The death of the power lunch

Once, no mover or shaker would dream of doing business without the help of a long, leisurely meal at one of London's great Establishment restaurants. But now, these great venues are having to seek out a new clientele. As the Savoy Grill gets a makeover, the social commentator Nick Foulkes explains why

When I heard that Gordon Ramsay, or, to be more specific, his protégé Marcus Wareing, was to get his hands on the Savoy Grill, I happened to be reading Dracula. It struck me that Ramsay – who yesterday became the only British chef to win three Michelin stars – was something of a 21st-century version of the vampire-hunter Van Helsing: on a mission to rid the world, or at least London, of the old-fashioned power lunch. First, Claridge's; then the Connaught; and now the Savoy Grill: like vampiric lairs that have to be sanctified with holy water, the old haunts of what we fondly used to call "powerbrokers" are being laid to rest. Like Van Helsing and his armoury of garlic, crucifixes etc, Ramsay has his paraphernalia: a dedicated and highly trained chef producing modern, thoughtful food, and an attractive decor by a designer such as Thierry Despont or David Collins.

Of course, Ramsay is not single-handedly responsible for killing off the power lunch. Power itself has changed, and, as an implement of power, the power lunch is antiquated. If people want to exercise power in a modern way, they would probably not book lunch at the Savoy Grill.

"Every ruling (and retired) Prime Minister of the recent past is a regular [sic], and various professional residents of Fleet Street have made it their lunch and supper club," enthuses The Savoy London, a book you can buy at the Savoy. Although it may read like a poor pastiche of one of Trollope's Palliser novels, the book was published last year. However, Tony Blair does not strike me as a man who spends much time trawling through Trollope; and I would not have put him down as a Savoy Grill man. As for Fleet Street, journalists have been replaced by bankers who are too scared to leave their desks in case their job isn't there when they get back from lunch.

And yet the Savoy was, for decades, the logical place for the Establishment to gather: handy for both the City and Westminster; a few minutes' drive in chauffeured Rolls-Royce from the industrial HQs that lined the Thames; near Fleet Street and the theatres of the West End. It was the world's meeting-place.

Later, during the Savoy Grill's Indian summer, the Thatcher years, the sort of people coming up in politics and industry were keen to recreate the appearance, if not the reality, of probity, discretion, gentlemanliness and other perceived attributes of the Establishment. The Savoy Grill was the perfect place for them to do that. The lifting of cloches, the ceremonial wheeling of the trolley, the pageantry of the flunkeys all imbued even the most rackety of transactions with a sort of dignity. It must have seemed to them as though they were joining a tradition of power and influence that stretched back centuries.

According to Sir Roy Strong, who has recently published Feast: a history of grand eating: "The City lunch, which was men asking each other out to eat, became important in the early years of the 20th century. Parallel with that, you get the society lunch, which was certainly going strong in the 1920s and 1930s." Strong himself attended some of those society lunches: "The sort of lunches that I remember Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper and Lady Hartwell used to give are completely gone. The final one who used to keep things going was the Queen Mother."

We can trace their evolution to the lunching ladies of our own day: the Park Avenue princesses, well-connected fashionistas and posh PR girls who lunch one another in San Lorenzo, Le Caprice, Cecconi's or Harry's Bar.

I have been a loyal customer of Le Caprice for more than a decade, and over that time I have seen the clientele change. At the beginning of my time there, I would occasionally see a cabinet minister lunching with a journalist, and on one occasion I seem to remember Lords Lamont and Archer, both pre-peerage, lunching in the see-and-be-seen corner table while the pound crashed. Of course, that was a long time ago; my memory may be playing tricks on me, and Lord Archer probably has a diary entry proving that he was somewhere else entirely on that day. Nevertheless, it is a long time since I have seen a cabinet minister at Le Caprice. The place is no less difficult to get into, and the fishcakes are still the finest in the civilised world, but the tone is showbiz, in its broadest sense, rather than old-fashioned power lunching.

"The golden age of the power lunch was the mid-Eighties; those were lunches that all the big brokerage firms were given before they were all bought out. The lunches that the great advertising agencies gave their great clients," says the market- research guru Peter York. Increased transparency is what the modern deal, be it political or commercial, is about; not the murky territory somewhere after the lamb cutlets but before the crêpes soufflés.

"In the City, there is no large-scale lunching any more," says Mark Pignatelli, chief investment officer of Schroders. "There is a lot of time pressure, and it is just not accepted."

The increasingly intensive nature of the modern deal and the desire for transparency are not the only reasons for the power lunch's fall; in Britain, we have also finally come to care about food. Good food would have got in the way of the old-fashioned power lunch. You could hardly break off a discussion about politics, finance or the future of the nation to speculate as to the exact vintage of the balsamic vinegar. Yet, in today's world, to announce with pride that you always eat the same thing in the same place with the same people marks one out as unadventurous: a quality that once might have signalled solidity and dependability but now speaks of inflexibility and an old-fashioned outlook.

It is interesting that one of the most important power lunches of recent years took place at night, in a local restaurant in north London called Granita. As Stephen Bayley records in his book Labour Camp: "It was here, perhaps over a little salad of red oak-leaf, shredded gruyère and croutons, that Gordon Brown famously conceded leadership that fateful night of 31 May 1994, and old Labour was, in an environment of harsh furniture, for ever after translated into New."

The significance of such restaurants as Granita in Islington and Riva in Barnes has increased as they have become "safe houses" where word is unlikely to be spread by a journalist at a nearby table or a crowd of paparazzi outside. Today, lunch has a ceremonial role; rather like the reserved parking-space in the company car park, it is a barometer of social and professional esteem. Certainly, that was a truth well understood by Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, quondam proprietors of Le Caprice and The Ivy.

They relaunched The Ivy at the beginning of the Nineties, when it might have seemed that they were perpetuating the clubby, discreet feel of the power-lunch venue. What King and Corbin were actually doing was creating a clever facsimile of the power lunch. If all the hard work was being done by lawyers, accountants and spin merchants, then at least The Ivy offered a virtual-reality alternative, where the modern élite could see one another lunching one another. Since then, the power lunch has become even more associated with tabloid celebrity; what Roy Strong witheringly calls "the apotheosis of trashocracy".

Perhaps it is a little harsh, though, to blame Posh'n'Becks, Sir Elton and the cast of EastEnders for the decline of the power lunch in England. After all, it is only reflecting the declining power of Britain herself.