Lunch For Success

No Wonder it Sounds Stuffy

Posted on 28. Apr, 2009 by Craig Peters in Uncategorized

Those of you who have read our blog before know that our definition of “Power Lunch” is broader than the image of high-powered fat cats with ludicrous expense accounts. Call it a business lunch. Call it a power lunch. We don’t really care. What matters to us is that people get together over a meal to do business. Plain and simple.

Every once in a while, I read something that reminds me why people have such a stuffy impression of a Power Lunch. I came across this nifty panoramic viewer of the India House, a Lower Manhattan luncheon club. The title of the page is “The Power Lunch Takes a Hit.” That’s not the stuffy part. That’s in the accompanying article,

Once there was the Broad Street Club and the Stock Exchange Club, private haunts for the financiers of Wall Street, killed off by the blights of merger and recession and by the money crusades of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney general of New York. India House, a stately Renaissance palazzo, is among the few survivors in the neighborhood that still provides a decent turkey club and the kick of a crisp martini for its aging clientele.

Established in 1914 by 38 guests at a special dinner at the Metropolitan Club, India House has long been a refuge for mercantile masters, a sanctuary near the stock exchange where men from J. P. Morgan or General Electric could gather, in the words of a founder, Walter Clark, to foster “relations between the bankers and the promoters of foreign trade.”

Its name is a nod to the West Indies; its décor is mildewed maritime. A 100-year-old globe of the earth looms beside the hostess’s desk. The dining room is hung with smoky paintings: “A View of Canton Harbor.” “The Steam Yacht Aguan.” “The Capt. Anthony Kelley, Jr. Passing Flushing, 1859.”

Business lunches are being held all over the world in places much less stately than this, and that’s a good thing. It’s time to let go of this old-fashioned image and replace it with an image of people simply getting together to do business over lunch.

There’s something else that gets my goat. The author is suggesting that lunch is a vanishing institution.

He was sitting in the dining room near four old men, skeletons who muttered about their doctors’ bills. The men wore sagging suits and somber faces; one of them wore a Band-Aid on his nose. The hush was such that one could hear their forks clank on the antique china plates. The chandelier above them had a pair of burnt-out light bulbs; a mirror above the oak buffet reflected the empty chairs.

Mr. Godfrey, a Londoner with tired-looking eyes, was coming to the end of an impassioned speech about the vanished institution known as lunch.

That’s silly. Lots of things are different in this recession. But does that mean we’re witnessing vanishing institutions? Are we also witnessing the vanishing institution of the automobile because car sales are down in this recession? Of course not.

Are we witnessing the vanishing institution of extravagent spending? Maybe so, but for the long run, I doubt it. For now at least, it’s a business faux paus to throw money around … and that’s a good thing, too.

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Tags: business lunch, Power Lunch