Founding season · Houston
It’s not just you — it’s the geometry. Everyone you’d like to know lives forty minutes away and is busy this weekend. We seat you with five people in your part of town you’d actually get along with, and when it clicks, we make sure it keeps happening.
Friday, October 9 is the first night of the season — eighteen seats, and a seat at it is what a membership is for. See the night.
Sound familiar?
Eight months in, you know your coworkers, your apartment gym and the fastest route to the Med Center. Everyone at work has a fiancé and different priorities. Everyone told you Houston was friendly; nobody said where.
Your family is nine time zones away, your coworkers are kind, and the weekends are long. More than a quarter of Harris County was born in another country — you just haven’t been in the same room with any of them yet.
They went the get-married-and-have-kids route, which is great for them. They’re also forty-five minutes away, in bed by ten, and “busy this weekend — let’s catch up next weekend.”
Work friends are just work friends. You got the job, the lease and the gym, and somewhere around 27 the week became home, work, HEB, doomscroll, 10pm — and a group chat that never picks a date.
18–29
It’s not a personality problem, either. Houstonians aged 18 to 29 report more loneliness than any other age group — the people supposedly at the most social stage of their lives. Rice’s Kinder Institute, 2025.
“Friendship needs proximity, repetition and unplanned time. School had all three by accident.”
Friday, October 9
Every seat at it is a member’s seat. Membership is $10 a quarter for the first forty people and $55 after that, and it covers this night, the matched tables that come after it, and everything else we run — not one evening at a time.
6:00pm
Two or three lanes. Nobody has to hold a conversation across a table with someone they met ten minutes ago — there are turns, a scoreboard, and something to do with your hands. Lanes and shoes are on us.
Leaving here is normal
8:00pm
Whoever’s still around. Somewhere that takes a group without a headcount, and everyone pays their own check.
Leaving here is normal
10:00pm
Two options, and you take whichever one sounds like you. Nobody’s night ends because they don’t drink.
La Pasha
Hookah, no drinking required.
Midtown
Bars, the usual way.
Eighteen seats, because six people fit on a lane and we’d rather run three good ones than a crowd. Most people come on their own.
Save my seatHow it works
What the six of you actually do is up to the six of you. These are the things people ask for.
Ten questions, not a personality exam. Where you live, what you’d actually leave the house for, whether you drink, how loud you like a room.
Six people, close to home, mixed on purpose — enough in common to have something to say, enough difference that it’s a group and not a mirror. A table is the six of you, not a restaurant: dinner, a court, a bar, a run, a trivia night, a Saturday shift somewhere useful. You pick.
Privately, the morning after. No public ratings, nobody swipes on anybody, and nobody finds out they weren’t picked.
When enough of the table says the same thing, that’s your group — and the next four nights are already on the calendar, so nobody has to be the one who organizes everything. The group is the thing you joined for. The nights are how it keeps going.
People drift; new seats open. Leave whenever and get re-matched. No hard feelings, no penalty.
By night five, it’s just your Tuesday.
One night
7:28pm
You get there early because you’re nervous. So did two other people.
7:35pm
Six of you sit down and nobody knows anybody. That part lasts about four minutes.
9:10pm
You notice nobody has asked what you do for work.
Next morning
You say privately who you’d see again. If enough of the table says the same thing, the next night is already booked.
Nobody is selling anything. Nobody is being graded. You can leave whenever you like.
Why this exists
Four years in Houston and I couldn’t have told you how to make a new friend here. A few of us tried one of those dinner-with-strangers apps. It worked — once. Then it dealt us a new table, and another, and another.
So we did the sorting ourselves: went to the dinners, noticed which two or three people were worth keeping, and stitched them into a group chat by hand. It took the better part of a year. That group chat is the best thing that’s happened to me in this city.
Regulars is the argument that it shouldn’t take a year.
Hamza
Founder, Regulars
Why a seat costs something
1 of 6
seats is what one empty chair costs.
$55
a quarter — about $18 a month.
One empty chair is a sixth of a table of six, which is why there is no free door: membership is $55 a quarter, and that is not a revenue model, it’s a filter. What a price changes is who signs up. Whether it makes anyone turn up is a different claim, and the trials nearest to it found that it doesn’t.
And while we’re opening, I’m doing the matching myself — reading the answers and putting groups together by hand, rather than waiting for the whole city to sign up first. It’s slower and it doesn’t scale, which is exactly why the founding price is forty people. You won’t be waiting for a season to start; you will be in one of the first groups I put together.
Founding price · first 40 members
$10per 3 months
Yours for as long as you stay — not an introductory rate. The forty also get the organizer side of Regulars: your own page, your events, your roster, free.
One price, four times a year — about $18 a month. Food and drinks are yours, paid at the venue like any other night out.
Cancel in one tap. A real pause. An email before we ever charge you.
The price you see is the price. No booking fee at checkout, no evenly-split bill you didn’t agree to.
One city
In a driving city, “fifteen minutes away” decides whether you actually go. So we’re starting in one city, staying until it works, and anchoring every table to the neighborhoods you already live in.
Tried Timeleft or 222?
They seat you with five strangers. If the night goes well you swap Instagrams in the parking lot, start a group chat, and the app has done its job — right up until it deals you five new strangers next month and you begin again. It’s hard to make a friend out of one pleasant encounter.
Dinner apps
Regulars
Who’s at the table
Dinner apps
Five new people, every time
Regulars
The same five, once it clicks
After a good night
You swap Instagrams and do it yourself
We plan the next four nights
What you pay
A monthly subscription
$55 a quarter
To take part
Download the app
Nothing to download
Questions
Six people who live in your part of Houston and answered the same ten questions you did — mixed on purpose, so there’s enough in common to talk and enough difference to make it interesting. There’s no age bracket you have to fit; it’s 18 and up, and we build the table from what you told us. Everyone there chose to be there; if they didn’t want to meet new people, they’d have stayed home.
Yes — it’s built for exactly that. A table of six means you never carry a conversation alone, and if you pick something with an activity in it — pickleball, trivia, a run, a climbing session — the thing you’re doing carries the first half hour for you. Most people at a first table showed up not knowing anybody.
No, and that’s the part most people get wrong about us. A “table” is the six of you — it isn’t a restaurant. Pickleball on a Friday, a bar hop, a run, a climbing session, trivia, a morning at the shelter: you tell us at signup what you’d actually leave the house for, and once the group locks it picks its own nights. Food is just the easiest first one, because everybody has to eat.
No. Tables are mixed, nobody swipes on anybody, and nobody is there to be picked. What two people do afterwards is their business, but it isn’t what the table is for.
Membership is $55 a quarter — about $18 a month. That covers the matching, the table, and every night we run; your own food and drinks you pay for at the venue, and everyone pays their own check. The first 40 members pay $10 a quarter and keep that price for as long as they stay — they also get the organizer side of Regulars, so they can run their own thing on it.
No. Every seat at a Regulars night is a member's seat, including the first one in October. One empty chair is a sixth of a table of six, so the night only works if everyone sitting down chose the table in advance — and what a price changes is who signs up, not what they do afterwards. Everyone at that table paid to be there. We won't tell you the money makes people show up; the trials nearest to that question found it doesn't.
You say so privately the morning after, and nobody else ever finds out. You’re re-matched to a new table — no penalty, no hard feelings.
No, and it’s deliberate. A table with a pair already in it turns into four people watching two friends catch up. Everybody comes on their own — which is exactly why it works.
Restaurants, cafés and bars we pick ourselves, in the neighborhood you chose — public places, close to home, never a forty-minute drive across town. You’ll know exactly where you’re going before the night, and you can leave whenever you like.
Founding hosts
The run club, the domino table, the supper club, the pickup game. Bring it here.
Founding season
Founding members get first seats at the first tables and set the tone for everything after — and the first 40 pay $10 a quarter for as long as they stay. Houston only. The list is free; the seats are members’ seats.
