Fifty Years of Lunch Rooms

We’ve all been captivated this past year by cultural dichotomies: conservative versus liberal, East coast versus West coast, Ivy League versus Pac 12, and simply best versus worst.  Maybe it is Urban versus Suburban, but in my fifty years as a businessperson, I’ve always eaten lunch, and I’ve enjoyed the perspective from the above different cultural sides.

The Brett Kavanaugh hearing was the trigger for my comparison between East Coast lunches, “Whatever happened to our old Economics Professor Higgens, still at Yale?” and West coast lunches “Did you get in on Tim’s new AI start-up?”  Old boys versus new kids – stodginess versus creativity.

It’s stereotypical, but the East coast lunch is classical and has been around for centuries.  It isn't going to change. The West coast lunch is dynamic, ever changing, and I watched those changes over the last five decades of the 20th century.  The West coast lunch set the tone for the rest of the country, at the limits and setting the pace for decades into the future.

We Californians set these trends, incorporating Asian and Latin American dishes, leading the way in methods of delivery, opening the worlds of fresh fruits, vegetables, and seafood.  Finally, the ultimate, concierge catering to individual whims.  Coffee is no longer burned and black from a machine in the break room.  Now it’s which of the variations on a latte or cappuccino would you like?

Of course, along with this are some cultural changes: the West imported executive lunchrooms and assembly line food service, but these have not survived.  We are more egalitarian than easterners are, never had a North-South split.  No East West either since we developed the West after the civil war.

I started working, as a teenager, for my father's business.  His business was typical when it came to lunchtime.  I know, because I used to deliver packages from his business to those I will mention and scores more, often at lunchtime.  Lunchtime in Santa Clara Valley in the fifties was a personal time.  My father and I, when he was in town, would grab a hamburger or a tuna salad sandwich and play pinball for an hour at the deli around the corner.  Most employees at his office brought lunch from home; I did too.  If my father were on the road, I would eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then play Ping-Pong with the other employees: Luke, Lucy, Delores, and Jack. 

Things were the same all over the Valley.  I saw it at the places I delivered to and worked at.  We saw the lunch truck become a more prevalent icon of the times in the late sixties and early seventies as people's lives heated up and life became too busy to pack a sandwich in the morning.  At my first real computer job, GT&E Lenkurt, they had the typical Silicon Valley assembly-line luncheon cafeteria.  At least for those early Valley days, the food was nutritious and cheap; few companies had contracted with catered services.  Lenkurt was my first exposure to a factory cafeteria for the line workers.  But we junior management also used it most of the time.  As senior management told us, over martinis, at a local luncheon restaurant that they had approved for expense accounts, the whole point was "If they go off site," my boss’s boss said, sipping his second martini, "they will come back sloshed on booze and not be any good on the production line."  My peer group of up-and-comers wasn't into martinis, but we would go out once a month to a hamburger joint that was awesome and we'd drink a beer or two.

My office at IBM wasn't big enough to support a cafeteria, so everyone brought their own lunch.  Once a week, we went out to lunch at one of the local hot dog places.  At GT&E, we might hoist a few beers once a month, but at IBM, management strictly forbade drinking, even on your own time.  Luncheons at the lower levels were still controlled feedings of the monkeys, but now that I was doing some selling and entertaining, I was enjoying the benefits of an expense account.  When I moved to San Francisco in the sixties, life turned topsy-turvy, including the business world and especially luncheons with clients, peers, managers, and anybody else connected with the business world.  People in the Valley, so I heard, were demanding Perrier water with their lunch and gourmet food.  The Chronicle often ran articles explaining the latest weirdness of these Silicon Valley people.

I lived and worked for fifteen-years in San Francisco.  The City was completely opposite to the suburbs, where Apple and HP were rising-giants and fast food was in no one’s best interests.  I acquired a wealth of knowledge about restaurants, both lunch and dinner, but these are stories I tell elsewhere.

I did a stint in San Francisco at ISI, an Insurance and Mutual Fund holding company.  They had one of the classic East Coast style management dining rooms.  Management-only, allowed-grades, usually just men in suits and ties.  You had an account there automatically and the company charged meals to your next paycheck.  When I started there, I could only attend as a guest of my manager.  It wasn't until my first promotion that I attended the executive dining room with privileges.  The food was amazingly cheap and could be custom cooked to one's taste.  The thinking was twofold; everyone kept talking business, and nobody drank alcohol.  The company figured that if they let you out the door in downtown San Francisco, you'd get back in two hours and you'd be reeling from a few drinks.

Returning to the University of Arizona for graduate school, I was able to eat in the catered faculty lounge.  The rules were faculty only but no one ever tried to stop me.  When I came back to San Francisco a few years later, the East coast lunch concept had died out.  I had started to work for smaller concerns as a consultant.  The only posh elite luncheon room was the one I encountered at IBM Santa Teresa.  I played host to visiting dignitaries and IBM kept a special lunchroom for people like my guests.  We ordered from a menu and I became familiar with the wait staff. The lunches were free to me, so I loved this.

There was a management lunchroom at Lucas in Birmingham England when I first visited, but it was gone by the next year when I returned to start work full time.  During my first year there, a small revolt by all the contractors caused them to close up the by-key-only executive washrooms.  They removed the gold fittings and then reopened them to the general staff.  It signaled the end of an era.

I spent most of the eighties decade in England, far out of step with Silicon Valley, which was probably why I was there.  When I came back, the tech-boom was booming.  Benefits were generous; contractors like me were in demand.  The golden heyday for computer nerds.  Still, it was a problem to lure smart techies from the East coast or Texas.   Food was cheap, so companies lavished it on us.  Pizza and beer satisfies most nerds as much as wild-caught Salmon and Chalk Hill Chardonnay.

I worked as an independent contractor for over a dozen companies that last decade: HP, Amdahl, IBM, Ziff-Davis, Sequent, Mervyn’s, VISA, Franklin-Templeton, InfoWorld, Lotus, Hitachi, Stratus, and finally Agilent in Santa Rosa.  The epitome of all these was Silicon Graphics.  They were the forerunner of what you see today: company transportation systems, sponsored education, and of course, virtually free, catered meals – if you were willing to work beyond 5pm, anything, from anyone and free breakfast before nine.  Friday-night beer bashes or anything else you wanted.  The food was the best that money could buy.  Same reasons – free labor.

I can’t comment on the past decade.  Things have settled down a bit, especially after the crash a decade ago.  I’m retired now, but I’m not surprised at anything I read or hear about the technology company rewards these days.  Those were my golden heydays, working 50-70 hour weeks at high hourly rates.  The rates aren’t back yet [foreign competition], but the benefits are even more elaborate now.  Don’t spread the word though.  I’m happy when those from the East coast with their old-boy’s network are satisfied with their NYC connections.  We West-coasters will replace them all with AI robots soon.

Remember, robots don’t eat lunch [or drink alcohol].