Working up an appetite for the humble staff canteen

Eating in the canteen is an ideal compromise between long lunches and wolfing down a sandwich as you work, writes GAUTAM MALKANI

WHEN TRYING to decide where to take my wife for our wedding anniversary last month, only one idea stood out from my list of cringe-making candlelit clichés: dinner in the office canteen.

This is not as stupid as it might sound. Soon after we started dating, she found herself working in the building next door. Perhaps because she’s a management consultant, she decided the most time and cost-efficient way to hold our lunchtime liaisons would be to dine together in our respective staff canteens. Or perhaps it was because mushy food just seemed appropriate.

Either way, my affection for the office canteen long predates my relationship with my wife. When I commuted from the outer reaches of outer suburbia, I’d eat dinner there to stop myself flaking out during the epic journey home. Then, when I moved into a flat down the road from the office, I still found myself getting dinner in our canteen, although this time in a polystyrene takeaway box.

Even when I worked night shifts, replacing the traditional lunch hour with an 8pm break for dinner, my compulsion to eat both meals in the staff canteen meant I’d arrive for my shift early while they still served lunch.

This devotion to the office canteen might seem slightly ludicrous given the easy availability of microwave meals. Even more so given that our office is but a kidney stone’s throw from a market bustling with snack stalls, cafes and restaurants. But surely it is not as ludicrous as the opposite, all too common extreme: whingeing about your office canteen as if it’s some kind of Dickensian punishment. Wake up and smell the greasy gravy – these places are one of the greatest perks of office life.

Everyone who has an office canteen should be grateful. Of course, the important thing is not to focus on the food. The dishes served up in our canteen have been delicious of late, but it hasn’t always been thus. The point is, even when it only bordered on edible, I still preferred eating there.

For starters, eating a proper hot meal in the canteen just makes more sense. I suspect most people who snub theirs feel like they’re escaping monotony and corporate drudgery as much as treating their tastebuds. But who are they trying to kid? We all know that, in practice, popping out for lunch usually means grabbing a sandwich, and that grabbing said sandwich is just a prelude to bringing it back and eating it at your desk.

Because, let’s face it, these days how many office workers can still take a whole hour for an à la carte lunch? Staff canteens have become an ideal compromise between the quaintly extravagant lunch hours of times long gone and the soul-destroying gobbling of food at your desk today.

Office canteens are also places for cerebral as well as dietary nourishment – giving you the chance to mix with colleagues you might not otherwise talk to, much less eat with.

Of course, this inclusivity can be either a good thing or a bad thing. In my experience, our canteen has sometimes felt like an invigorating intellectual salon, allowing me to converse with interesting and intelligent colleagues whom I normally wouldn’t feel clever enough to talk to.

Perhaps perversely, this camaraderie can actually benefit when the quality of food falls short – a little like the way bug-eating contests help bring rival contestants closer together on survival-based reality TV shows.

In the same vein, office canteens can also bring management and underlings together more effectively than corny corporate away days or drunken Christmas parties.

This egalitarianism is no doubt helped by the fact that canteens tend to have the kind of large communal tables that restaurants reserve for birthday celebrations, although admittedly without much celebration.

In this respect, the most regrettable development in our own canteen in recent years is not the much-lamented disappearance of hot custard and apple crumble, but the introduction of a long bar that encourages the kind of lone dining more suited to Edward Hopper paintings and goths. However, what I really love about the canteen is the sense of continuity it lends to office life. In the 11 years since I started working here, my desk, phone extension and immediate colleagues have moved to different parts of the building, sometimes to different parts of the world, but the canteen has always remained on the sixth floor, its familiar scent greeting you as you exit the lift.

On returning to the office recently after spending 18 months working from home, I found myself overcome with joy when I laid the trusty plywood tray on the granite counter, ready for a much-needed square meal. My colleagues were baffled by my childlike enthusiasm – some of them even thought I was sarcastic. But they were not nearly as confused as the chef one afternoon when I felt moved enough to compliment him on the food. Once he realised I was being sincere, he seemed as overjoyed as I was.

That said, I suspect if I ever do have dinner up there on my wedding anniversary, I will probably be eating by myself. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Lucy Kellaway is away