It can be hard making friends as a grown-up.
But one San Francisco man came up with a neat solution - free pancakes!
After his wife told him to make some new friends, 43-year-old Curtis Kimball attempted to bring his neighborhood together by cooking and giving away over a hundred free pancakes.
Kimball - who has lived in the neighborhood for about a year with his wife and two daughters - told The Washington Post that his family thought the idea was crazy.
"Everybody in my life thought I was insane," he said. "It's a pretty vulnerable feeling to do something that outlandish in public."
As for his reasoning behind a pancake party, Kimball explained: "Even if you don’t like to eat pancakes, you just like the idea of them. Being around pancakes feels good, even if you’re not eating them yourself."
To spread the word about his planned pancake party, Kimball made some funny fliers and put them up on local telephone poles.
"My wife says I'm getting weird," they read. "She says I need to make friends. So I'm making pancakes. Come by and say hi and have some pancakes with me."
Even with his jokey adverts up, Kimball was worried that no one would show up. But he needn't have worried: as nearly 100 neighbors turned out for the pancake party on the front driveway of his home.
In fact, the pancakes went down so well that a month later on February 12, Kimball threw another meet-up. The second was even more successful than the first - with around 300 people turning up to chat and eat.
While everyone enjoyed Kimball's cooking, the dad-of-two suspected that people were hungry for more than just food - and that it was the social connection that kept them coming back.
"It was the best vibe I had felt in a long time. It was really refreshing to see people smiling and enjoying themselves," he said. "We've got to celebrate each other as people a lot more."
He's even set up a GoFundMe so he can continue to throw bigger and better pancake parties - where he's already raised a whopping $1,400.
Meanwhile, Kimball hopes that his example will inspire people across the nation to host their own community meet-ups. His dream is to have "a national neighborhood pancake day and have everyone do it on the same day and same time and carb up the whole country."
"How awesome would that be?" he says.