Business is bad, so let's lunch like crazy

Now, that trend has been dramatically reversed. It has got to the point that I dread the emails and phone calls inviting me to "pick a date" for which I have to surrender a precious couple of hours of the working day to check my mascara, rush into a taxi, linger over Dover sole and petits fours and then catch a cab back to my desk, where it takes a while to remember where I'd left off. Before you know it, dusk arrives and you wonder where the day has gone - all because of wretched lunch.

Yet, lunch one must, according to the unwritten code of business. Even celebrities now do it. Rather than take questions on the red carpet at their movie premieres, many attend a lunch the next day to meet the press. Publicist Peggy Siegal says it is a far more successful formula.

"Both the talent and the press prefers lunch," she says. "You have two hours during which the actors and the press don't feel pressured."

Julian Niccolini, owner of the Four Seasons restaurant, whose Grill Room is the ultimate backdrop for the Manhattan power lunch - last time I was there a few weeks ago, so too were Henry Kissinger; Donald Marron, the former chief executive of Paine Webber; Diana Taylor, Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend; Princess Firyal of Jordan, to name a handful - tells me that he is completely overbooked at midday.

"It seems that in a recession, people need to lunch more aggressively than ever," Niccolini says.

The head of a talent agency described the phenomenon to me thus: "There is a pecking order to the way in which you allot meals to people. If you only want to spend 45 minutes or an hour you do breakfast, coffee or drinks; dinner is usually purely social - you do that if you want something really intimate from someone. Lunch is the one time to mix business and the social. If you really want something, business-wise, you do lunch."

So now we know. Or do we? Recently I got asked to lunch by a well-connected financier. We chatted away but despite my persistence he batted away all questions about his work. I left, perplexed. Now he's asked me for lunch again. My suspicion is that, for him, this might be dinner, disguised as lunch.