Last week, The Times ran a piece announcing the death of ‘Le Long Lunch’ in Paris — an ancient workday artform now guillotined entirely by Gen-Z, apparently, who are presumably also the reason no-one has massive expense accounts anymore or can afford to own houses. A couple of days later, Giles Coren argued that this was no bad thing, actually — and that long lunching, in its 1990s corporate hey-day, was really just an excuse for middle-aged men to hide the fact that they didn’t have much to do, and so they might as well do that not much while they were slightly drunk. It’s a core skill you rarely see endorsed on LinkedIn these days, along with ‘nepotism’, ‘desk snoozing’ and ‘stopping those jokes as soon as the women walk into the room out of respect.’
But it got me thinking. What were some of the legendary long lunches of days-gone-by? Which I realise is a bit like writing a piece entitled ‘the five most classic inside jokes’ or ‘five dreams I had recently where I scored the winning try’— real you-had-to-be-there stuff. But my pitch on ‘Five influencers now suddenly very quiet about Dubai’ got spiked, so here we are.
In April 2016, at a time when the Brexit vote was as troubling to David Cameron as a bad day’s bodyboarding in Polzeath, gouty foghorn Nigel Farage was taken for a ‘Lunch with the FT’ by Henry Mance. The pair headed to ancient City Boy chophouse Simpsons Tavern (soon to be re-opened, interestingly enough) where Farage, who had been going there for more than 30 years, decried how “sadly most of the waitresses have changed.” And so begins a “proper” lunch of six pints, a bottle of claret, two bowls of stewed cheese, a chump chop and sausage (Nigel), an apparently blasphemous goat’s cheese filo pastry (Henry; “for a brief moment I know how the Romanians must feel”) and several large glasses of port. The lunch is notable now in that it seemed to be such a relic of a lost era (“I must visit the eighties more often,” says Mance) and the general tone is highly skeptical as to Farage’s ongoing relevance. The old boy was losing his touch, it seemed: “enchanted by the past” and in danger of soon being “as outdated as his overcoat.”
Nearly a decade hence, Farage’s new party, Reform, now top the polls, way out ahead of Labour or the Conservatives. Mance and Farage may have had the boozy lunch, but we’re all now experiencing the hangover.
Okay, it’s not technically a lunch — but the opening to E Jean Carroll’s book about Gonzo-writer and Johnny Depp inventor Hunter S Thompson does begin at the lunch-ish hour of 3pm. Here it is in full:
3:00 p.m. rise
3:05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills
3:45 cocaine
3:50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill
4:05 first cup of coffee, Dunhill
4:15 cocaine
4:16 orange juice, Dunhill
4:30 cocaine
4:54 cocaine
5:05 cocaine
5:11 coffee, Dunhills
5:30 more ice in the Chivas
5:45 cocaine, etc., etc.
6:00 grass to take the edge off the day
7:05 Woody Creek Tavern for lunch-Heineken, two margaritas, coleslaw, a taco salad, a double order of fried onion rings, carrot cake, ice cream, a bean fritter, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone (a glass of shredded ice over which is poured three or four jiggers of Chivas)
9:00 starts snorting cocaine seriously
10:00 drops acid
11:00 Chartreuse, cocaine, grass
11:30 cocaine, etc, etc.
12:00 midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write
12:05-6:00 a.m. Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.
6:00 the hot tub-champagne, Dove Bars, fettuccine Alfredo
8:00 Halcyon
8:20 sleep
Television cook, five-wifer and bow-tie ambassador Keith Floyd always said his last meal ought to be oysters. And it was. On September 14th 2009, The beloved ‘gastronaut’ enjoyed a serious lunch at Mark Hix’s Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis, Dorset. He started with champagne (plus a cherry soaked in apple eau de vie) on the terrace, before moving inside for some oysters with potted shrimp toast and a glass of 2006 Pouilly Vinzelles. He then had red-legged partridge with bread sauce and a bottle of Côtes de Rhone, before finishing with a pear cider jelly, several cigarettes, and a coffee. The bon vivant had been in fine spirits on the occasion of his wife Celia’s 65th birthday, and had received some good news that morning about the bowel cancer he had lately been fighting. After a four hour lunch, he headed home, watched an episode of University Challenge, and waited excitedly for a special interview he had done with Keith Allen to be aired at 10pm. But just before it started, he fell asleep and never woke up. Celia remembers him saying “I have not felt this well for ages,” during his final lunch. “He had a very good last day.”
The lunch sittings at the lunch-only Yellow Bittern only last two hours. But the furore around this restaurant’s opening rumbled on for months. Founded by Hugh Corcoran — “a young Jack Black” in wire-frame glasses, according to Emily Sundberg — and Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones, the Caledonian Road restaurant gained worldwide attention (The New Yorker wrote many thousands of words, weaving in meditations on General Franco and the loneliness epidemic) after Corcoran decried some early diners for not enjoying their lunch with sufficient “abandon”. “A grand cru to drink and a Beaujolais Villages to rinse the mouth”, sort of thing. Let them eat coddle. But for what felt like a year, the debate raged endlessly on over whether lunch should be short and efficient and reasonably priced — or long and boozy and served to you by minor aristos who hate Sally Rooney.
Another ‘Lunch with the FT’ story, this time involving the 79-year-old poet Gavin Ewart and interviewer Nigel Spivey in October 1995. The pair began with several pre-gentrification negronis and very much ran from there. “We departed the Café Royal in a moderately straight line,” Spivey said in the article. He popped Ewart on a bus, and headed home himself for a snooze. When he woke the next day, he received a call from Ewart’s wife.
“There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second — and you are not to feel bad about this — is that he died this morning.”
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Issue 5
From titanium cameras and delinquent wallet chains to ankle casts and unguarded mountain bikes, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s real signature wasn’t tailoring — it was the accessories that made Camelot look casually undone.
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