Two weeks ago, during a work trip to Milan, I had a free lunchtime and found my way to a humble-looking trattoria surrounded by office blocks in an unromantic corner of the city.
At 12.30pm, when I took a seat at the counter, it was all but empty. By 1pm it was heaving. Every seat was full and they were queueing out the door. It was clear from the shirt sleeves and the familiarity that this wasn’t anything special. It was just colleagues from local businesses sitting down together. It was lunchtime in Milan and they were damn well going to have lunch. They were here for €12 plates of spaghetti puttanesca or orecchiette with pesto. And yes, a glass of wine while you’re at it. Here in Milan, lunch mattered.
Last week the film director Wes Anderson revealed in a podcast interview with the chef and restaurateur Ruth Rogers of the River Cafe, that he had done his darnedest to reduce lunch on his sets to an afterthought. It just took too long, he said.
“For years I tried to make it just soup and to convince everyone that we would just eat soup and then get right back to work,” he told Ruthie’s Table 4. It fits. Anderson’s dialogue is famously sparse and clearly so are his eating habits. Have you seen the man? He looks like he hasn’t eaten a proper lunch since the release of Jaws. The problem is that a lot of work on film sets is hard manual labour. “Most people don’t just want soup,” Anderson admitted “and eventually there was a mutiny.” They had to get the key grip, Sanjay Sami, steak and chips.
I know I am meant to be Team Sami and Team Milan. I am meant to be a cheerleader for a proper lunch. It’s a mark of being civilised and all that. We sit. We eat. We talk. Life is good. Morale is boosted. But in truth it has never been my favourite meal.
The responsibilities of the day are always just outside the door, winking at you, reminding you that work is not yet over. If you eat that dessert, you know you’ll fall asleep at your desk, it whispers. And do you really think a glass of wine is a good idea? Dinner, meanwhile, is eating on your own time. Lunch is eating on somebody else’s, whether they are actually paying you or not.
In this, it seems I am not alone. The Milanese might regard a proper sit-down lunch as a birthright; the British, not so much. A recent survey backed by the mass catering company Compass, who might well have an interest in the subject, found that in Portugal, Brazil and Japan on average workers take more than 45 minutes for lunch. Meanwhile in northern European countries such as Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and yes, the UK, it can be only 30 minutes or less.
And what of the dear French? Well la pause déjeuner may have declined over the years. In 1975 workers reported taking almost an hour and 40 minutes for lunch. Outstanding effort. By 2018 it was down to an average of 39 minutes, though more than 60% of Parisians reported that they take between one and two hours. In this they have the weight of French law on their side. There is an (admittedly unenforceable) law in France barring eating lunch at your desk. All businesses employing more than 50 people must have somewhere their employees can stop to eat.
Despite Wes Anderson’s best efforts, the American film and TV business is very much more Paris than London. I’ve been on a lot of British TV sets. On the bigger ones you might get a food truck of varying quality there to serve up some sort of lunch. On the smaller ones it might be a wicker basket with an artful arrangement of Monster Munch, Scampi Fries and Lion Bars. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, it’s a gargantuan buffet akin to something offered at the Four Seasons. The actor Jason Isaacs once told me of the terror of being faced with the LA craft services options when he was on a Star Trek shoot lasting months, stitched into a 23rd-century starship captain’s Lycra bodysuit and knowing that if he touched any of it, the lumps and bumps would show in hi-def.
For some in the film and TV business, however, a good lunch remains a point of principle. Phil Rosenthal is now known as the presenter of the joyous Netflix food travelogue Somebody Feed Phil, but he made his name as the producer of the hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. For Rosenthal the route to a happy set lay through the team’s stomach. “It’s always been very important for me”, he has said. “I believe that families gather around food.” And the best set is just another family. He proudly proclaims that he had “the best craft services” in Hollywood.
And there was quirky, geeky Wes Anderson trying to strip everything back to the bare essentials, including the lunch options. Have a bowl of soup. It was a brave move, but it was never going to fly. I may well be a shameful traitor to the cause. But clearly if you want a job done well, a damn good lunch is the way to go every time. Just ask the people of Milan. And Wes Anderson’s key grip.
