Letter of Recommendation: Drinking at Lunch Is A Good Thing

Bringing In the New Cheer

Adam Sternbergh of The New York Times reports on a topic dear to my heart:

I may be wrong, but my hunch is that, when you go out for lunch with colleagues or even just office friends, you don’t order a martini, let alone three. I’ll wager you don’t order a beer, a glass of wine or a brandy-soaked cherries jubilee. That’s because, a few decades after the heyday of the notorious “three-martini lunch,” the act of ordering even one measly martini with your lunch on a workday is viewed as roughly equivalent to pulling out your heroin works and splaying them on the table between courses.

Would it surprise you to learn that the three-martini lunch was once such a staple of the American workday that it was celebrated by the former President Gerald Ford in 1978? Addressing the National Restaurant Association, Ford called the practice “the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” The three-martini lunch may be remembered as an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness. But Ford’s joke about efficiency ironically suggests exactly why the martini-at-lunch disappeared: not because of some renewed sense of temperance but because of our ascendant obsession with cramming every minute of our day with work.

When the Italian brewer Birra Moretti commissioned a poll in 2011 on daytime drinking habits among American workers, it found that, whereas nearly half of Italians reported they were “inclined” to have a drink with lunch, only 20 percent of Americans reported the same inclination.

…

This might explain how we’ve arrived at this improbable moment when microdosing LSD in order to increase workplace productivity is, in some precincts, more professionally acceptable than having a glass of wine. But it’s not LSD that has replaced our midday cocktails; it’s that other modern intoxicant: productivity.

(click here to continue reading Letter of Recommendation: Drinking at Lunch – The New York Times.)

Classic Martini – Hendrick’s

As someone who has been self-employed for a while, I don’t have a compunction about day drinking, when appropriate. If I’m meeting a prospective new client, and they are open to having a glass of wine with lunch, I’ll join them, but I won’t be the first to order it. However, if I’m the one being wooed by a prospective new business associate, wine with lunch is absolutely encouraged, or beer if sushi is on the menu. If I’m lunching with associates I already know, or eating to brainstorm, or similar kinds of “working lunches”, again, having a glass or two¹ of something is absolutely encouraged. Some meals, I prefer the dose of caffeine of a good green tea, but often will also order an alcoholic beverage for after. 

21st C.E. Americans are weird though. This nation was founded on strong ale, cider, and eventually rye whiskey² – we should not be adverse to having a tipple in the middle of the day.

Vieux Carré with Armagnac and Few Rye

Drinking like Don Draper is not required, you should still be able to go back to work after your meal and not end up on a three day bender.

Martini Hour

1. never more [↩]
2. look up your early American history, if you’ve forgotten [↩]