The kitchen point is right and there is a small tactic that makes it work far more reliably: cook something that takes a while and smells good.
I am not joking. A pan of something slow gives you a legitimate reason to be standing there for forty minutes, and it is an opening for other people that does not require either of you to initiate a conversation with a stranger - they ask what it is. I have had more genuine evenings out of a pot of beans than out of any organised social event.
The corollary is that a microwave meal buys you four minutes and nothing else, and for a long time that was what I was doing while wondering why the kitchen was not working for me.
Also worth saying: this is the cheapest item on the entire list by a wide margin, which for anyone doing this for months rather than weeks is not a small consideration.