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Entrepreneur Dishes Up Lunch With a Surprise

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Fed up. That was Stephen Bagish after nine months of lunching with the only other person in his small downtown office.

“He’s a nice guy,” Bagish says. “But every day? No way.”

Especially since just heartbeats away--he could see them from his skyscraper windows--toiled hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others just like him: young, single, energetic, charismatic--and eager to meet someone new.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have their phone numbers?” Bagish recalls thinking. “To go out with someone new for lunch, right near where I work?”

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And then the Brilliant Idea Light clicked on in his brain.

Three months ago, Bagish left his job as a video distributor, donned his gray flannel suit and stood in swarming lunch crowds at 3rd and Hope streets. For a week, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., he handed out leaflets touting Lunch With Someone New as “the first lunch companion service designed to help you make new friends.”

It’s sort of the Pet Rock of dating services: low-tech, low-key, low-cost--but high-concept.

And perfect, Bagish predicts, for the ‘90s, when people will resist mechanized and impersonal in favor of small and face-to-face.

“My service pairs people for a friendly lunch--not for love or sex. It’s for people who are tired of the meat-market approach,” Bagish says. “Most people who hear about it are amazed that no one thought of this until now.”

Bagish, 29, a sometime journalist, jazz musician and entrepreneur, has tried six jobs in the last three years--all while waiting for the Brilliant Idea. And this may be it, he says.

Bradley Rose, an attorney, likes the notion. He read Bagish’s leaflet, thought it was “a fabulous business concept” and decided to sign up.

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Was it great? “The beauty of it,” Rose says, “is that you don’t expect great. For $15, you expect to maybe make a new friend at lunch, to have a good time. That’s exactly what it was.”

What about romance? “If the chemistry’s there, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Jennifer Garrison’s first date didn’t show up. But it didn’t matter, the marketing assistant says, because she bumped into an old friend and they had lunch. At least she got out of the usual dull routine. And as she puts it, “There’s something magical about standing there in a sea of people, waiting to meet someone you’ve never seen before.”

Garrison’s second date was “hysterical,” she says. “He tells me on the phone that he’s six feet tall, mustached and has dark hair. I’m downstairs in the lobby, when I see this guy who matches. He’s adorable. I think: ‘This is it, Mom and Dad, worry no more.’ I’m smiling, licking my lips, waiting for him to say hello. But he passes me by, staring at me like I’m crazy. Meantime, I see this other fellow outside, kind of the same description, frantically, fumblingly looking for the entrance. He was OK, but I liked ‘Choice A’ better.”

Though it was not a match made in heaven, she’d do it again, she says. So would Patrick Grannan, a securities fraud lawyer. His date didn’t produce fireworks either, he says, “but it was a fun thing to do.”

So far, Bagish says he’s earned about $500. But he has 50 clients lined up and ready to lunch, and he expects business to grow so much that he’ll be able to sell franchises. When he sews up downtown Los Angeles, he says, he’ll move to other steel-and-glass-canyon spots, like Century City.

“Let’s face it,” he says. “Working people everywhere are bored with lunch.”

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