Lunch and business - keep them apart
My guest is late. Like a stood-up girlfriend, I wait in the restaurant for 15 minutes, sipping my mineral water and smiling demurely at the staff as I adjust my suit, forks and knives. When he eventually turns up, he spends 10 minutes meeting and greeting other people in a very loud voice. I rise to shake his hand and he grabs me by the shoulder and kisses me on both cheeks, much to my embarrassment. He orders soups and linguini with clams and tomato sauce, mopping up the latter with huge chunks of bread.
By the time we get to dessert I have heard about every problem he’s had with his wife over the past 10 years. I’m nearing the end of a dreaded business lunch and we haven’t said a word about the subject we’re here to discuss. My neck is sore with nodding, empathising and staring into the short horizon as he takes one telephone call after another. At least the telephone isn’t sitting on the table; it’s in his jacket pocket. After he shoves the last piece of orange cheesecake down his gullet, he wipes a dribble of sabayon off his chin with the back of his hand, then stands up to leave. “Email me your proposal!” he bellows, knocking over a chair on the way out. He has insisted on picking up the bill because I’m a woman, even though, thank God, this isn’t a date. To avoid more stares, I let him. Funny how what flatters a woman when romance is involved only serves to belittle her when it isn’t.
As far as lunching faux pas go, Mr Nameless has just committed most of them. Eating in public is never about just satisfying the yawning emptiness in your stomach; it has everything to do with manners, company and pleasant chatter. When all this is combined with business, in a world where men and women are meeting across crowded boardrooms, the possibilities of slipping up are really quite endless.
When we eat, we give ourselves away. The kind of behaviour that might just be accepted in an office – boorishness, arrogance, wild and loud laughter – suddenly becomes socially crippling when meals and meetings are combined into a single instrument of torture. People you think are smart and savvy suddenly become the kind of louts with whom you would not wish to be seen in public again, let alone sign on the dotted line.
When it was the company that paid in terms of time and money, and three-hour boozy lunches were a public endorsement of ‘being out there’, it was all well and almost good. Nowadays, the first thing that comes to mind when you see people sprawled over the Averna on a weekday at 3pm is that their business must be going down the chute and they’re after a little distraction. People don’t want to spend hours at a restaurant over lunch-time meetings any more. They would rather spend those hours at the office and get home sooner – unless there are problems there, too. Business lunches, unless absolutely necessary for cementing a relationship, bridging a gap, or shoring up a burning bridge, are now considered mainly a waste of productive time. Priorities have shifted in just a few years, and the favourite lunch-time restaurants are no longer those where you could sit around for the rest of the day, but the ones that can have you seated and paying the bill in the space of 45 minutes.
Eating for free or getting their money’s worth of food still remains something of a national pastime. Look at the way people stack their plates with clashing colours, tastes and textures at ‘eat all you can’ buffets and weddings. If they’ve spent Lm10 on a present, they’re going to make sure they get Lm20 worth of food and drinks. See the way they rush the waiters at receptions. It’s this attitude that led to the introduction of the ‘free’ business breakfast here. Elsewhere, you can expect to pay around 40euros a head at the least to listen to a speaker, network with others, and eat breakfast at a five-star hotel. But not in Malta, where the only way you can get people to listen to your speaker is by offering them free food. And sometimes even that is not enough. They would much prefer it if you were to deliver their breakfast to their office and leave the speaker out of it.
Business breakfasts? Your brain has to be up and functioning far too early in the day, and there’s far too much cholesterol for far too many people who are supposed to be cutting down on it. I last went to a business breakfast at least a year ago. While the speaker droned on with absolutely no attempt at keeping us amused, clicking from slide to slide on his tear-inducing power-point presentation, my fellow guests ran through a mountain of food and scarcely listened. There I was, sipping cappuccino and wondering what in heaven’s name I was doing there. I never went to one of those things again.
I now draw the line at business dinners, too. Apart from the fact that they’re a lousy idea in a tiny society where people see a man out with a woman (or two men out with a woman – even worse) and draw the worst conclusion, the business dinner screams to all and sundry that you haven’t got a personal life or anyone to go home to. And if you do have somebody to go home to, it yells out to anyone who will listen that you’re selfish, leaving your partner to wilt with loneliness at home while you’re out trying to get a contract at 10pm. How often have we heard it? “Ara dak! U l-mara d-dar bit-tfal iwerżqu!” If you’re a woman with children, the comments are even more sarcastic, for instance: “Is your husband babysitting?” No – he’s just watching television while his children are in bed. Inviting somebody to talk shop after 7pm, even if you throw dinner and a bottle of wine into the equation, is the height of rudeness, an endorsement of the fact that money comes before all else.
The rules for mixing eating and business are hard and fast. Get the job done, keep your personal life out of it, and if you’re hungry, have a snack before you go.