By Lisa Bonos
The Washington Post

A sticker on a wall caught Katya Gratcheva’s attention last fall: “No dating or networking. Just breakfast.”

It led the married 52-year-old, tired of the transactional networking she encountered at home in Washington, D.C., to download an app called The Breakfast. For a fee, it pairs strangers seeking deep conversation for morning meals in 17 cities worldwide.

Gratcheva, who is Russian, ultimately matched with a young Ukrainian woman whose willingness to discuss the conflict between their two countries felt transformational. “She was able to see a friend in me even though I represent the nation that bombed her country and killed her friends,” Gratcheva said.

Gratcheva estimates that she’s attended about 30 such breakfasts with strangers in the past nine months. She has lots of company: Apps that offer to connect strangers seeking platonic connections are having a moment. Although they share many features with dating apps, they bill themselves as tools for networking or community-building, not for finding romance, with many like Breakfast targeting isolated remote workers and digital nomads.

In July, the dating app Bumble, which also has modes for networking and friend-finding, completed its acquisition of Geneva, an app designed to help people make new friends to spend time with offline. Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said on an earnings call that fostering platonic bonds is core to the company’s future business. “What we are hearing from our young users is that they are feeling lonely and disconnected,” she said.

Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Timeleft, an app that arranges Wednesday night dinners for six-person groups in 170 cities across 37 countries, says fatigue with dating apps is driving people toward in-person, friends-only meetups. “We can see that people are craving something that is not a dating app,” he said.

These services are proliferating at a time when loneliness is common and city dwellers report feeling detached from their local communities.

According to a February survey from Gallup, 1 in 5 workers experiences loneliness. Fully remote workers are more likely to feel lonely (25%), the survey found, compared to those who work fully on-site (16%) and hybrid employees (21%).

A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that urban Americans are less likely to feel they have local connections. Forty-nine percent of city dwellers reported feeling close to people in their local community, compared with 55% of those in the suburbs and 58% of people in rural areas.

Raymond Ou is one of those city dwellers who’s had a hard time making friends. The 41-year-old used to attend tech events to meet people, but since he became a broadcast producer at a local television station whose workday starts at 7 p.m., his evenings are no longer free for happy hours or mixers. “I’ve sacrificed my social life for this job,” Ou said over tofu and veggies, adding that though sacrifice was worth it, he’d still like more friends, especially those with availability during the day.

Ou signed up for the Creative Lunch Club app after seeing an ad on Instagram that promised to connect people in similar industries. In his first three months as a member, he paid $11 to be matched with two others for a small group lunch. On the day of the meeting, one of those Ou was due to meet canceled citing a work emergency — and the other turned out to be this Washington Post reporter.

Ou, who also works as a documentary filmmaker, said he wanted to try the Creative Lunch Club because it offered a space separate from the tech scene. “It’s providing opportunities for different people we want to meet,” Ou said.

Ou told me that he usually eats lunch alone, making him part of a pattern that spurred Klaus Heller, the founder of Creative Lunch Club, to start the app. “I was thinking this could be a good time of the day … to meet other people or to be used better,” Heller said in a phone interview.

Heller, a freelance social media marketer, also had a hunch that people in creative industries would find a lot to connect on. That was true for me and Ou.

Having spent much of my 20s working nights in journalism, I was able to tell Ou that I knew intimately how an unorthodox work schedule can make it hard to have a social life. We also spoke about the challenges of convincing sources to confide in journalists, how we go about cultivating trust with people we’ve just barely met — and bonded over our love of the Japanese clothing brand, Sou Sou. Meeting Ou was enjoyable, but at times I found myself thinking that a larger group would have helped round out the conversation.

Kasley Killam, a social scientist and author of “The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier and Happier,” estimated in a phone interview that there are now hundreds of apps trying to address the loneliness epidemic by helping people connect with others. Just about every week, she hears about a new one. It’s easy to meet new people while in college or your 20s, Killam said, “but what if you move to a new city or go through a breakup? A lot of people struggle for where to turn for that.”

Damian Jacobs, a 44-year-old lawyer, faced that conundrum after a recent move from Hong Kong to San Francisco. His wife and children are still thousands of miles away, visiting occasionally as the family finalizes its plans to relocate.

Jacobs tried taking himself out to bars and restaurants and striking up conversations with strangers, but that didn’t take. “People at my age tend to be married with kids. They’re not going out to bars on a Saturday night and mingling with strangers,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “I’ve found that places I’ve gone to, folks are much younger than I am, hanging out with their friends.”

Things felt very different at his first dinner arranged via Timeleft. “Everybody at the table is there to meet strangers,” he said. Jacobs paid $25 to access a month of meetups, which combine a different group each week.

After each dinner, Timeleft picks a place for the group to move on to for an optional after-party. At the dinner Jacobs attended in San Francisco’s Japantown, his dining partners, including this reporter, chose a nearby karaoke bar instead. “If you told me I would’ve ended up at a karaoke bar afterward, I would’ve laughed you out of the room,” said Jacobs, who isn’t normally a fan of the art.

Still, he got up on the stage and mouthed the words to “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers with the rest of his dinner-mates, later calling the performance “a testament to the power of peer pressure.”

He’s not sure if he’ll see that group again. But he has a three-month subscription to Timeleft and will be going for another dinner with a new group soon.

Fresh from a trip to Italy, Macomb County restaurateur Joe Vicari is set to open his latest project, the new Andiamo Pasta & Chops, which promises to become one of the most visible tenants at the Mall at Partridge Creek.

Scheduled to open Thursday, the 7,670-square-foot restaurant takes the place of the former Brio Italian Grille space at the front of the open-air shopping center on Hall Road (M-59) east of Garfield Road. Brio closed in January .

At a media event earlier this week, Vicari said the menu will include a mix of Italian cuisine that the Andiamo restaurants are known for along with additional steakhouse options. Diners may choose from meats from a regular menu or all-prime selections, which cost a little more.

“The best thing about this location is there are no true steakhouses in the area,” Vicari said. “We’ll have several grades of quality steaks available at price points we brought down a little bit. We were able to talk to our vendors and they were able to reduce some of their pricing.”

The menu also features Italian breads, free-range chicken, veal, house-made pasta and seafood choices. Entrees will start at at $23 and top out at $155 for 30-day dry-aged tomahawk steak for two. All come with a choice of house salad, soup or a side of angel hair pasta.

The pastas are overseen by Certified Master Chef Daniel Scannell, one of only 72 in the country with that designation, who helps curate menu options that provide fresh, and modern Italian food.

Appetizers include fried calamari, baked clams and char-grilled artichokes and among the side dishes are steakhouse staples such as broccolini, whipped potatoes and steak fries. Steak sauces offered include classic zip sauce, peppercorn cream, pizzaiola, shrimp scampi and blue cheese brulee.

On the drinks side, Andiamo offers 12 signature craft cocktails, with wine-by-the-glass options in the $11-$25 range, and dozens of wine bottles to choose from.

Joe’s wife, Rosealie Vicari, worked with Bloomfield Hills-based designer and architect David Savage to come with a style that brightens the rooms and capitalizes on the tall windows near the mall’s water fountain. She said the eatery becomes a cornerstone of Partridge Creek Mall.

Much of the exterior and interior have been bathed in white with blue trimming. The interior has moved the lounge/bar area to the center of the building, and serves as a focal point, surrounded by two two dining rooms, two banquet spaces for private dining and an outdoor patio.

“I love bars that are at the center of restaurants,” said Rosalie Vicari. “We moved it from the side of the building to the center and now it’s like the pulse of the restaurant. And by moving the bar, we opened access to these windows looking out to the fountain. It’s like having dinner in Italy. This is exactly my vision of the way I wanted it to look.”

The opening comes as the Joe Vicari Restaurant Group celebrates its 35th anniversary. It is the 22nd largest restaurant group in the United States.

The new restaurant also brings another dining option to Partridge Creek, which is in the midst of a revival. Other new tenants expected to open in the next year include a Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. House of Sport that is planned for a portion of the vacant Nordstrom building and an $11 million Powerhouse gym that will occupy much of the former Carson’s that closed in 2018.

Carmen Spinoso, CEO of Spinoso Real Estate Group, which leases and manages the mall, said in a news release he “cannot wait to break bread” at the family-owned eatery.

“After seeing the build out for this incredible concept, we are eagerly looking forward to the grand opening this week,” Spinoso said in the release.

Andiamo Pasta & Chops is located at the mall at Partridge Creek at 17430 Hall Road. Starting Thursday, it will be open 3-10 p.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 3-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday, and 3-9 p.m. Sunday.

Beginning on Monday, Sept. 23, they will be open for lunch at 11:30 a.m., and offer brunch every Sunday from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. with dinner service starting at 4 p.m.

For reservations and more information, visit andiamopastachops.com.

A bit of summer pruning goes a long way to keeping your raspberries healthy and productive. So, get out the mosquito netting, long sleeves and pruners and get busy.

The summer harvest is produced on 2-year-old canes called floricanes. Remove those that bore fruit to ground level once your harvest is complete. These canes will not produce more fruit and their presence can increase the risk of insect and disease problems. This is also a good time to remove damaged, insect-infested or discolored canes.

Summer is also a good time to thin the remaining canes on summer-only bearing raspberries. Remove weak or damaged canes, leaving three or four of the sturdiest canes per foot of row or six or eight stems per hill when growing in the hill system. Thinning increases airflow and light penetration, resulting in healthier plants and a better harvest next season. Wait until next spring to reduce the height of the remaining canes. At that time, you can determine winter dieback, and damage, and prune accordingly.

Everbearing raspberries are often called fall raspberries and form fruit on first-year canes called primocanes. You can manage these types of raspberries for a single fall harvest only. Wait until the plants are dormant then cut the whole planting back to ground level. There will be a larger and earlier harvest when pruning everbearing raspberries this way. Although this pruning technique eliminates the summer crop, it is much easier, less time-consuming, and eliminates animal and winter damage in just one cut.

The other option is to prune everbearing raspberries for a fall and summer harvest. The new growth produces the fall crop. These canes are left to produce berries the following summer. Prune these 2-year-old canes after the summer harvest as you would on a summer-only bearing raspberry.

Maximize your summer and fall harvest by planting a summer and a fall-bearing raspberry patch. You’ll enjoy summer raspberries from one planting plus a larger, earlier harvest from the fall-bearing raspberries when pruning all those canes to ground level each year during the dormant season.

Don’t let a lack of space keep you from growing delicious raspberries high in fiber and vitamin C.

Plant, train and use raspberries as a hedge in your landscape. Or grow the new compact and thornless Raspberry Shortcake in a container or any sunny small space in your garden. You may not be freezing a large harvest from a single pot of raspberries, but you will enjoy fresh-from-the-garden raspberries even in your small space.

Melinda Myers is the author of more than 20 gardening books, including “Small Space Gardening” and “Midwest Gardener’s Handbook, 2nd Edition.” Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine and her website is MelindaMyers.com.