The last of a dining breed

After a string of vague promises stretching back years, I finally got around this week to having lunch with a fellow journalist who lives down the country but travels to Dublin regularly.

This involved my belated first visit to a French restaurant that, when it opened a decade ago, had queues outside. So I was surprised to find it very quiet the day we were there. But then again, it was Monday. And besides, as my friend explained, “Nobody does lunch anymore.”

He may have been exaggerating this last point slightly – including us, there were a dozen or so diners. But he was right about the trend.

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.

A few of the tales date from as recently as the 1980s. But they might as well be the legends of Fionn and the Fianna now, so incredible do they seem.

On the way home later, I remembered the great American journalist, AJ Liebling, who would have been 110 this week. He lived through what was probably the glory age both of newspapers and of lunches. And this was fortunate, because the two subjects coincided more than normally in his life.

He was an acclaimed war correspondent, who also wrote well about boxing. But if he had a favourite theme, it was food. He once commented that the main requisite for quality food-writing was a good appetite: “Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.”

Well, suffice to say, Liebling was gifted in the appetite department, and wore the evidence on his person. In boxing terms, he was a superheavyweight, although too short to be one. That food was a subject close to him is attested to even by the book collection he left behind.

It was inherited by fellow writer Joe Mitchell, who found that Liebling's bookmarks included, in one case, a rasher. Yet even Liebling had to bow sometimes to the superior appetites of others. Thus in his 1962 collection, Between Meals, he paid tribute to Yves Mirande, a French actor and director he knew in Paris.

According to Liebling, Mirande used to dazzle onlookers in a right-bank restaurant “by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of fois gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot – and of course a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady had sent up from his estate . . .”

In these post-lunch days, a paragraph like that should be accompanied by a health warning. And Liebling himself did offer some comfort for moralists. He suffered gout and various other afflictions before expiring on the young side of 60.

Mirande, on the other hand, appears to have avoided retribution. His appetite was almost matched by his longevity. At any rate, he lived a full four-course life, with cheeseboard, and stretched proceedings out well into to the evening before he finally had to settle the bill, aged 82.

@FrankmcnallyIT