A long lunch is as good for you as a spin class – and Gary Lineker agrees

Earlier this year I royally cocked up on an invitation for Gary Lineker to have lunch with the editor of Noble Rot magazine by sending him to the wrong restaurant some distance away from where I was. Safe to say Lineker arrived, pretty unamused, but I knew it would be OK, because what lay ahead was a proper lunch.

I cocked up; lunch would fix it. The chat got funnier, sharper, ruder, sillier, the exclamations about the taste of things more enthused, the confidences more meaningful. There might have even been a little tear. From the choux buns filled with chicken liver pate to the Earl Grey-soaked prunes and a cheeky glass of sauternes, we did not hold back. A proper lunch saved the day, because a proper lunch is the most powerful agent of joy known to humankind.

There’s been a helluva hullabaloo about chef/patron Hugh Corcoran's complaint that no one knows how to lunch these days. While he sounds a bit of an arrogant oaf (a chef? An arrogant oaf? Never!) his complaint that people who come to his restaurant (The Yellow Bittern) to have tap water and split one course are kryptonite to “an atmosphere of conviviality” and “abandon” is fair. I too prefer restaurants not to be full of dull sober people.

“Restaurants are not public benches. You are there to spend money,” thundered Corcoran’s indignant Instagram rant (now taken down). But times have shifted and he might have to suck it up.

As the far more experienced chef/patron, Jason Atherton told me recently: “People have changed. They want to be healthy. We are in an era of people using restaurants less as places to eat and more as social spaces. It’s a very tricky time to make a business work.”

Everyone is very cross with Corcoran. How dare he lament the loss of “etiquette in restaurants that if [a diner] booked a table in a nice place you at the very least had to order a main course (and possibly even a starter or dessert) and drink wine for your table to be worth serving.”

But only a curmudgeon doesn’t love that unique laughter-cut roar of a dining room full of happy people.

But even us Gen Xers who remember a time when lunch really was lunch, are complete novices compared to our parents and grandparents. In Who’s Who, the comic writer Keith Waterhouse listed his only hobby as lunch. He wrote The Theory and Practice of Lunch in 1986 and was clear that it isn’t a real lunch if, “Either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry”.

The world is a different place now. We live in a state of fretfulness, debtfulness, and health warnings. Fun’s wings have been clipped.

But we need to savour and benefit from a moment or two of retreat from life. Meditating or some barmy exercise class shouldn’t be the only things seen as self-care.

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The food, the wine, the sound, the buzz, the company, that inner smile lunch gives... you can’t synthesise it. Even longevity doctor Tamsin Lewis talks about “the benefits of co-regulation,” when giving the odd drink her blessing to her want to live to a hundred patients. What she called co-regulation, I call a spot of lunch and chatting about life with a good mate.

With just 18 tables and only open for weekday lunch, I suspect The Yellow Bittern is going to struggle to turn a profit. Had he opened, like the chef Pam Brunton, on the shores of Loch Fyne, everyone would have made the journey with every expectation of going large as you do at a destination restaurant.

I understand why people eat such dull and meagre meals with tap water and no pud. They eat out to socialise, and not to eat. My advice would be, if you’re skint, stay home eating sardines on toast. Save up and do it properly every now and again.

I was eating at the Somerset restaurant Osip alone recently, and acutely aware of being a table for one, I rang ahead and said I only wanted three courses, despite their thing being a tasting menu of about eight. But then I got there. “Ah f*** it,” I said to the waiter, “Bring me all of it.” And it was a dream.

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We could all do with a bit more of that. Instead of eating out 20 times a month, make it four. Make it one massive and brilliant long lunch. In British cities, and especially London, we eat out so much we’re in danger of forgetting what’s special about it at all. Eating out all the time has become as ordinary as going to the toilet.

Fill your boots. Have three starters between two, a main, cheese and pudding. All this miserable “just a starter for me” business is just reflective of an evermore joyless world.

Once lunch was once a chunk of joy in the working day. It was not an optional joy, it was a mandatory one, even for prime athletes. Over lunch, Lineker described to us his time playing for Barcelona in the second half of the Eighties, and the ritual of the pre-match lunch including a glass or two of good Rioja for all the players, “You finish the lunch, go up and siesta and then play the game”.

Four hours on, blinking in the sunshine with the commuters scuttling by the lunch crew felt like another species. We weren’t really drunk. But we were all giddy. We were full. We were lunched. I recommend it.

Read more from Kate Spicer at katespicer.substack.com