The lazy lunch was a great joy that was in danger of disappearing. Now it’s firmly back on the menu
Liz Hodgkinson
After some years in the doldrums, glamorous restaurants are bouncing back, as customers are rediscovering the joys of lunch. And I don’t just mean a quick sandwich at your desk or in a coffee shop, but a long, leisurely midday meal with wine that you share with a friend, work colleague or family member.
In fact, 2024 looks like being the year of the revival of lunch, with the news that one of Princess Diana’s favourite restaurants, Le Caprice in St James’s, is to re-open under the name Arlington after being closed for four years.
The Ivy restaurant in Covent Garden now has nearly 40 branches across the country, and the high-end Indian restaurant Dishoom, founded in 2010, is due to open its eleventh branch in Oxford later this year.
At one time lunch was considered so important to the joys of life that in 1986 the novelist and journalist Keith Waterhouse wrote a book about it, called The Theory and Practice of Lunch. Indeed, he listed ‘lunch’ as his only hobby in his Who’s Who entry.
Then there were ‘ladies who lunch’ – well-off, well-dressed women who met for the midday meal wearing hats and gloves and, as often as not, smoking cigarettes in holders.
When I was a young journalist in Fleet Street lunch was an important, even vital, part of the job. The whole thing now sounds like something from a vintage film, but we would go to the Savoy in a chauffeur-driven car, even though the restaurant was within easy walking distance, to entertain contacts and colleagues.
Many important deals and job offers were concluded over lunch, and firm, often lifelong friendships were cemented. Later, after newspapers dispersed around London, lunch was largely forgotten. Socialising became less important and transactions could be conducted by email.
By then we would rarely meet the people with whom we did business, and lunch was reduced to a sandwich man coming round the office in the middle of the day.
So what are the attractions of the old-fashioned lunch, served in a beautiful restaurant with waiters hovering around to attend to your every need? First of all, although it may be an intimate setting, lunch is understood by both parties not to be a romantic liaison. As Waterhouse says: ‘You can happily invite a lady who is not your wife to lunch in the knowledge that you will almost certainly not be obliged to escort her
