Lonely? Russia's New Rental Solution: Pay Someone to Barbecue With You

In Russia, a peculiar solution has emerged for one of modern life’s quieter struggles: the solo grilling experience. For somewhere between $13 and $65 a day, you can now rent a stranger to join you at the barbecue—no friendship required, no strings attached, just meat, beer, and temporary companionship.

The service has quietly proliferated across classified platforms, with ads like the one from Artem in Moscow offering to“help you organize barbecues and camping, keep you company, and grill some meat. Jokes and anecdotes are also included.”Depending on your budget and expectations, these hired companions will fire up the grill, set up tents, source ingredients, and—most importantly—fill the silence with conversation. Their fees range from 1,000 rubles to 5,000 rubles, and the service comes with a clear boundary: it ends when the day does.

This may sound absurd on the surface, but it points to something real: a gap between the life we have and the one we’d like to live. Whether due to work schedules, relocations, divorce, or simply being wired differently, plenty of people face an evening alone at the barbecue with no one to share it with. The demand is concentrated in Moscow, Krasnodar Krai, and Nizhny Novgorod, suggesting this isn’t just an isolated curiosity but a pattern.

Russian restaurateur Evgeny Demchenko offered a pragmatic take to KP:“From a business perspective, this is absolutely natural: if there’s an unmet need, a service will emerge. Of course, you can’t buy true friendship. But for many, this won’t be an attempt to replace friends, but rather to simply spend a comfortable evening and meet new people. Therefore, I think such services will become more common, and the range of services will expand.”

He’s onto something. We’ve already normalized renting strangers for all sorts of tasks—dog walking, cleaning, tutoring. Why not companionship for a specific occasion? It’s transactional, sure, but it’s also honest about what it is. No pretense. No expectation of something deeper. Just two people grilling meat and passing time together.

The real question isn’t whether this service is weird—it absolutely is. It’s whether the existence of such a service tells us something unsettling about how isolated we’ve become, or whether it’s simply capitalism finding an elegant solution to loneliness. Maybe it’s both.