Invite Everyone You Know to a Bar

It started out as a joke. My dear friend Emily asked our sacred groupchat of NYC friends what would happen if she invited every Hinge date she had to a bar at once. After volleying that hilarious yet horrifying idea around for some time, we began to ask: what if it was just…every person? What would ensue?

My group of friends can’t back away from a bit. The idea of inviting everyone we know to a bar at once charmed us too much to pass up. We found a date in September 2024 that worked for our group of 7, made a Partiful, and started sending invitations at a truly bewildering rate.

When I say inviting everyone we know, I mean it in the truest sense of the word. Year-old past situationships. People from high school we hadn’t talked to in years, but knew were floating around the city. Two-job-ago coworkers. Camp friends of yore. Cousins and their respective fiancés. When we commit, we commit hard.

Predictably, people were somewhat confused about why we were choosing to do this. Some people would text us, positive they had misunderstood the invitation. Surely it’s not everyone you know? Everyone? In one bar? Total and complete chaos? Yes, we’d say. It is indeed. You have not misunderstood. Please join us!

My friend Carlyn, ever the event planner, secured Linen Hall in the East Village as our event space. (Shoutout to the good folks there—they promised us control of the AUX and have a cute bartender with an Irish accent.) We had around 250 people between yeses and maybes (woohoo), a smattering of can’t go’s (have fun with that FOMO), and a swath of people who simply didn’t respond (maybe out of confusion? Either way, lame).

When my friend Taylor brought up the fact that it would be nice to know which host attendees knew, I concocted the idea of the wristband. Each host would have one, and you would wear the wristband corresponding to the host who got you there. We gamified this to force people to interact, too—if you interacted with a new host, you could collect theirs and compare to other strange partygoers/potential friends or lovers.

I spent the weeks leading up to the party worried nobody would attend and we’d be sitting alone, the 7 of us, in a giant event hall, solemnly listening to No Hands by Wacka Flocka Flame. When the date rolled around, we showed up, took a picture before guests began arriving, and waited.

Spoiler alert: the party was so wildly successful, we threw a sequel in February 2025. The bar was packed both times with people, talking and laughing and flirting and dancing—and absolutely ravenous for wristbands. In the February 2025 version, we bought cheapo medals off Amazon to give to people who collected all seven, which a boyfriend-who-shall-not-be-named of an attendee would reportedly wear in bed later that night.

The debriefs after these events are the stuff of legend. A friend of mine who hadn’t been on a date in three years (by choice—a picky queen) got swooned by another friend’s old camp acquaintance. My out-of-town friend from Philly (who came in just for the occasion) told me he saw a guy fail to wash his hands coming out of the bathroom, so the offender was nicknamed Pee Hands in my friend group forevermore. I then forced Philly friend to meet Emily’s coworker as I knew friendship was their destiny, and they spent the next hour in a beautiful nerd-out over Dungeons and Dragons.

Two short dudes in twinning baseball caps chatted up host Clare and I and insisted they knew host Dana from a Thai cooking class, and we had to kick them out after we found out that was fat lie and they refused to tell us which host they actually knew. My friend from high school brought a chihuahua into the party via tote bag, immediately grabbing the attention of everyone within eyeshot. A former two-date Hinger match of a host showed up fully wearing a backpack and over-the-ear Beats headphones, then promptly left after 30 minutes. A rich college acquaintance flexed his gold Amex so hard that a group of 16 struggling 20-somethings persuaded him into buying them a round. Chaos was plentiful, and chaos was beautiful.

This idea was borne as a joke, sure, but it works because people really do crave connection. We live in an online world where spaces to meet new people are increasingly disappearing. We’re all stressed with busy jobs and busy lives and busy minds, and it’s nice to have someone else do the heavy lifting of finding a bar and inviting the cool people they know to come hang out. My pod of pals chose to do it, and what ensued was more friends and two hilarious, silly nights full of laughter and chaos. We have a third on the books already. Yeah, it’s an ridiculous idea, but so much of life is already ridiculous. Why not lean into it? Find some co-hosts and invite everyone you know to a bar. I promise—it’ll be fun.