Drinking Alcohol: Even at Lunch! (Gasp!) American vs. European Attitudes, History
Letter of Recommendation: Drinking at Lunch
By Adam Sternbergh
May 23, 2018
I may be wrong, but my hunch is that, when you go out for lunch with colleagues or even just office friends, you don’t order a martini, let alone three. I’ll wager you don’t order a beer, a glass of wine or a brandy-soaked cherries jubilee. That’s because, a few decades after the heyday of the notorious “three-martini lunch,” the act of ordering even one measly martini with your lunch on a workday is viewed as roughly equivalent to pulling out your heroin works and splaying them on the table between courses.
Would it surprise you to learn that the three-martini lunch was once such a staple of the American workday that it was celebrated by the former President Gerald Ford in 1978? Addressing the National Restaurant Association, Ford called the practice “the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” The three-martini lunch may be remembered as an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness. But Ford’s joke about efficiency ironically suggests exactly why the martini-at-lunch disappeared: not because of some renewed sense of temperance but because of our ascendant obsession with cramming every minute of our day with work.
When the Italian brewer Birra Moretti commissioned a poll in 2011 on daytime drinking habits among American workers, it found that, whereas nearly half of Italians reported they were “inclined” to have a drink with lunch, only 20 percent of Americans reported the same inclination. But mostly what Birra Moretti found is that we’ve lost our appetite for taking a lunch break at all. Of respondents in their poll, 16 percent reported taking a lunch break that lasts from one to 15 minutes. Forty-five percent reported taking a 16-to-30-minute lunch break, while 25 percent take 31 to 60 minutes, and a measly 2 percent take more than an hour.
This might explain how we’ve arrived at this improbable moment when microdosing LSD in order to increase workplace productivity is, in some precincts, more professionally acceptable than having a glass of wine. But it’s not LSD that has replaced our midday cocktails; it’s that other modern intoxicant: productivity. Like most highs, productivity is something you chase habitually and yet, unlike most highs, it feels terrible. Still, more of us work more hours per week than in nearly any industrialized country, we take fewer vacation days than anyone in the world and we are now reachable at all hours through computers we carry in our pockets. All this despite ample evidence that productivity declines proportionally as work hours increase, even as health risks and relationship stress both rise. You work too hard. And you especially work too hard to spend your 16-minute lunch “hour” at your desk hunched over a takeout salad, checking Slack.
In my capacity as an editor, I and two of my colleagues once took a renowned journalist to lunch to mark his retirement. None of us ordered a drink - three of us because we are of a generation where ordering a drink at a business lunch would prompt a referral to H.R., or A.A., or both, and one of us because he was a recovering alcoholic. The subject of lunchtime drinking did come up, though. The journalist regaled us with tales of his swashbuckling years when, four days out of five, he retreated at midday to a local restaurant, which held a table for him, complete with a waiting martini. How, we asked collectively, did you function? On days he had important meetings, he explained, he would compromise - and guzzle gin-and-tonics instead.
The real answer to the question “how did you function?” is that, in truth, he didn’t. He lost that job, and he was recounting all of this to us as someone who hadn’t had a drink in years. But I thought of that conversation years later as I went to a working lunch with a professional associate. Like most working lunches, the event had the taint of the obligatory, where both of you act as if you’re doing something social and fun by choice when in fact you’re doing something vaguely dreary because it’s your job. There’s the rehearsed bonhomie, a little canned chitchat, then on to the business at hand. The difference, on that day, was that I decided to deal with the business at hand while drinking a glass of white wine. I may have even had two.
There are those for whom this admission will sound like a cry for help. Then there are those - let’s call them “Europeans” - to whom it will seem hilariously neurotic. In this magazine, the playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh was once asked about his drinking habits, and he replied: “There’s a difference between what’s called drinking a lot in America and drinking a lot back in Ireland or in London. You have two glasses of wine over here, and you’re an alcoholic.”
At that lunch, I was an alcoholic. But I still enjoyed the rest of my day, fully functional and productive, and I didn’t soil myself or vomit at work even once. What I enjoyed most, though, was not the light buzz of two glasses of wine, but rather the sense that I was reclaiming, if only for an hour, a proportional sense of pleasure in my life. It felt good to do something mildly hedonistic in the midst of an otherwise relentless workday. After all, the mindless pursuit of productivity can result in a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness, and as we’ve all learned from history, that will only drive you to drink.
Adam Sternbergh is a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author, most recently, of the novel “The Blinds.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-drinking-at-lunch.html
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Drinking at work
The boredom of boozeless business
The sad demise of the three-Martini lunch
Aug 11th 2012
Another busy day at the office
AMERICA has a proud history of drinking on the job. Craftsmen who built the first government buildings in the 17th century were sometimes paid in brandy. The 19th-century railroaders who laid the foundations of modern America were notoriously thirsty. And anyone who thinks that “Mad Men”, a TV drama in which 1960s advertising executives spend the working day sucking up Scotch, is a pastiche, would do well to talk to an account manager from the time-though his memory may be hazy.
America also has a long tradition of temperance. From the Washingtonian movement to Prohibition, there have been many attempts to sober up the workforce. Today, it seems that the battle is over and the killjoys have won.
A glass of something fizzy over lunch with an American executive now means sparkling water. The three-Martini lunch fell into decline in the 1970s, the victim of sober economic times that demanded clear-headed executives, and also of political pressure: Jimmy Carter made it an issue in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morgan Stanley’s New York bankers, for example, were instructed to avoid the drinks cabinet except when entertaining European clients (who could hardly be expected to make it through the day without a snifter). Many modern contracts expressly forbid the consumption of alcohol.
America’s ascetic reputation is confirmed by a paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Scott Rick of the University of Michigan and Maurice Schweitzer of Wharton Business School. They looked at Americans’ perception of drinking in a professional setting. In one experiment, they found that job candidates who ordered a glass of wine during an interview over dinner were viewed as less intelligent than those who ordered a soft drink. This holds true even when the interviewer himself is enjoying something a little stronger. Several other experiments showed that Americans link even moderate drinking with stupidity, which the professors call the “imbibing idiot bias”.
This may be short-sighted. Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge.
Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that journalists at Bloomberg Businessweek could be disciplined for sipping a spritzer at work. This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition
https://www.economist.com/node/21560265
----------------------------------------------------------
Why The Three Martini Lunch Worked
Michael Lee , CONTRIBUTOR
I write on creativity in marketing.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Three Martini lunch!
As we await the new season of Mad Men next spring, I thought it worthwhile giving The Legendary Lunch a thought or two.
The Lunch, partaken in the many establishments on the side streets of Madison Avenue: The Jockey Club, The Palm, The Oak Room, Smith and Wollensky’s, where all involved likely emerged shaken and well stirred.
The Lunch so infamous it was used as political ‘ping-pong’ in the 70’s by Jimmy Carter who claimed that the “working class was subsidizing the $50 martini lunch.” And by Gerald Ford, who responded "The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?”
Cute.
But let’s not focus on what was consumed there, but what happened there. Why it seemed to encapsulate a famous era for advertising? Why it built such a robust reputation?
I think what happened there was that it created a space. A space and time for the agency to listen and for the client to talk. Unbridled by minions and protégés. Devoid of conference room etiquette. And definitely no conference reports to worry about.
I think The Lunch became a time for clients to confidentially unburden to their agency counterpart. (What happens in The Three Martini lunch stays in The Three Martini Lunch).
The Lunch became a merger of Confessional and Psychiatrist’s Chair….all melded with the skill of a bartender.
Now that’s a cocktail!
Now I’m not advocating a return to the Roger Sterling School of Business Management, but I think there’s something for agencies and clients to consider today.
I think agencies and clients should find the time where you can really talk and listen (and don’t take notes). Where business issues can be talked about openly and candidly. What new pressure is the CEO putting on the CMO? How to handle some pesky franchisees. The upcoming shareholders meeting and the likely fallout. And of course the outrageous fees the agency is charging.
Maybe that is why Cannes is becoming so popular among clients. Cannes is now a vibrant cocktail itself of marketers and media companies, agency network executives, digital gurus and chief innovation officers. And perhaps the good, spirited, adventurous and candid conversations that take place over a Pernod on the Carlton Terrace, a Carlsberg at the Martinez or Guinness at the Gutter Bar, are the new version of the Three Martini Lunch. Where talking and listening isn’t just about the data, but involves the sub-plot, and sub text. Where an honest and candid conversation takes place in a creative and open environment.
The main point, for clients and agencies, is to find your place (and I don’t think breakfast meetings count) to talk and listen, to engage, to question, to ponder, to encourage, even to dream, what you can achieve……together.
On a side note, Tom Messner, founding partner of Messner Vetere Berger Macnamee Schmetterer (try saying that after a TML) told me of when he tried to introduce the idea of “The Three Perrier Lunch” while at Ally & Gargano. Which, to me, is brilliant. But everyone thought it ridiculous, so he picked up his Olivetti, went off in a huff and started his own shop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellee/2013/11/25/why-the-three-martini-lunch-worked/#32fe3a067a0f
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis
By ERIC ASIMOVMAY 2, 2007
HAVE I told you about my 80-martini lunch?
I exaggerate. Actually, four of us shared 80 martinis, so it was really a 20-martini lunch.
Frankly, once you get past the first 12 martinis, it might as well be 80. But it was worth it.
The occasion was the spirits panel’s martini tasting. Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Audrey Saunders, bartender extraordinaire and an owner of the Pegu Club on West Houston Street, and Pete Wells, editor of the Dining section, who has written extensively about drinks.
The subject was supposed to be solely gin. But because gin is often consumed in a martini, we decided to taste the gin as expressed through the world’s most famous (and perhaps least understood) cocktail. We discovered that while great martinis require great gins, great gins don’t necessarily make great martinis.
The gin category has exploded in the last decade, with distillers offering unusual riffs on the classic theme. Some of these make for striking gins, although they struck out as martinis. Our task was to sort out which gins produced classic martinis, which added welcome nuances and which really ought to seek another line of cocktail.
Before we discuss the findings, though, we need to clear up a little matter. It’s come to my attention that some people believe martinis are made with vodka. I hate to get snobbish about it, but a martini should be made with gin or it’s not a martini. Call it a vodkatini if you must, but not a martini. Gin and vodka have as much in common hierarchically as a president and a vice president. Vodka can fill in for gin from time to time and might even be given certain ceremonial duties of its own, but at important moments you need the real thing. Vodka generally makes a poor substitute for gin in a martini or any other gin cocktail.
The panel found common ground here. Each of us is partial to the classic martini made with gin, although Audrey was sensitive to the desires of her clientele.
“You have to revisit which generation is drinking the martini,” she said. “We might be classicists, but is the newer generation?”
Still, after perhaps 8 or 10 martinis, Audrey fessed up, referring at one point to “a generation lobotomized by vodka.”
Indeed, gin is more of a thinking person’s spirit. Vodka is neutral in aroma and flavor, which is also how gin begins life. But where vodka stays neutral, gin is infused with botanicals - a witch’s pantry of roots, berries, herbs, dried fruits and spices - dominated by the piney, breezy aroma of juniper berries. Other common botanicals include angelica, cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, lemon peel, licorice, fennel and ginger. It is the closely guarded combination of botanicals that makes each gin distinctive.
The dividing line between vodka and gin has always been the addition of juniper to gin. But among the spirits sold as gin today, some have reduced juniper to a secondary component while others seem to have dispensed with it altogether. We found that cardamom was prominent in quite a few of the 20 gins we had stirred into martinis.
“You see cardamom over and over,” Audrey said. “It’s exciting but you have to guard the category or you’ll just be drinking flavored vodkas.”
Speaking of guarding the category, let us now speak of the martini itself. Daunted at the prospect of mixing 80 cocktails, we handed that task over to Allen Katz, a mixologist who consults with Southern Wine and Spirits and with Martha Stewart Living Radio. Mr. Katz set a few parameters: the martinis would be stirred, not shaken; we would sample them as he made them so they would all be fresh; and they would include vermouth.
This last is a touchy subject among martini drinkers, many of whom have reduced vermouth’s role to no more than waving an unopened bottle in the direction of the glass.
“With the exception of a few artisan bars and restaurants, most people might get a 9-to-1 ratio, or just gin,” Audrey said.
A martini is also not a martini without vermouth. What is a cocktail but a blend of disparate elements into a harmonious new whole? We used Noilly Prat Original French Dry vermouth in a proportion of five parts gin to one part vermouth, perhaps a bit more gin than might have been ideal (try 4-to-1), but we wanted to make sure that the gin was featured prominently.
A century ago the typical martini recipe called for orange bitters. Most great cocktails do require at least three ingredients. But as we’re already being rigid on the vodka issue, I won’t press the case.
Let’s get to the tasting. In our martinis, we looked for balance, persistence and character. A martini without balance cannot be elegant, and a martini ought to be a model of elegance. By persistence I mean flavors that linger long enough to savor, intrigue and refresh, a combination that demands another sip. Too little persistence, and there’s no intrigue. Too much, and it won’t refresh.
Our favorite martini gin, Plymouth English Gin, could not have been more stylish and graceful. Plymouth has the classic juniper-based gin profile, yet it is uncommonly subtle and smooth. Still, it is assertive, its complexity emerging slowly but distinctly, the proverbial fist in a velvet glove.
By contrast, our No. 2 and No. 3 gins emphasized power. The Junipero, made in small quantities by the distilling branch of the Anchor brewery in San Francisco, came on strong with the traditional gin flavors of juniper and citrus, hitting all the right notes, though a little self-consciously.
The No. 3 gin, Cadenhead’s Old Raj from Scotland, at 110 proof, or 55 percent alcohol, was by far the most powerful gin we tasted: Tanqueray and Tanqueray No. 10 at 94.6 proof were the next highest. But while Old Raj packed a punch, its muscularity came across as bright and in control.
Two standbys of the American cocktail cabinet fared well as martinis. Seagram’s Extra Dry came in at No. 4. We found it surprisingly complex in the glass, with fruit, herbal and gingery spice notes, yet it didn’t stray far from the gin ideal, while Gordon’s London Dry adhered to the straight and narrow, with a slight emphasis of spicy cardamom and nutmeg aromas.
Tanqueray London Dry made a classic though quiet martini. Its livelier cousin, Tanqueray No. 10, with its emphasis on citrus flavors, may work well neat or with tonic, but was discordant in a martini.
In fact, in the context of a dry martini, few of the newer, hipper gins worked. Aviation is a popular gin out of Portland, Ore., but its predominant flavors of wintergreen, vanilla and anise had no place in a martini. Nor did the menthol and peppermint in G’Vine, a new French gin, the pronounced melon fruitiness in Hamptons, made in Minnesota, or the cinnamon emphasis in No. 209 out of San Francisco.
“What was really striking was how un-dry some of these were - like bathing in canned fruit or a postnasal saccharine drip,” Pete said.
We didn’t reject all of the less conventional gins. With its floral aromas, Hendrick’s from Scotland seemed to work from a different palette of botanicals, and it made for a lively, colorful martini. Bombay Sapphire was sort of jazzy - a martini that intrigued without really hanging together. Both Quintessential and Martin Miller’s hit odd notes, though they made pretty good martinis.
We each had a favorite that didn’t make the top 10. I liked Citadelle, a new-wave French gin. I felt its unconventional citrus flavors merged well with evergreen aromas, but the others disagreed.
Likewise, Audrey was pleased with that old standby Beefeater, while I found the flavors indistinct. Florence, who adores Tanqueray, liked the Tanqueray No. 10 as well, while Pete was more inclined to the G’Vine than the rest of us.
Still, the disagreements never really got out of hand. When you’ve just shared 80 martinis, you’re inclined to smooth things over.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/dining/02wine.html
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By Adam Sternbergh
May 23, 2018
I may be wrong, but my hunch is that, when you go out for lunch with colleagues or even just office friends, you don’t order a martini, let alone three. I’ll wager you don’t order a beer, a glass of wine or a brandy-soaked cherries jubilee. That’s because, a few decades after the heyday of the notorious “three-martini lunch,” the act of ordering even one measly martini with your lunch on a workday is viewed as roughly equivalent to pulling out your heroin works and splaying them on the table between courses.
Would it surprise you to learn that the three-martini lunch was once such a staple of the American workday that it was celebrated by the former President Gerald Ford in 1978? Addressing the National Restaurant Association, Ford called the practice “the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?” The three-martini lunch may be remembered as an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness. But Ford’s joke about efficiency ironically suggests exactly why the martini-at-lunch disappeared: not because of some renewed sense of temperance but because of our ascendant obsession with cramming every minute of our day with work.
When the Italian brewer Birra Moretti commissioned a poll in 2011 on daytime drinking habits among American workers, it found that, whereas nearly half of Italians reported they were “inclined” to have a drink with lunch, only 20 percent of Americans reported the same inclination. But mostly what Birra Moretti found is that we’ve lost our appetite for taking a lunch break at all. Of respondents in their poll, 16 percent reported taking a lunch break that lasts from one to 15 minutes. Forty-five percent reported taking a 16-to-30-minute lunch break, while 25 percent take 31 to 60 minutes, and a measly 2 percent take more than an hour.
This might explain how we’ve arrived at this improbable moment when microdosing LSD in order to increase workplace productivity is, in some precincts, more professionally acceptable than having a glass of wine. But it’s not LSD that has replaced our midday cocktails; it’s that other modern intoxicant: productivity. Like most highs, productivity is something you chase habitually and yet, unlike most highs, it feels terrible. Still, more of us work more hours per week than in nearly any industrialized country, we take fewer vacation days than anyone in the world and we are now reachable at all hours through computers we carry in our pockets. All this despite ample evidence that productivity declines proportionally as work hours increase, even as health risks and relationship stress both rise. You work too hard. And you especially work too hard to spend your 16-minute lunch “hour” at your desk hunched over a takeout salad, checking Slack.
In my capacity as an editor, I and two of my colleagues once took a renowned journalist to lunch to mark his retirement. None of us ordered a drink - three of us because we are of a generation where ordering a drink at a business lunch would prompt a referral to H.R., or A.A., or both, and one of us because he was a recovering alcoholic. The subject of lunchtime drinking did come up, though. The journalist regaled us with tales of his swashbuckling years when, four days out of five, he retreated at midday to a local restaurant, which held a table for him, complete with a waiting martini. How, we asked collectively, did you function? On days he had important meetings, he explained, he would compromise - and guzzle gin-and-tonics instead.
The real answer to the question “how did you function?” is that, in truth, he didn’t. He lost that job, and he was recounting all of this to us as someone who hadn’t had a drink in years. But I thought of that conversation years later as I went to a working lunch with a professional associate. Like most working lunches, the event had the taint of the obligatory, where both of you act as if you’re doing something social and fun by choice when in fact you’re doing something vaguely dreary because it’s your job. There’s the rehearsed bonhomie, a little canned chitchat, then on to the business at hand. The difference, on that day, was that I decided to deal with the business at hand while drinking a glass of white wine. I may have even had two.
There are those for whom this admission will sound like a cry for help. Then there are those - let’s call them “Europeans” - to whom it will seem hilariously neurotic. In this magazine, the playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh was once asked about his drinking habits, and he replied: “There’s a difference between what’s called drinking a lot in America and drinking a lot back in Ireland or in London. You have two glasses of wine over here, and you’re an alcoholic.”
At that lunch, I was an alcoholic. But I still enjoyed the rest of my day, fully functional and productive, and I didn’t soil myself or vomit at work even once. What I enjoyed most, though, was not the light buzz of two glasses of wine, but rather the sense that I was reclaiming, if only for an hour, a proportional sense of pleasure in my life. It felt good to do something mildly hedonistic in the midst of an otherwise relentless workday. After all, the mindless pursuit of productivity can result in a swallowing sense of existential pointlessness, and as we’ve all learned from history, that will only drive you to drink.
Adam Sternbergh is a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author, most recently, of the novel “The Blinds.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-drinking-at-lunch.html
------------------------------------------------------------
Drinking at work
The boredom of boozeless business
The sad demise of the three-Martini lunch
Aug 11th 2012
Another busy day at the office
AMERICA has a proud history of drinking on the job. Craftsmen who built the first government buildings in the 17th century were sometimes paid in brandy. The 19th-century railroaders who laid the foundations of modern America were notoriously thirsty. And anyone who thinks that “Mad Men”, a TV drama in which 1960s advertising executives spend the working day sucking up Scotch, is a pastiche, would do well to talk to an account manager from the time-though his memory may be hazy.
America also has a long tradition of temperance. From the Washingtonian movement to Prohibition, there have been many attempts to sober up the workforce. Today, it seems that the battle is over and the killjoys have won.
A glass of something fizzy over lunch with an American executive now means sparkling water. The three-Martini lunch fell into decline in the 1970s, the victim of sober economic times that demanded clear-headed executives, and also of political pressure: Jimmy Carter made it an issue in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morgan Stanley’s New York bankers, for example, were instructed to avoid the drinks cabinet except when entertaining European clients (who could hardly be expected to make it through the day without a snifter). Many modern contracts expressly forbid the consumption of alcohol.
America’s ascetic reputation is confirmed by a paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Scott Rick of the University of Michigan and Maurice Schweitzer of Wharton Business School. They looked at Americans’ perception of drinking in a professional setting. In one experiment, they found that job candidates who ordered a glass of wine during an interview over dinner were viewed as less intelligent than those who ordered a soft drink. This holds true even when the interviewer himself is enjoying something a little stronger. Several other experiments showed that Americans link even moderate drinking with stupidity, which the professors call the “imbibing idiot bias”.
This may be short-sighted. Another recent paper from the journal Consciousness and Cognition by psychologists at the University of Illinois confirms what many have long suspected: a couple of drinks makes workers more creative. Tipsy employees, they say, find it hard to focus on a task, but this makes them more likely to come up with innovative ideas. This may help to explain the success of Silicon Valley, one of the last workplaces in America where hard and soft drinks still jostle for space in the company fridge.
Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that journalists at Bloomberg Businessweek could be disciplined for sipping a spritzer at work. This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition
https://www.economist.com/node/21560265
----------------------------------------------------------
Why The Three Martini Lunch Worked
Michael Lee , CONTRIBUTOR
I write on creativity in marketing.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Three Martini lunch!
As we await the new season of Mad Men next spring, I thought it worthwhile giving The Legendary Lunch a thought or two.
The Lunch, partaken in the many establishments on the side streets of Madison Avenue: The Jockey Club, The Palm, The Oak Room, Smith and Wollensky’s, where all involved likely emerged shaken and well stirred.
The Lunch so infamous it was used as political ‘ping-pong’ in the 70’s by Jimmy Carter who claimed that the “working class was subsidizing the $50 martini lunch.” And by Gerald Ford, who responded "The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency. Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?”
Cute.
But let’s not focus on what was consumed there, but what happened there. Why it seemed to encapsulate a famous era for advertising? Why it built such a robust reputation?
I think what happened there was that it created a space. A space and time for the agency to listen and for the client to talk. Unbridled by minions and protégés. Devoid of conference room etiquette. And definitely no conference reports to worry about.
I think The Lunch became a time for clients to confidentially unburden to their agency counterpart. (What happens in The Three Martini lunch stays in The Three Martini Lunch).
The Lunch became a merger of Confessional and Psychiatrist’s Chair….all melded with the skill of a bartender.
Now that’s a cocktail!
Now I’m not advocating a return to the Roger Sterling School of Business Management, but I think there’s something for agencies and clients to consider today.
I think agencies and clients should find the time where you can really talk and listen (and don’t take notes). Where business issues can be talked about openly and candidly. What new pressure is the CEO putting on the CMO? How to handle some pesky franchisees. The upcoming shareholders meeting and the likely fallout. And of course the outrageous fees the agency is charging.
Maybe that is why Cannes is becoming so popular among clients. Cannes is now a vibrant cocktail itself of marketers and media companies, agency network executives, digital gurus and chief innovation officers. And perhaps the good, spirited, adventurous and candid conversations that take place over a Pernod on the Carlton Terrace, a Carlsberg at the Martinez or Guinness at the Gutter Bar, are the new version of the Three Martini Lunch. Where talking and listening isn’t just about the data, but involves the sub-plot, and sub text. Where an honest and candid conversation takes place in a creative and open environment.
The main point, for clients and agencies, is to find your place (and I don’t think breakfast meetings count) to talk and listen, to engage, to question, to ponder, to encourage, even to dream, what you can achieve……together.
On a side note, Tom Messner, founding partner of Messner Vetere Berger Macnamee Schmetterer (try saying that after a TML) told me of when he tried to introduce the idea of “The Three Perrier Lunch” while at Ally & Gargano. Which, to me, is brilliant. But everyone thought it ridiculous, so he picked up his Olivetti, went off in a huff and started his own shop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellee/2013/11/25/why-the-three-martini-lunch-worked/#32fe3a067a0f
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis
By ERIC ASIMOVMAY 2, 2007
HAVE I told you about my 80-martini lunch?
I exaggerate. Actually, four of us shared 80 martinis, so it was really a 20-martini lunch.
Frankly, once you get past the first 12 martinis, it might as well be 80. But it was worth it.
The occasion was the spirits panel’s martini tasting. Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Audrey Saunders, bartender extraordinaire and an owner of the Pegu Club on West Houston Street, and Pete Wells, editor of the Dining section, who has written extensively about drinks.
The subject was supposed to be solely gin. But because gin is often consumed in a martini, we decided to taste the gin as expressed through the world’s most famous (and perhaps least understood) cocktail. We discovered that while great martinis require great gins, great gins don’t necessarily make great martinis.
The gin category has exploded in the last decade, with distillers offering unusual riffs on the classic theme. Some of these make for striking gins, although they struck out as martinis. Our task was to sort out which gins produced classic martinis, which added welcome nuances and which really ought to seek another line of cocktail.
Before we discuss the findings, though, we need to clear up a little matter. It’s come to my attention that some people believe martinis are made with vodka. I hate to get snobbish about it, but a martini should be made with gin or it’s not a martini. Call it a vodkatini if you must, but not a martini. Gin and vodka have as much in common hierarchically as a president and a vice president. Vodka can fill in for gin from time to time and might even be given certain ceremonial duties of its own, but at important moments you need the real thing. Vodka generally makes a poor substitute for gin in a martini or any other gin cocktail.
The panel found common ground here. Each of us is partial to the classic martini made with gin, although Audrey was sensitive to the desires of her clientele.
“You have to revisit which generation is drinking the martini,” she said. “We might be classicists, but is the newer generation?”
Still, after perhaps 8 or 10 martinis, Audrey fessed up, referring at one point to “a generation lobotomized by vodka.”
Indeed, gin is more of a thinking person’s spirit. Vodka is neutral in aroma and flavor, which is also how gin begins life. But where vodka stays neutral, gin is infused with botanicals - a witch’s pantry of roots, berries, herbs, dried fruits and spices - dominated by the piney, breezy aroma of juniper berries. Other common botanicals include angelica, cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, lemon peel, licorice, fennel and ginger. It is the closely guarded combination of botanicals that makes each gin distinctive.
The dividing line between vodka and gin has always been the addition of juniper to gin. But among the spirits sold as gin today, some have reduced juniper to a secondary component while others seem to have dispensed with it altogether. We found that cardamom was prominent in quite a few of the 20 gins we had stirred into martinis.
“You see cardamom over and over,” Audrey said. “It’s exciting but you have to guard the category or you’ll just be drinking flavored vodkas.”
Speaking of guarding the category, let us now speak of the martini itself. Daunted at the prospect of mixing 80 cocktails, we handed that task over to Allen Katz, a mixologist who consults with Southern Wine and Spirits and with Martha Stewart Living Radio. Mr. Katz set a few parameters: the martinis would be stirred, not shaken; we would sample them as he made them so they would all be fresh; and they would include vermouth.
This last is a touchy subject among martini drinkers, many of whom have reduced vermouth’s role to no more than waving an unopened bottle in the direction of the glass.
“With the exception of a few artisan bars and restaurants, most people might get a 9-to-1 ratio, or just gin,” Audrey said.
A martini is also not a martini without vermouth. What is a cocktail but a blend of disparate elements into a harmonious new whole? We used Noilly Prat Original French Dry vermouth in a proportion of five parts gin to one part vermouth, perhaps a bit more gin than might have been ideal (try 4-to-1), but we wanted to make sure that the gin was featured prominently.
A century ago the typical martini recipe called for orange bitters. Most great cocktails do require at least three ingredients. But as we’re already being rigid on the vodka issue, I won’t press the case.
Let’s get to the tasting. In our martinis, we looked for balance, persistence and character. A martini without balance cannot be elegant, and a martini ought to be a model of elegance. By persistence I mean flavors that linger long enough to savor, intrigue and refresh, a combination that demands another sip. Too little persistence, and there’s no intrigue. Too much, and it won’t refresh.
Our favorite martini gin, Plymouth English Gin, could not have been more stylish and graceful. Plymouth has the classic juniper-based gin profile, yet it is uncommonly subtle and smooth. Still, it is assertive, its complexity emerging slowly but distinctly, the proverbial fist in a velvet glove.
By contrast, our No. 2 and No. 3 gins emphasized power. The Junipero, made in small quantities by the distilling branch of the Anchor brewery in San Francisco, came on strong with the traditional gin flavors of juniper and citrus, hitting all the right notes, though a little self-consciously.
The No. 3 gin, Cadenhead’s Old Raj from Scotland, at 110 proof, or 55 percent alcohol, was by far the most powerful gin we tasted: Tanqueray and Tanqueray No. 10 at 94.6 proof were the next highest. But while Old Raj packed a punch, its muscularity came across as bright and in control.
Two standbys of the American cocktail cabinet fared well as martinis. Seagram’s Extra Dry came in at No. 4. We found it surprisingly complex in the glass, with fruit, herbal and gingery spice notes, yet it didn’t stray far from the gin ideal, while Gordon’s London Dry adhered to the straight and narrow, with a slight emphasis of spicy cardamom and nutmeg aromas.
Tanqueray London Dry made a classic though quiet martini. Its livelier cousin, Tanqueray No. 10, with its emphasis on citrus flavors, may work well neat or with tonic, but was discordant in a martini.
In fact, in the context of a dry martini, few of the newer, hipper gins worked. Aviation is a popular gin out of Portland, Ore., but its predominant flavors of wintergreen, vanilla and anise had no place in a martini. Nor did the menthol and peppermint in G’Vine, a new French gin, the pronounced melon fruitiness in Hamptons, made in Minnesota, or the cinnamon emphasis in No. 209 out of San Francisco.
“What was really striking was how un-dry some of these were - like bathing in canned fruit or a postnasal saccharine drip,” Pete said.
We didn’t reject all of the less conventional gins. With its floral aromas, Hendrick’s from Scotland seemed to work from a different palette of botanicals, and it made for a lively, colorful martini. Bombay Sapphire was sort of jazzy - a martini that intrigued without really hanging together. Both Quintessential and Martin Miller’s hit odd notes, though they made pretty good martinis.
We each had a favorite that didn’t make the top 10. I liked Citadelle, a new-wave French gin. I felt its unconventional citrus flavors merged well with evergreen aromas, but the others disagreed.
Likewise, Audrey was pleased with that old standby Beefeater, while I found the flavors indistinct. Florence, who adores Tanqueray, liked the Tanqueray No. 10 as well, while Pete was more inclined to the G’Vine than the rest of us.
Still, the disagreements never really got out of hand. When you’ve just shared 80 martinis, you’re inclined to smooth things over.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/dining/02wine.html
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