The last of a dining breed

The last of a dining breed: "Whenever office-bound workers drag themselves away from the desk for midday food these days, it’s likely to be eaten on the run. As for the long, boozy lunch – once a staple of the journalistic profession, among others – that’s dead. Even if people do make it to a restaurant, the meal will usually be both abstemious and short.
It’s an international trend, begun by latter-day puritans in the US but now spreading everywhere in the western world. Even Paris has succumbed. Although apparently some people do still eat in the daytime there, I’m told that many Parisian waiters don’t even bother offering them the wine menu any more. Quelle horreur.
My colleague on Monday couldn’t drink, as it happened, because he was driving. So to take the bad look off it, I had a single glass for us both. And over this we marvelled, not for the first time, at the prandial feats of our predecessors.
Journalism has a rich folklore relating the heroics of former editors and reporters who spent half-days over lunch, draining cellars, and still managed to get back to the office (often armed with indiscretions leaked by inebriated guests) in sufficient shape to get a newspaper out."



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