Perhaps new friendships may be within reach after all.

On the phone from San Francisco, where Feastly is based, the company’s founder, Noah Karesh, 34, said that he views “the dining room table as the original social network.” And many agree. Feastly has hundreds of thousands of users across 60-odd cities worldwide. “There’s a growing awareness of the disconnection plaguing millennials when the majority of the social interactions you have a day are through your iPhone,” Mr. Karesh said. “Someone may have 10,000 followers on social media but is eating dinner alone. People want to have off-line interactions.”

But as with an online blind date, it’s best to approach a group setup with low expectations. After the Feastly dinner, I felt defeated because the other guests didn’t seem like soul mates. But Andrew thought the evening was an unmitigated success. He argued that lifelong friendships weren’t the point. “It’s parachuting in to get a dose of varied social interaction,” he told me exuberantly on the way home.

This dip into a new social pool may be easier when united around a common interest, even if that’s trying a new cuisine, as at a Balkan dinner organized by EatWith, a communal dining service, in Harlem. There Andrew and I met a young Frenchwoman studying food cultures at N.Y.U. and an affable tech professional who brought his sister who was visiting from India. The chef, Dina, told us about growing up in the former Yugoslavia and the origin of all the dishes she was serving. It’s hard to have a bad time while gobbling homemade sirnica, fluffy pastries filled with cheese.

With such enticements, I got into the groove of dining with strangers. I liked it: the levity and spontaneity of topics that’s not possible when there’s a shared history, good and bad.

Also, there is a certain monotony to the soirees of young marrieds that make everyone go two by two, like animals in Noah’s Ark. I liked the odd number — five — at the EatWith dinner, which, I found, liberated me from talking with other wives and the conversational constraints that go with that role. (I’m a 34-year-old married woman, and other women always ask me when I’m having children — something I’m rarely, if ever, asked about by men.) Coming home from that dinner, which cost $63 apiece, I felt a wave of euphoria: freedom from the shackles of couple dates! (Andrew was equally excited about the blanched pear with honey dessert.)

But the next morning, my enthusiasm for this newfound social outlet waned. I received an email from EatWith asking me, “Who would you eat with again?” The rating system that’s a staple of transportation services, like Uber, now extends to leisure.