Associated Press

New York, January 31:

If you look hard enough, you can find all sorts of business in New York. So for the lovelorn who are burned out by the bar scene, fed up with personal ads or tired of scouring the Internet, there’s another place to look for that perfect date: the back seat of a taxicab. Specifically, Ahmed Ibrahim’s cab. The 50-year-old Egyptian immigrant sets up blind dates for his single passengers through a free, impromptu matchmaking service he runs out of his yellow cab. He said he finds mates, or at least dates, for about eight people a week.

“New York is a very tough city for dating,” Ibrahim mused while driving through the West Village recently. “I have heard a lot of crying in this cab, a lot of fighting and a lot of broken hearts.” “Sometimes great people were just missing each other by minutes; one would get in my cab just as another had gotten out,” he said.

Funny thing is, it works. Ask Natalie Dillon. “I was a kind of skeptical at first but then I figured, ‘Oh, this is New York, what the hell.” So Dillon — a single, 33-year-old media studies graduate student — described what she was looking for in a guy, and gave Ibrahim her cell phone number. About six weeks later he called her and said: “Natalie, I have a guy for you.” “It’s very surreal, but that’s the way it happened,” she said.Ibrahim set about it with gusto, attempting matches for doctors, lawyers and students. He has been featured on Fox News Channel and NBC’s “Today” show and in The Wall Street Journal. Ibrahim doesn’t charge for his service; he does it for fun, he said. But he doesn’t offer his help to just anybody who gets into his cab.

First, they must be serious about looking to settle down. Men in their early 20s are usually ruled out as being too young and wild. Older men who are “looking for Britney Spears” are crossed off the list for just being creepy.

And what about for himself? "Marriage is not for me," declared Ibrahim, who is divorced. But he has a girlfriend — a woman he picked up in his cab.