A look at an institution, through (an empty) wine glass. A version of this article is published by the Financial Times.
In the 1980s my husband Nick had a large restaurant in Soho in London’s West End. It was extremely popular, especially for business lunches. It was a favourite with publishers, lawyers, journalists and media folk of all stripes. Just across Oxford Street in Charlotte Street, Channel 4 had started up with its new and unusual dependence on independent television producers. Soho was the epicentre of TV production. Conveniently situated, L’Escargot was a mecca for this new breed of independent producers who would hopefully lush up C4’s all-powerful commissioning editors. Nick would patrol the tables and tactlessly ask the hopefuls whom he knew, ‘So, have you got your commission yet?’ The fact that the restaurant’s speciality was American wine added some novelty to the business of entertaining.
One day in 1985 he came home from the restaurant with some extraordinary news about a friend who was then on The Sunday Times. ‘Sue Summers was in for lunch today with another woman – and they drank only water.’
Until the arrival of American influence on London’s professional community, it was a given that alcohol played a vital role in business lunches. There were still a few old-timers who preferred spirits or beer, but wine was catching on then in the UK and a bottle between two at lunchtime was considered a bare minimum. Some journalists specialised in lunches called TBEs, two bottles each, and old habits died hard.
François Feuillat, a London-based private-equity lawyer, remembers, ‘When I started my career at a large London law firm in 1995, wine was served at client lunches, of course, but also at internal sandwich-lunch meetings where a few bottles of Louis Latour’s Ardèche Chardonnay were passed around the mahogany meeting-room table, and usually ended up stuck in front of the same senior partners whom you would know not to disturb in the afternoon.’
Those who didn’t relish over-indulgence had to strategise. A corporate communications advisor friend unwilling to drink much herself at business lunches but didn’t want to seem mean or preachy, would suggest they each had a glass of champagne to begin with, and then ask whether they’d like a glass of wine with their meal.
But then came the more puritanical culture of the American investment banks, and the need to keep a clear head for afternoon calls to offices on the American east coast that were five hours behind London.
As drinking at lunchtime became less approved of, the set lunch menu at Le Gavroche, the Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant much favoured for upmarket business lunches, became even more popular because it included a half-bottle of wine that did not feature explicitly on any bill that was eventually submitted to an accounts department. ‘Sometimes we were asked to add a few extra covers on the bill to make up for the aperitif and digestif!’, chef-patron Michel Roux Jr told me.
Things changed gradually but significantly. A keen wine lover with experience of different careers on both sides of the Atlantic points out, ‘In American business circles, I’ve almost never seen drinking at lunch during my career (which started in 1992). I started working in London in publishing in 2004 and, while alcohol at lunch was becoming less common, among the older generation of publishers it was still relatively common. I moved to technology in 2006 and am not sure I’ve ever seen alcohol at lunch in the US or the UK outside of a holiday context such as a company ski trip.
‘The same is true in the investment world I’ve been in since 2020. I often have business meetings in Paris. I would say that I’m offered wine at perhaps 10–20% of lunches there but never with younger tech executives or investors.’
Englishman Mark Williamson co-founded Paris’s first wine bar, Willi’s Wine Bar, in 1980 and now also runs Macéo restaurant next door. Growing abstinence in the French capital is not something he welcomes. ‘There has been a notable drift to lunch without wine – or, at best, less wine’, he agrees gloomily, seeing it as a post-COVID result of online working, generational evolution and shorter working weeks, adding with British sangfroid, ‘Macéo provides a truer, more general view of this deplorable movement, where the consumption of wine is reserved to a more mature segment of the population who can still afford themselves a short nap in the office after lunch.’
Spain may have been famously the home of the siesta but things have been changing here, too. Our Ferran Centelles cut his wine-serving teeth at elBulli and was garlanded as Best Sommelier in Spain as long ago as 2006 but reports that at lunches in Spain, ‘the quantity of wine served has severely been reduced in many restaurants. Where before we served a bottle, now we serve a glass.’
Former CEO of the London Stock Exchange Xavier Rolet, who produces wine at Chêne Bleu in the southern Rhône and is currently a fellow at Harvard focusing on regenerative agriculture, has hosted business lunches and dinners in Europe, North America and Asia since COVID. He, too, has noticed that demand for wine by the glass is increasing, ‘as is the quality and breadth of “wine by the glass” offerings’.
Thomas De Waen is a Brussels-based wine collector with experience of business lunches all over Europe. ‘Twenty years ago, wine was a very common part of the business lunch scene, in Latin countries in particular. I remember that the canteens of most French businesses I visited had small bottles of wine that one could consume with lunch. There were occasions when refusing a drink at lunch marked you out as a bit of a bore. But this gradually faded away.
‘Today, asking for wine at lunch in most business occasions is akin to having “Dilettante” tattooed on your forehead. It shows that you either have a suspiciously high tolerance to alcohol or, worse, that you’re not planning to get much done after lunch. I guess this doesn’t apply to wine writers!’
I can confirm this, as can our Walter Speller, who, based in Italy, robustly defends drinking at lunchtime, not least because, he reports from an Italian perspective, ‘at lunch there is no stigma attached to actually ordering and drinking wine. And it is extremely rare to see drunk Italians.
‘At a lunch in Italy there will be wine, even if it is short (lately it has become fashionable to offer a “light lunch”, first to economise and secondly to keep it not so filling that people just want to take a nap afterwards). When I tell Italians about the UK culture where people eat a quick sandwich at their desk or get something to take away and wolf it down on the go, I am met with looks of utter puzzlement.’
Americans would surely understand completely, however, even though New York business lunches were famous at one time. Patrick Smith, senior beverage manager of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, reports, ‘Business lunches in New York have evolved over the past decade. For example, while we still see “three-martini lunches”, they are becoming less common. We also see many business lunch guests staying away from alcohol entirely in favour of diet Coke and iced tea. But we also love it when our guests try our non-alcoholic cocktail options.’
Non-alcoholic drinks menus are becoming increasingly common everywhere (though perhaps not in Italy) and restaurateurs are having to become ever-more creative in generating income now that the high margins on wine are denied them at lunchtime. The four-year-old Maison François on the fringes of Mayfair, London’s well-heeled financial district, has developed quite a business breakfast scene. Chief operating partner Ed Wyand volunteers, ‘a lot of what used to be lunch meetings are now breakfast meetings. My instinct is that some of this may be driven by people’s desire to avoid drinking, or perhaps just avoid the awkwardness over whether they will have a drink or not.
‘Most finance business lunches, if they do have any wine, will do wine by the glass or carafe rather than commit to a bottle. As a result we run a vin du jour programme alongside our plat du jour. This is primarily wines from large formats that we purchase small stocks of. We find that pouring large formats tableside will often have the “Aperol Spritz effect” of people seeing it and wanting it.’ Clever.
Will Beckett, co-founder of the Hawksmoor group of steak restaurants 20 years ago and today CEO of all 13 of them throughout the British Isles and now in New York and Chicago, is ideally placed to comment on the changing profile of the business lunch.
‘Perhaps we have a static memory of what a business lunch might be’, he suggests, ‘caught somewhere between a Mad Men vision of middle-aged white men drinking heavily for hours, to a more 1980s Wall Street view of people in power suits making Big Decisions in restaurants with tablecloths and fawning waiters.
‘But the reality isn’t static at all, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. For starters, it is hard to tell who is having a business lunch. It could be the group of men in their jeans and T-shirts. Is it the couple in the middle of the restaurant? Is it the drinkers, or the teetotallers? Those with flecks of grey in their hair, or people who look like they may only be in their first job?
‘Perhaps the only reliable guidelines are that business lunches happen mid week (mostly), and are paid for with a company card (mostly).’
Confounding expectations, he says they tend to sell their most expensive bottles at mid-week lunches. So, clearly, some people are still prepared to have their employers, or at least their companies, subsidise their most extravagant choices from the wine list.
Visitors to JancisRobinson.com can read hundreds of Nick's reviews of restaurants around the world. Image courtesy of Maskot via Getty Images.