Is It Business or Just Lunch?
Back when we all went to offices, some of us stood up at 12:05 p.m., looked at a colleague, and said, “Feel like lunch?” And it was thus. Though most of us still eat lunch, whether we do it with colleagues is mostly a function of whether we work in an office anymore. Spontaneous workday conviviality is nigh impossible from home.
But whining about your boss or company during the midday meal is not necessarily a business lunch. The business lunch is a different animal, usually involving actual work and paid for with an expense account. Did it survive WFH?
The St. Paul Grill has reopened for lunch, as has Kincaid’s, but not Meritage, WA Frost, or the Lexington. Across the river, Murray’s, Capital Grill, Giulia, and Manny’s have reopened at midday. Zelo is at three lunches per week since October. About the only high-end downtown restaurants that outlasted the pandemic but did not resume lunch are Oceanaire and 801 Chophouse. (McCormick & Schmick’s, Mission, and Atlas were big lunch spots but are out of business.)
One thing that’s more challenging is spotting business lunchers. “Everything’s gotten more casual,” says Rick Webb, owner of Ciao Bella in Edina and Zelo. Webb estimated that in 2019, 80% of his weekday lunches were business. Now he suspects it’s closer to 60%. He says Ciao Bella is back to good lunch volumes, “but the atmosphere is lighter; more of the lunches seem social.”
His restaurants regularly turned people away at lunch rush in 2019, but now the demand is a bit more spread out over the 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. window.
Downtown, Murray’s is the consummate business lunch, and co-owner Tim Murray reopened daytimes well before there was enough business to justify it—in fall 2021. (Monday lunch was a casualty.) He also sees the trend toward informality, noting virtually all his walk-in lunchers gravitate to the bar.
“We still see a fair amount of what seem to be business lunches,” Murray notes, but “there’s just not enough people downtown” to drive a robust lunch business these days. Murray says the pandemic and WFH may not be the only culprits. “I started to see business lunches fading about 18 months before the pandemic.”
