The Lost Art of Taking a Long, Boozy Lunch

Every year or two, the weekday business lunch—sometimes called the power lunch, in which businessmen and businesswomen break bread, often with alcohol—is declared either dead or back. It came up last week, when one of the most popular writers on Substack, Emily Sundberg, author of the “Feed Me” newsletter, suggested lunch was waning. Nobody eats anymore, she said (I suspect that’s a reference to the prevalence of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic), and our phones are always getting in the way.

“Modern technology has also made it harder to just be present sitting across the table from someone, focused solely on the food and conversation, without feeling the screaming glow of notifications from the device stashed at the bottom of my bag,” Sundberg wrote.

The newsletter item was part of a bigger conversation happening this year: We are very worried about the state of lunch. Few observers are declaring the meal dead; instead they seem to think it’s in a precarious place. The New Yorker just ran a full-throated endorsement in a story titled “The Case for Lunch.” In April, The Wall Street Journal warned readers that packing their own sandwich or salad and eating it at their desks was hurting local economies. That same month, The Economist urged its audience to go out for lunch on weekdays.

The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal have lately encouraged readers to take a proper workweek lunch—not sit alone at their desks or on a bench outside their office.

In years past, we felt more certain that lunch was either thriving or experiencing a nadir. It was only a year ago that The New York Times, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Inc., and others ran headlines declaring the power lunch back. Those declarations came two years after the Times said, “The Business Lunch Might Be Going Out of Style.” A year before that story published, The Wall Street Journal insisted the New York power lunch had returned.

I remember a widely shared story from 2015 in which the Times used the power lunch to pit the old guard of media against the new. “The thought of hourslong, sometimes vodka-soaked lunches is a wee bit foreign to the newest generation of media stars,” John Koblin wrote, followed by this unforgettable quote:

“I almost resent having to go out to lunch,” said Ben Lerer, a co-founder of the website Thrillist and a managing director of Lerer Hippeau Ventures. “I’m too busy. My assistant picked something up for me that I ate in a meeting.”

The story really annoyed the staff at Esquire, because we quite literally invented the term “power lunch.” In October 1979, Esquire editor in chief Lee Eisenberg coined the phrase in a story about the Four Seasons restaurant.

“Understand that it isn’t the head of the company who lunches in the Bar Room,” he wrote. “More likely, it is the head thinker of a shop. Editors, creative directors, designers, wine aficionados—these are the lords and ladies who lunch.”

The opening page of the 1979 Esquire story that invented the term “power lunch.” Pictured on the page is the restaurant at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, then the epicenter of the meal.

Eisenberg’s story came after a particularly fraught time for the power lunch. Two years earlier, President Carter had launched a full-scale assault on the ritual. In the late ’70s, he proposed reducing the amount people could deduct from their taxes for a business meal. The business community saw it as an attack on the three-martini lunch.

“Okay, so Mr. Carter is still a barefoot boy in Gomorrah,” the financial journalist Alan Abelson wrote in a 1977 Wall Street Journal column. “But he’s gone too far. It’s one thing to cuddle up to the Cubans, hobnob with Congressmen and similar dubious types, stand up for a prominent subordinate who may have strayed from the path of fiscal seemliness. These rate as mere peccadillos in our book, deserving of no more than a mild twit, compared to the staggering enormity of his persistent attack on martinis.”

Before Reagan was even sworn in, however, The Washington Post Magazine in October 1980 put the midday elites at ease by insisting the power lunch had returned.

Vice President George Bush and President Ronald Reagan power-lunching at the White House in the ’80s.

Why are we so preoccupied with the state of our midday meal? Because it’s nostalgic, connecting us to a past that was more civilized and elegant. Never mind whether that was the reality. It’s a collective memory in which we leave the office and return a little liquored up. It makes office work seem sexy. Whether it was the ’70s or the present day, a proper lunch acts as the rearguard against our fast-approaching future, in which technology grinds all the personality—all the fun, really—out of our workdays. Or, as the writer Lauren Collins put in The New Yorker, lunch “can serve as a redoubt of leisure and even decadence in an ever-optimizing world: the simmering Sunday ragu, the midday martini, the vacation table laid at two o’clock and not abandoned until the heat fades.” In that way, lunch, with or without libations, whether powerful or leisurely, is a small act of rebellion. That’s why we’re so worried about its precarity—without it, the resistance is dead.

Last June, Esquire’s food and drink editor, Jeff Gordinier, invited me to lunch on a Wednesday at Le Bernardin, the upscale French restaurant run by chef Eric Ripert. The chef served us his tasting menu, and when we tried to beg off the wine pairings, the waitstaff—surprised and politely annoyed—pressed us to reconsider. We gave in and enjoyed several (smallish) glasses of wine with our lunch. I returned to the office 30 minutes later than I had wanted but entirely worry-free.

Thankfully, Emily Sundberg didn’t declare lunch dead via newsletter. Instead she issued a rallying cry: “I think about the most glorious summer lunches—the sensation of holding a cold martini glass with French fry salt crystallizing between my finger and the condensation. My calendar in August is pretty open…”

Let’s all plan to follow her lead.

This story appeared in the weekly Letter from the Editor email newsletter. Subscribe to Esquire to receive it in your in-box every Sunday.