Kiese Hansen seemed like a good bet. In her dating profile, she listed Steely Dan’s “Peg” — one of the greatest dance-party-of-one jams of all time — as her favorite song.

There was just one problem. When we emailed Kiese to tell her she had been selected for Date Lab, the 25-year-old told us she had temporarily moved to Minneapolis to work on a fellowship on domestic hunger and food insecurity. “I’m not there, but I’m worth waiting for,” she wrote.

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We took her at her word. After she moved back to Washington in February, we set her and Brandon up for a Friday night date at Haikan, a ramen spot in Shaw. On the day of the date, Kiese started to feel some nerves. She was fresh back to the city, and a Friday night date felt like a big commitment. Also, one of her co-workers jokingly warned her not to get murdered on her blind date (good joke, co-worker!). She made plans to meet friends around 9:30 p.m., just in case.

When she showed up at the restaurant, Brandon was waiting for her. Her first impressions were friendly. “He seemed really nice,” she said. “I liked the maroon corduroy jacket he was wearing.” And Brandon? “My immediate thought when I saw her was, ‘Oh man, she is very good-looking,’ ” he said.

They got important business out of the way early: Yes, they were both down to max out the budget we gave them for the meal. “I was really excited about the dinner,” Kiese said. “He was really excited about the food, which was a relief to me, that he was down to try different things.”

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“The other thing that was very nice,” Brandon said, “was she kept ordering drinks, which meant I got to keep ordering drinks.” Brandon stuck to Old-Fashioneds, while Kiese sampled the menu.

Over bowls of ramen, Kiese told Brandon about her work, her high school sports career and her experiences growing up in a small town in South Dakota. Brandon told Kiese about the volunteer work he did in a recent local election. “I thought that was a really cool way to spend your free time,” she said later. “It made me realize I don’t phone-bank or canvass enough.” He also made her laugh by telling her the lesson he learned after years of taking care of animals on his family farm: that he didn’t want pets.

Soon, others were drawn in. The couple at the next table was drinking from cartoonishly large steins of beer; when Brandon and Kiese struck up a conversation with them they learned that one of the pair was a scientist coming off a long, failed experiment. Brandon offered to buy them a round.

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After dessert, Kiese still had a free hour before meeting her friends, so they went to Gaslight Tavern, where a friendly (okay, drunk) stranger approached them.

“He was pretty intoxicated,” Kiese said. He wanted to know if they were together. “It’s a little hazy how things went from point A to point B,” Brandon said. But point B was the man buying them drinks. By the time they finished, it was time for Kiese to meet her friends. Just as they were leaving, someone shouted her name.

“In typical D.C. fashion, it was my old boss,” Kiese said. She hadn’t seen her former colleague since she moved back and was excited to catch up. Kiese introduced Brandon, then finished saying goodbye and returned to catch up.

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“It ended on a bit of an awkward — like a weird, anticlimactic ending,” Brandon said. Maybe that’s for the best. He and Kiese texted a few times the next day, but, Kiese said, “at this point I’m trying to be really honest with people,” so she texted him to say that she wasn’t feeling a spark.

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He wrote back to say that he was on the same page. “I was a little nervous knowing [the date] would be written about. That put me off my game more than it normally would,” he told me later. “I thought she was great, and it was fun, and we never really left the interview-y stage of a first date.”

Missing sparks aside, the two agreed that they still had a great time. “I’m so grateful I did it,” Kiese said. “It was really fun. The whole process added a level of drama and fun to my life that was just overall really positive.”

Rate the date

Brandon: 3.75 [out of 5]. “The things I’m knocking points off for have more to do with how I was doing that night. She seemed great.”

Kiese: 3 out of 5.

Update

No further contact.