Feeling lonely? This app is bringing strangers together for dinner in Minneapolis.

Finding new friends as an adult is a challenging, awkward undertaking anywhere. But some Minnesota transplants will tell you that it can be particularly difficult to start fresh in the Twin Cities.

There’s a local cliché that Minnesotans will happily offer directions to anywhere but their home.

I love Minnesota. It’s my favorite of the several states where I’ve lived, which include Florida, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Connecticut. The only thing I’m missing is also an important factor in mental health: friends outside work.

The search for new connections recently led me to a dinner table with five strangers. We gathered through Timeleft, an algorithm-based service matching diners with others for a meal at a mystery restaurant.

Timeleft organizes dinners every Wednesday in 160 cities across 33 countries. The first Timeleft dinner in Minneapolis was held on June 12. More than 40 dinner groups have met here in recent weeks, according to the company.

Timeleft said it is focused on growing in downtown Minneapolis but may expand to St. Paul.

Timeleft charges $16 for organizing the dinner. Before you pick a date, you are prompted to fill out a quiz about your personality, going-out habits and dietary preferences.

The app doesn’t provide any information about your fellow strangers or the restaurant until the days leading up to the dinner. It displays the general outlines of other diners’ professions and their zodiac signs the night before the dinner, but not their names or faces.

On the morning before the dinner, the app notified me that the venue would be Sawatdee Thai in downtown Minneapolis.

When I got to Sawatdee, I was seated at one of four tables reserved for Timeleft groups.

Everyone in my group was in their 20s and could be described as young professionals. Four worked in health care and another worked as a project manager. One guy in our group told us this was his third time at a Timeleft event.

The other Timeleft tables appeared composed of people in their 30s or 40s.

I was skeptical: Could an app I found while doomscrolling at 2 a.m. deliver the kind of in-person connection Gen Z finds so elusive?

To my surprise, everyone at my table was friendly and the dinner was full of laughs. We swapped stories about awful roommates and college dorm shenanigans. One of the people at my table recalled a time when students at the University of Minnesota took to building forts in the hallway of their residence hall.

The app offers an icebreaker game, but we skipped it because the conversation flowed easily.

An hour into the dinner, the app suggested a bar we could visit afterward. Only two people in my group wanted to get a drink. The others said they had to wake up early.

The recommended bar was a 16-minute walk from Sawatdee. We went to Crooked Pint next door instead.

Timeleft lets you choose who you want to connect with after dinner. You can message within the app or remove a connection and report a user if you have safety concerns.

After the dinner, I checked in with two people in my group to see what they thought.

Alessandra Gaglio, who uses they/them pronouns, moved here four years ago and has found it difficult to break into new social circles. Gaglio enjoyed the Timeleft experience, but they wished the conversation had gone deeper than small talk.

“If I went again with more energy, I might try to shift the conversation to deeper topics and see where we could go,” Gaglio said.

Chloe Neighbor, 26, moved to Minnesota in 2016 for college. Because she made friends in college and stayed here after graduation, Neighbor said she hasn’t experienced the Minnesotan iciness familiar to some transplants.

Neighbor wanted to meet new people since some of her friends moved away recently.

“We all collectively forgot how to make new friends and interact with new people” during the pandemic, Neighbor said. “But humans are still social creatures, so we’re still looking for those connections.”

Gaglio and Neighbor said they would recommend the app and consider trying it again. Gaglio, who works with young people as a therapist, believes Gen Z could benefit from more in-person connections.

“The way we connect to others via the internet has fundamentally changed the way that we view ourselves and what we have to offer to the world,” Gaglio said. “So infrequently do we get the opportunity to really connect with strangers in a safe and curious environment face to face.”

The Timeleft app was the perfect tool to push me out of my comfort zone and to meet new people. That reminds me: I should text some of the people from dinner.