Surely it’s our national duty to revive the long working lunch
It was, until a Downing Street warning yesterday evening, the most glorious loophole imaginable: one that appeared to permit the working lunch. These can be exempt from Covid-19 restrictions as, while you can’t socialise inside hospitality venues with anyone outside of your household bubble, both No 10 and local authorities have suggested that meetings could still be permitted in pubs and restaurants for “work purposes”. The Prime Minister’s spokesman has since added that this is aimed at freelancers or self-employed types “who may not have a workplace to conduct business meetings”. Even so, plenty will surely be heeding this advice with a pinch of salt (over a business lunch, of course…).
Having written about food and drink for more than 20 years so many of those I have engaged with – be they producers, chefs, retailers, designers, restaurateurs, PRS, writers, editors – I have conversed with over lunches, drinks and dinners. Sometimes all three in that order on the same day. It’s how we roll, this lunchtime schmoozing.
Hospitality leaders and restaurateurs keep urging the Government for clarity on the issue, but I urge them to keep shtum: we need grey areas like this. Restaurant owners need them. As Ranald Macdonald, the founder of the Boisdale restaurant group, says: “London is the business capital of Europe, business happens over lunch.”
Of course, it is a culture that has taken a bit of a battering in recent decades. In the capital there were always two districts that lunched long: the City and Fleet Street. And when financiers and journalists lunched it was often carnage. One man with feet firmly in both camps was Damien Mccrystal, City diarist for The Telegraph in the Nineties. . Valiantly, he sought to ward off the rot t that had begun during the mid-eighties ghties when American banks bought ought much of the City. The New ew York financiers’ idea of lunch was a quick starter and a warm m glass of water.
Mccrystal took his contacts ntacts away from the City to Mayfair ayfair to the likes of Le Boudin n Blanc in Shepherd’s Market, Bellamy’s off Berkeley Square, Langan’s Brasserie off Piccadilly, and Mews of Mayfair near Bond Street. “Eighteenhour lunches were not a rarity,” he says.
His stamina he put down to fine wine: “I’ve always found that quality keeps me conscious.”
Mccrystal managed to write his legendary column once back at the office around four o’clock. When he was later made restaurant critic for the now-defunct paper Sunday Business he attempted a world-record-breaking lunch of 72 hours. Reuters agreed to sponsor the event, Marco Pierre White hosted it but the Guinness Book of Record refused to recognise the achievement as, they stated, they could not support “record-breaking attempts that were life-threatening”.
My father Francis, as a City PR man, straddled both camps. A much-loved networker, his lunches began with a few red wine sharpe sharpeners at El Vino on Fleet Street at 11 11.30am before repairing to a cheap Italian eatery and th then invariably going home around 4pm without doin doing much in the office, save de depositing a briefcase besi beside his desk.
I can relat relate to years spent munchin munching and carousing for mut mutual benefit with work a acquaintances who, if you saw us together, you m might mistake us for frien friends.
Bu But no, officer. This is a wo working lunch. And defin definitely not a rule bein being exploited. Yes, som some in the group are godparents, we might go on holidays (sorry trips) together, but this is business.
As my fellow restaurant critic and food writer Tom Parker Bowles tweeted: “Pretty much every magazine piece/column/book/tv show is born over a lunch or dinner”.
God forbid if the working lunch was banned. It has already been much curtailed in recent years: many Fleet Street journalists found their lunches shortened once newspapers moved away to fancy new offices. The 2008 credit crunch was another nail in the coffin for City lunches.
As curfew now shortens dinner, the prospect of a long lunch is even more vital. Macdonald says his business would haemorrhage money without it. Which means we need to lunch our colleagues often, to lunch hard and lunch long. Some of us still work to clear an afternoon of engagements for lunch. Why just last week myself and five esteemed restaurant critics met for lunch at the new Noble Rot in Soho, with most of us peeling off around 6pm – a modest five hours of chat about food, restaurants and more. That’s right: a working lunch …
Which is a wonderful institution; a beautiful thing and well worth saving. And in a world where opportunities for socialising are dwindling ever further and the hospitality industry needs our help, a long lunch with colleagues is a fine place to start.