Last week as I was suggesting ways you can use up your marketing budget by the end of the year I suggested “lunch with me.” The newsletter brought a host of questions from readers, including, “did anyone take you up on it?”
Yes! They did! Post-pandemic, though, I’ve noticed the art of having a meal with a professional contact is dead. I was at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station last week and noticed most of the people in the saloon were over 70. Long gone are the days of Mad Men, when Don and Roger ate oysters over several Martinis. When they returned to the office to find the elevators were out of service, the 26-floor climb had negative results. But still, it’s a hilarious scene.
Now, there are some rules about claiming lunch on expenses in the U.S., under the tax code:
- It must be at a restaurant. No take-out.
- You must be there. This shouldn’t be too challenging.
- You must talk business in a “substantive” way either before, during or after the meal.
- You can’t expense alcohol beyond what’s “reasonable,” although there’s some flexibility there.
These rules are not onerous. I don’t drink, I love restaurants, and I love to talk business. Since my business is strategic communications, talking business can cover a gamut, even in a substantive way, but that’s it. Once you’ve done such things, 100% of your bill can go on expenses. Or mine. And I see having lunch with you as a legitimate business expense — even a Martini, if you fancy one. It’s designed to build relationships.
I understand that this may feel old-fashioned, like the cocktail of the same name. But having lunch as a professional is an art and we should all commit more to it. That’s my rallying cry for 2025, at least while we’re all figuring out what our actual rallying cries are.
This week I’ve been reading the Financial Times’ book Lunch with the FT. It includes 52 classic interviews with a variety of big hitters. Published in 2013, it’s dated a bit. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, feels like a name from another era. But David Hockney and Michael Caine are both fascinating. So is Angela Merkel. Each interview features about 1,200 words of interesting conversation. There’s also an emphasis on the person’s choice of restaurant, what they choose to drink, and what to eat. The poet Gavin Ewart has such a great time that he goes home and dies after the meal. “But with hindsight,” the author writes, “we gave him a grand send-off.”
I’m also reading Sara B. Franklin’s biography of Judith Jones, the Knopf editor. Jones edited John Updike’s work and Julia Child’s. In an earlier job at Doubleday, she persuaded her boss to publish Anne Frank’s diary, after he’d passed on it. Frank’s voice, Jones said, made a complex matter engaging. It sold 30 million copies and is the most popular printed work after the Bible. So, Jones had a good instinct. One of her defining qualities, it seems to me, was understanding an opportunity when she saw it. Bored of New York after World War II, she moved to Paris in 1948. She stayed four years, worked a series of jobs, none of which panned out, but had a fantastic time. The move terrified her family, but she insisted on being adventurous. Men tried to ignore her, often. But she found her place and learned to advocate for herself. I’ve exclaimed several times reading the book how incredible she was.
There’s more to this than feminism. In an era where #MeToo has led to most of us being terrified of socializing around work, I understand the trust deficit. But it’s important to me that more of us have lunch on expenses because working life should be engaging and fun. It should be an adventure. It shouldn’t all be dry strategic frameworks and narrative planning. Those things matter, sure. But they shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. They should exist out in the world where real people live and breathe and of course, eat. They should be the product of substantive conversations in restaurants. Too many restaurants these days just exist to provide Instagram content for their customers, and that’s so tragic.
If you’re up for a business lunch in New York City, feel free to book a two-hour strategic communications session with me in the New Year, and name the venue. I’ll pay. See you there!
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Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant in Manhattan.
