction comes over Nissim's face, when someone suggests meeting up to knit beyond the confines of the club. You get the impression that it's exactly what he has been waiting to hear: people reaching out and making friends.

For details on the Lunch Club and the Dublin event, which takes place at the Odessa Club, Dublin 2, at 1pm on August 26th, see http://www.thelunchclub.com/

© The Irish Times