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The days of the long boozy business lunch are over. With expense accounts cut to the bone and restaurants closing down, Stuart Jeffries mourns the end of a British institution
Foodblog: What are you eating for a credit crunch lunch?
There used to be something called The Reach. If you were invited out to a business lunch, you might, out of sheer misguided politeness, reach towards the bill when it arrived. Just to show willing. Not that you seriously expected to pay. "Inevitably what happened was that the person who had invited you would rush to grab the bill before you got it. It was like two gunslingers trying to be the fastest draw in the west, and you always secretly knew you were going to lose." So says a fund-raising director for a large UK charity.
"Now what happens is that you'll reach - and find that you're paying. Sometimes it's even worse than that: you're invited out for lunch by a donor and when the bill comes and you offer, just to be polite, to go 50-50, they accept! That puts someone like me in a very invidious position. I don't really have an expense account - we're a charity, for crying out loud! - but you don't want to upset someone who may well be significantly bankrolling my charity at some future point." Perhaps understandably, she doesn't want to be named.
Lunchtime etiquette has changed as diners adjust to lean times. Shrinking bonuses and the widespread abolition of expense accounts mean that if people go for a sitdown lunch at all, they are less likely to pay the bill. "Businesses are cutting down on their expense accounts and so there's generally less week-time dining out than there was six months ago," says Peter Backman, managing director of Horizons, a company that monitors the restaurant business.
In New York, lunch is reportedly a dying institution. A recent article in the New York Times was headlined: "At the power lunch, the check is kryptonite". It reported that even press officers were declining to take out reporters for lunch. Something similar is happening over here, showing how crazy the credit crunch has become. Time was that a journalist was always a good bet for a free lunch, not least because newspaper ethics historically demanded that the journalist did more than just reach for the bill, for fear of being schmoozed. It isn't like that any more: the media, like everywhere else, is cutting back on expense-account lunches as advertising revenue plummets. Instead of lunch, with wine, business meetings are more likely now to be conducted over lattes or, once the weather warms up, sandwiches in the park.
"That shift is particularly noticeable in London and the large metropolitan cities," says Backman. "What is especially noticeable is that the era of the long, boozy lunch is over. Less wine is being ordered and customers are spending less long at table."
Is the institution of lunch suffering just because of the credit crunch? "Not entirely," says Backman. "In Britain, the expense-account lunch has been a declining phenomenon for a long while. The corporate belt-tightening is more intense now, but it predates the recession."
This time last year, Goldman Sachs issued a memo to its staff saying lunch should no longer cost more than £52 per person - unless prior permission was obtained. Even more dismally, the bank extended the opening hours of its in-house cafeterias to 9pm, while prohibiting its bankers from claiming expensive meals ordered in to have at their desks. "The maximum reimbursable amount for cafeteria meals has been adjusted to £10 to reflect the cost of a full meal within the firm's cafeteria," said the memo.
It's all a far cry from the giddy days of 2002, when six bankers ran up a £44,000 wine bill at Gordon Ramsay's Pétrus and the food was thrown in for free. True, Barclays Capital later sacked five of them, but let's not spoil the story.
But the recession has clearly intensified a puritanical trend. In London, more than 100 restaurants have already closed this year. And many more restaurants are bemoaning the decline in trade. "When Lehman Brothers collapsed, we were all privately crying in our offices," Richard Corrigan, owner of Corrigan's Mayfair, recently told Bloomberg's restaurant writer Richard Vines. Leading British restaurateurs Antony Worrall Thompson and Tom Aikens have closed restaurants, and even Gordon Ramsay has closed Foxtrot Oscar and the Devonshire for two days a week - as if in testimony to the new truth that hardly anyone wants to have a posh lunch on Monday or Tuesday any more. According to Jeffreys Henry LLP, the accountancy firm whose clients include Ramsay, as many as 50 more restaurants might fold in the next few months.
"I think a few will go to the wall," says Achille Cherchuz, general manager of the Michelin-starred French restaurant L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in London's West End. It is now offering two courses at lunch for £19 and three courses for £25, whereas before the credit crunch it only allowed diners to choose from the à la carte menu at lunch. Why the change?
"The corporate business is shrinking and expense budgets are not as abundant," says Cherchuz. "People are looking for faster lunches and simpler products. What we're saying is that, even in the credit crunch, you can afford to eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
I had a gentleman come off the street the other day waving a newspaper which had a story about our lunch deal, saying: 'I can't believe it! I can't believe a Michelin-starred restaurant is offering a cheap lunch in London.' But it's true, and our customers should thank the credit crunch for that."
But how can the restaurant afford to cut prices this way? "It works as a business model right now because otherwise we lose customers at lunch," says Cherchuz. "Doing this deal has increased the number of customers, which you have to admit is pretty amazing in a recession. We're full most days for lunch now, which means between 55 and 60 diners."
It isn't only the Michelin-starred end of the restaurant industry that is offering meal deals. "Two-for-one deals are common, 50% discounts can be easily found," says Backman. "For savvy diners with a little money to spare this is a great time to have lunch." Some restaurateurs have been asking customers to pay only what they feel the meal was worth, including the Little Bay in Farringdon, London, and two seafood restaurants in Devon - moves that surely suggest that before the recession customers were paying too much. Both here and in the US, it's clear that the old-fashioned expense-account business lunch is fast becoming obsolete, but in Britain it's being replaced by a different way of eating out. No longer is the most fought-over lunch-time demographic the porcine banker on a boozy spree, but the tap water-drinking executive who might have a couple of cheap appetisers in a hurry. Restaurants are now competing as never before to keep a shrinking institution from disappearing altogether.
To find out what's changed, I decide to go to a Michelin-starred restaurant to eat a lunch as cheaply as possible. At the Ledbury in London's Notting Hill, chef-owner Brett Graham offers two courses for £19.50. I reserve online at toptable.co.uk and, as an introductory offer, I am given a £20 wine voucher. It looks, for one blissful moment, as though I am about to spend minus 50p on lunch.
Business on a Tuesday lunchtime is hardly brisk - only four people have booked, but by 1pm five tables are filled with what staff call "walk-ins". What's going on? "You can go two ways with lunch," says Graham, a plain-talking Australian. "You can say, 'I'm going to offer ****e at lunch like a bowl of soup with cream or a cheap cut of meat.' A lot of people are doing that now.
"We go a different way. We're trying to keep things fresh. We get our fish fresh every day, so if yesterday [Monday] you had ordered the turbot from the à la carte menu, it would have been fresh that morning."
Hold on, I say to Graham: my main course isn't from the à la carte but from your cheap lunch menu. "That's right. It was yesterday's turbot. If you'd had it the day before from the à la carte, the turbot would have been fresh that day. And we're doing the same thing throughout the week. You could have had monkfish as a main from the à la carte one day, which would have been fresh that day, or the following day from the fixed-price menu. It's still a loss leader for us to sell fish so cheaply."
Turbot from the Ledbury's à la carte would have been £18. My lunch, instead, costs £19.50 (before, at least, I had a glass of wine and a coffee) for both starter and main. I order flame-grilled mackerel with Celtic mustard and smoked eel, followed by roast turbot with garlic spätzle (German noodles but made with wild garlic). Both courses, at least according to my limited palate, are wonderful.
But are you cutting corners? "Nah, buddy, I'd rather close than cut corners," says Graham. "The lunch thing does create problems, especially with staffing costs and things like laundering. In my book, any cost you can save without the customer noticing is legit." Good point: only when Graham tells me the turbot is not fresh today do I notice. And even then, it doesn't bother me.
Are people drinking less booze with their lunch? "Maybe slightly less. But, again, that's not even clear. I had three people walk off the street and spend a grand and a half on wine the other week."
I ask a table of four diners at the Ledbury who are finishing off their main courses and thinking about ordering cheese how the credit crunch is affecting their lunch-time habits. "Well, three of us are French and one of us is English," says a Parisian businessman. "So three-quarters of us will never, as a matter of principle, say no to a good lunch. And our English friend invited us here to show us that there is such a thing as a good, reasonably priced gastronomic experience in London. He has proved his point."
Two women diners at another table are on appetisers and tap water. Would it be fair to describe you as ladies who lunch? "No, that would be bloody insulting, actually," says one. "We're not kept women who have nothing to do but get sozzled at lunch. We're having a business meeting, thanks very much, at a place where we know the food is good." Both turn out to be interior designers.
After insulting a fair proportion of the Ledbury's lunch trade, I retreat to my table where my waitress is serving coffee and a selection of petits fours. I reach for, and pay, my own bill. Minutes later, I'm back on the street, filled with mackerel, turbot, two freebie bacon-and-onion brioches, a glass of riesling, a gratuitous amuse-bouche of brie feuille with foie gras, espresso and a single Earl Grey petit four. Total bill: £34.03 (including 12.5% service).
My mistakes? Drinking at lunch time, and spending two hours at table when I should have been at the coalface of journalistic productivity. I nod off on the tube back to the office as though I am a hack from the previous millennium. Happy - albeit probably doomed - days.
The following day, though, I am writing this piece at my desk over cheese and pickled onion sandwiches that I made myself. Lunching out may not yet be stone-cold dead in Britain, but it isn't what it used to be.
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