Toma

Cooking something slow that smells good is genuinely the best social hack in this thread and I did not believe it until I tried it.

The three-hours-earlier point generalises to a whole category: anything with a scheduled start and a shared activity works, and anything that is just people being in a room does not.

Parkrun and the local run clubs are in most cities, free, at nine in the morning, and nobody cares whether you drink. Same for climbing gyms and language exchanges. The activity does the introducing.