Morning:
14°c
Siome of the most memorable meals and certainly some of the best bottles of wine I've ever tasted have been on City expense accounts.
I can think of a dinner for two at Pétrus which cleared £500, a lunch in Wiltons that was more than £300. In City terms, these are piffling amounts but they were still far removed from the prix fixée at Café Rouge.
It's the way my host invariably bypasses the cheaper bottles on the left and heads down the right-hand side of the list, or how he orders a glass of Rémy Martin at £28 that never fails to bring me up short. In the old days he'd light a fat cigar. Somebody - the bank, the firm - was picking up the tab.
Now such displays of ostentation are verboten. At Deutsche Bank, a large axe has been taken to expenses. While other banks have not issued the same sort of memorandum as Deutsche, the mood is the same: high living belongs to yesterday. Well, not quite. It's hard to imagine that the banks will rein in their sumptuous in-house catering - I had a meal only the other day in a bank that has written off billions in the sub-prime disaster that would have done Le Gavroche proud. But in public at least, staff are being told to cut back.
It's partly a cost-saving measure but it's also reputational. These are organisations that have squandered vast amounts, been forced to shed staff and go cap in hand to the authorities for extra cash - so now isn't the time to be seen to be flashing the company credit card. Still, the City's idea of showing restraint may not be shared.
In the Square Mile and at Canary Wharf, the Deutsche crackdown is seen as extreme - you only have to witness the lines of black cabs waiting patiently each evening outside the offices of the investment banks, all on account, to realise we're not talking mandatory use of the Oyster card just yet.
There are some things, too, that come before any corporate belt-tightening. I was talking to a banker the other day who apologised for his hangover - he then proceeded to regale me with his previous evening's activities. They'd started off at Sketch and ended up at a club in Mayfair. He'd got to bed at about 4am and he was clearly suffering - as no doubt was his entertaining allowance.
His excuse, he said, was that he was with a bunch of Qataris, potential clients, and that was what they expected. Needs must, he said, looking shamefaced.
Make no mistake, if there's business to be done and money to be made, all restrictions will be off.
