From halibut and hot dogs to unlikely friendships: This is what happens inside the Senate lunch room

During President Joe Biden’s final major address on the economy, he did what he does best: wax poetic about the old days of the United States Senate, the institution that defined him. He told an especially instructive story about when he returned to the Senate as vice president and went into the Senate dining hall, where a central dining room table used to stand. That’s were Democrats and Republicans would once meet and talk.

“You walk in — a long table sitting, I guess, 16, 18 people on the right, parallel with the table,” he said. “And you walk through an archway, and there was a table going the other way. One was the Democratic table. One was Republican table. And when there weren’t enough to sit at any one table, then they all sit together.”

Some people might roll their eyes at Biden’s nostalgic storytelling. But he was talking about something subtly important. Washington is more divided than ever. Even the Senate, which sees itself as a vestige of bipartisanship, is more caustic than it has been since the height of the Civil War.

“It’s hard to really dislike an individual that you strongly disagree with when you find out his wife is dying of breast cancer or he just lost a child or he’s having serious physical problems himself,” Biden continued, as he reminisced about the days when Democratic and Republican senators were forced by location to converse with each other every day.

He’s not the first senator I know who has lamented the end of the Senate dining table tradition. These days, senators operate on a much-mocked “French work week” — where they arrive and typically begin voting on a Tuesday, and then do whatever it takes to not have to work on a Friday, even if it means a vote at 11:30 p.m. on a Thursday before flying back to their home states.

An unintended side effect of this is that senators only see each other three days a week. And they meet for their caucus lunches on just one of those days, meaning they have fewer chances to mingle and get to know their compatriots.

The days around the big, long table are shrinking, and so is the chance to break from the political divide and break bread together as senators. That loss of togetherness could play a huge impact in future Senate relationships as the 100 that make up the body tend to eat with their own party, instead of a complete unit.

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In fairness to them, senators within their caucus do get to know each other. Republicans still typically bring food from their home state during caucus lunch. Last year, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took a spill, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sent him the halibut recipe from her state that he apparently loves. Murkowski told me earlier this year that that recipe includes capers, chopped onions and some shredded cheese.

Meanwhile, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah — who, despite his clean-living Mormon lifestyle, has a soft spot for hot dogs — told me that his favorite food to bring to the caucus luncheon is J Dawgs, which is a hot dog company based in his own home state.

Democrats do it a bit differently.

“The cooks do a marvelous job,” Senator Jon Tester of Montana told The Independent. “They'll serve everything from beef to shrimp to everything.”

Tester, who works on a farm in Big Sandy, Montana, is an old-fashioned dealmaker and a farmer who famously had three fingers sliced off in a meat-grinding accident. He likes the fact that there’s so much variety in the Senate kitchen — and, like most Democrats, will usually just order off the menu provided by Congress’s culinary workers.

But senators gnoshing in their own silos might cause more harm than good.

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Early in my career, I covered an event with former senator Chris Dodd, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, who lamented this problem. He said he told an incoming Republican senator to find a Democrat with whom he could have breakfast, lunch or dinner, and they could get things done.

There’s no word if the Republican took Dodd up on this, but he certainly diagnosed a problem. Workplace relationships are as important — perhaps more important — in politics than they are anywhere else. And breaking bread together is a defining part of any workplace relationship.

There might be some hope yet. The new Senate calendar released in the wake of the election showed incoming Majority Leader John Thune wants the Senate to work five days a week. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance that on those days when they are not lunching with their own party, Democrats and Republicans get a chance to enjoy a meal together and actually do something for the country.

While chatting with Romney for his piece, I walked past Tester of Montana.

Tester could not be more different than Romney. Where Romney doesn’t swear, Tester does. Where Romney wears expensive suits, Tester often rocks flannel.

But the two struck up an unlikely friendship in the Senate, they worked together on everything from infrastructure to Covid relief. When Tester saw Romney, he couldn’t help but smile.

Unfortunately, Romney is retiring, and Tester lost his re-election, leaving two more seats empty at the table - a metaphorical table that used to be one of the biggest power brokers in Washington.