I’ve browsed and sluiced with the best of them at haute cuisine establishments from Cape Town to Cairo, from Sydney to San Francisco. Good food and fine wine makes living well the best revenge, as the cliché goes.
Nothing like a chilled bottle of Bollinger, cold lobster, and giant prawns with real mayonnaise to round off the day, or a glass or two of good Bordeaux and an impeccably cooked sirloin to help one sleep the sleep of the just.
No killjoy puritan I. Been there, done that, got the large Amex bills and the extra chin to prove it.
So like a war hero turned pacifist I feel I have the most impeccable credentials to stand up and boldly claim:
“The business lunch when travelling is the worst thing that can be inflicted on both the traveller and the business he or she is in.”
Don’t choke on that canapé; don’t spit out the Pouilly Fuisse, just calm down and listen. Firstly I agree with rogue Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie who once claimed it was the long lunch that was turning Britain into a Third World nation.
Lunch is the most unnecessary of meals, and when taken on business trips it’s positively harmful. First off, let’s be frank with one another here. We may occasionally march into some exotic city’s restaurant at one o’clock, full of self-importance thinking, ‘I’m abroad, having lunch. How good is that?” But in truth we know that anything said here as we plough through three or more courses washed down with a couple of bottles, can just as easily be discussed in a memo, an e-mail or even a telephone call.
And we also know that after a long lunch while abroad on business no-one is fit for anything more than a prolonged snoring snooze fest for the rest of the day.
When you’ve got different time zones and jet lag, disorientation, perhaps a sleepless night on a plane behind you, a premature lunch can spell disaster. I once landed in Hong Kong at around 11 am. Hong Kong being eight hours ahead it was 3 am in my brain, I’d slept fitfully but just polished off a hearty airborne breakfast, trying to ease myself into the new time zone.
After leaving Customs I was immediately ferried to a Tsimshatsui restaurant for an impromptu Chinese banquet with my clients. Still reeling with aeroplane motion memory, I was suddenly faced with 1,000 year old eggs; birds nest soup, stewed eel, grilled python, Singapore noodles, curried duck, five different kinds of rice, squid, abalone and worse – endless toasts drunk from enormous tumblers brimming with Remy Martin brandy.
To not eat would be to lose face for my Chinese clients and myself. But what I did lose later that afternoon was the ill-digested contents of my stomach, and was ill for hours. Had these people no imagination? Couldn’t they see I wouldn’t remotely want masses of food an hour after stepping off an 11 hour flight? And the business I’d travelled there to discuss with them? Hardly mentioned, we dealt with it all in the boardroom two days later.
I once took an inaugural Alitalia flight from Tokyo to Rome via Moscow and Frankfurt. When I arrived I didn’t know if it was morning, noon, Saturday or April Fools’ Day, but was immediately rushed off to have a pre-arranged complimentary lunch with the manager of Rome’s Monopole Hotel.
We had six courses accompanied by various Chianti Classicos, and ended with a zabaglione washed down with the dessert wine Lagrima Christi. It means tears of Christ, but without wishing to be blasphemous, the tears were all mine as I forced myself to plough through the lunch. Imagine being woken from a deep sleep at – say 5am on a winter morning – and then force fed ravioli, risotto, veal escalope and constantly having a full wine glass pushed into your face, and you’ll know how I felt. Nauseous again.
The lunch, the wine, the jet-lag, all combined to eventually knock me out so soundly that not even the bedside telephone woke me for a reception that evening.
So let’s stop pretending. Unless it’s the equivalent of a prêt-a-manger brie and cranberry sauce sandwich and a café latte, we don’t need the foreign business lunch. It’s expensive, unnecessary and ruinous to our gastric systems and ultimately our expanding waist lines.
In America when they describe someone as “out to lunch” it means they’re not fully compos mentis. They’re not far wrong.
