How Long It Actually Takes to Make a Friend
A researcher put a number on it — roughly 50 hours to a casual friend, more than 200 to a close one. The number isn't the discouraging part.
Ray Oldenburg’s idea was simple. Home is the first place. Work is the second. The third place is everywhere else you go without an appointment, where you’re known, where the regulars outnumber the staff, and where showing up alone is normal. The café, the pub, the barbershop, the square. We’ve written about why they’re disappearing. This is about where they still are, in a city that supposedly doesn’t have any.
Los Angeles has plenty. They just don’t look like a Viennese coffeehouse. They look like a lawn with telescopes on it, a parking lot full of food stalls, a German beer garden that’s been on Glendale Boulevard since 1959. The test for everything below is the same one Oldenburg used: can you go alone, on a whim, and leave having talked to a stranger? Every one of these passes.
The Lawn at Griffith Observatory
Griffith Park · Monthly, after dark · Free
Once a month, volunteer astronomers haul their own telescopes up to the Observatory lawn and point them at whatever’s up. Hundreds of people come. There’s no ticket, no programme and no way to see Saturn except to stand in a line with strangers, which turns out to be the entire point. By the time you reach the eyepiece you’ve talked to the people on either side of you, and by the time you leave you’ve said “did you see the rings” to a dozen more. Dates are on the Observatory’s site. Bring a layer; it’s colder up there than it looks.
Smorgasburg
ROW DTLA, 777 S Alameda St · Sundays, 10am to 4pm · Free entry
A market is the original third place, and this is the city’s biggest. Seventy-odd food stalls in a downtown lot every Sunday, with communal tables you share whether you meant to or not. The move is to go alone, buy something from a line, and sit wherever there’s a seat. The person across from you is holding a plate they’re also unsure about, and that’s a conversation. la.smorgasburg.com.
Red Lion Tavern’s Beer Garden
2366 Glendale Blvd, Silver Lake · Daily · No cover
A proper Bavarian beer hall on the edge of Silver Lake since 1959, with a rooftop beer garden of long shared tables. Long shared tables are the secret weapon of European social life and almost extinct in America; here they survive. You will be seated next to people. Steins are large enough to justify staying through a second one. Oktoberfest runs on autumn weekends and fills the place with strangers in a good mood.
Venice Run Club
Venice · Wednesday nights · Free
The run club is the twenty-first century’s answer to the pub, and Venice’s is the one that proved it. Wednesday evenings draw crowds in the hundreds, from people chasing a pace to people jogging the back and chatting the whole way. Nobody minds which you are. Running is the rare activity where you can talk to someone for forty minutes without ever having to make eye contact, which is why so many friendships start on the slow side of a run club. Nearly every neighbourhood now has one; this is the one to start with if you’re on the Westside.
Grand Central Market
317 S Broadway, Downtown · Daily · Free entry
Open since 1917, and the closest LA comes to a European market hall: a block-long room of counters, stools and standing tables under neon. The counters are the point. Sit at one and you’re elbow to elbow with whoever else is waiting for their order, and the staff talk to everyone. Go at off-peak hours on a weekday and it’s a village; go on Saturday and it’s the whole city at once.
Echo Park Lake
751 Echo Park Ave · Daily · Free
A lake, a lotus bed, a loop you can walk in twenty minutes, and swan boats that nobody over the age of nine is too cool for. It’s the neighbourhood’s living room: people reading, people running, families, dog walkers, and the kind of sitting-on-a-bench idleness that third places are supposed to produce and modern life has mostly abolished. Pedal boats are rented by the half hour, and are a far better second date than dinner.
The Central Library
630 W 5th St, Downtown · Daily except Sunday · Free
Oldenburg would have put the library near the top of any list, and the Richard J. Riordan Central Library is one of the great ones: a 1926 landmark with a garden, a makerspace on the lower level with equipment you’d never buy yourself, a programme of free talks and readings most evenings, and the simple fact that you’re allowed to be there for hours without buying anything. LA has seventy-two branch libraries. The one nearest you probably has a book club.
The Beach at Sunset, Anywhere
Santa Monica to Manhattan · Every evening · Free
It sounds too obvious to list, and it’s the one most newcomers forget to use. Every evening, the stretch of sand around any lifeguard tower turns into an unofficial gathering: volleyball games that need a sixth, people with speakers, people with dogs, people who came alone and sat down near other people who came alone. Nobody is “at” anything, which is exactly what makes it approachable. Pick a tower, make it your tower, and keep showing up at the same time.
Your Local Run Club, Trivia Night and Farmers’ Market
Inside your twenty-minute radius · Weekly
The honest answer to “where are the third places in LA” is that the best one is the one you can walk to. Every neighbourhood in this city has a weekly farmers’ market, a bar with a Tuesday quiz, a run club, a climbing gym and a coffee shop where the same people sit outside every morning. None of them are famous. All of them are better for your life than anything on this list, because the whole machinery of a third place is repetition, and you will only repeat what’s close.
What Makes These Work
Notice what they have in common. None of them require a ticket. None of them put you across a table from one stranger with the explicit job of talking. All of them give you something to do with your hands and your eyes, a shared object of attention, so that conversation happens sideways. And all of them are on again next week.
That last one is the thing. Oldenburg’s point wasn’t that the café was a nice place. It was that you went every day, and so did everyone else, and that’s how a city of strangers turns into a town. LA doesn’t have a corner café. It has a lawn with telescopes on it once a month, and if you go every month, that’s the same thing.
Where Buffet Comes In
The hard part of every place above is the first visit, alone, not knowing anyone. That’s the part we built Buffet for. Every week there’s a short list of things happening around LA, a lot of them exactly the kind of place on this page. Claim a plate and you arrive with a group of six or less, all of whom chose the same thing you did, with the chat already open.
A third place, with the regulars supplied. Download Buffet and go find yours.
