The Kitchen Thinker: the power lunch in the credit crunch

The Kitchen Thinker: the power lunch in the credit crunch

Whither the power lunch, asks Bee Wilson.

Me gusta cómo escribe esta mujer: lo que cuenta y de la manera que lo hace.

( Y está en el facebook.....mmmhhmm..)
By Bee WilsonPublished: 7:00AM BST 31 Jul 2009

Photo: TOBY MORISON

He served everyone from Jackie O to Henry Kissinger. Days before he died he had cooked lunch for the Dalai Lama. You may not know his name, but the chef Christian Albin, who died in June aged 61, was the man credited with inventing the 'power lunch’. At the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, where he had cooked since 1973, Albin sent out lunches to the city’s rich and famous, who knew that they could always get a deal done in the wood-lined Grill Room over dover sole and bison carpaccio.

What is a power lunch? Never having eaten one myself, I can’t be sure. But I get the impression it is like a business lunch only more so. In the 1960s businessmen sank three martinis and spent the rest of the afternoon slumped over the filing cabinet. In the 1980s they were too busy for lunch ('Lunch is for wimps,’ sneered Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street). Then came the power lunch – an extension of the boardroom in which powerful types treated the meal as a form of combat (Do Lunch or Be Lunch, as one business manual has it).

The power lunch is the opposite of the humble desk sandwich that most of us survive on. Power lunches are high on protein and low on sleepy-making carbs. The Four Seasons was famous for serving a hamburger, but with no bun or fries (only spinach on the side) – healthier but also quicker to eat. The clock ticks. Your deal must be done between the starter and double espresso (no time for small talk).

This is not about ordering whatever you fancy. 60 Minutes to Success: The Ultimate Guide to Power Lunching, by Ronald Adams, Alice Adams and Rachel Seff, lays out strict rules for foods you should never choose: 'Anything smothered with gooey, greasy sauce… Long stringy pasta, like spaghetti. Anything you can’t pronounce.’ They warn, too, that you mustn’t order pudding 'unless others do first’. This is all about not showing weakness.

The authors are keen on salad, which sends a message to your host that you are 'health-conscious’. But beware cherry tomatoes! There is a terrifying danger, they suggest, that when you slice one you will send 'seeds spraying across the table’ at your 'tablemates’. On the other hand, putting a whole cherry tomato in your mouth is not acceptable either. This, it would seem, is one of the great dilemmas of the business world. The answer? 'By using your knife to steady it, simply pierce the tomato with a salad fork to hold it while cutting’.

It is not clear yet if the power lunch will survive the credit crunch. London restaurants are trying all kinds of tricks to entice back business trade: two-for-ones, free glasses of bubbly, special fixed-price super-speedy meals (the 10-minute lunch for £10). But the idea of power lunching suddenly seems in rather poor taste, when so many have had to leave the office altogether.

In any case, shouldn’t lunch be more about pleasure than business? A good lunch is an oasis in the madness of the day. Power lunches sound designed to give you indigestion – all that pressure to order the correct appetiser. There aren’t many upsides to being made redundant. One is that you can eat cherry tomatoes in the privacy of your home, as slowly as you like, without worrying that a splattered seed will lose you that deal.