Talk is rarely cheap, nor is it tax-deductible. People for whom talk is an essential business expense need to know where it flows freely within the confines of their expense account.
Marceline wants to be one of those places. A newly opened east London grand brasserie in a glass box that floats on one of Canary Wharf's many ornamental docks, its success depends on encouraging the business class to talk among themselves. There's a clubby mezzanine level for privacy, a main room that's optimised for buzz and a terrace that lends itself to table-hopping. Tricky acoustics are dampened by £40,000 of sound equipment, the double-height room having been mapped with pressure sensors while it was a shell. Billboard-sized hanging mirrors on one side mean guests need not be reminded of the daily grind by seeing the smokers huddled outside Barclays, State Street and EY.
Just as important is the menu, on which top billing goes to a two-sip martini. The £5-a-glass snifter is an out-of-office message, explains Marceline's operations director Liam Nelson. It's a signal of hospitality, a loss leader, a statement of intent. It says: you're safe with us — let's get just a little bit drunk.
"I'm less interested in French food and more interested in brasserie culture," Nelson said. "The celebration of the meeting space, the comfort and familiarity, that's what a brasserie really is."
Written down, the recipe for a good gossip spot can appear so obvious that it's a wonder why nearly everywhere gets it wrong. The most basic needs are to hear clearly, to be heard and to generally not be overheard. Comfort matters more than fashion, though safety in numbers can matter most of all. There's also the requirement to be left alone. Overbearing wait-staff and taster menus that namecheck each ingredient can be welcome distractions in a doomed marriage but are rarely wanted while talking shop.
Less obvious, but no less important, is the need to be transported. Think of the private elevator to Coq d'Argent's roof garden, perched incongruously on top of Bank Station in London, or the sidewalk marquees that abutted New York institutions such as The Colony and La Côte Basque. Think of the long, dark corridor that makes arriving at Guy Savoy in Paris feel like an out-of-body experience. The best restaurant entrances are like bridges between worlds, inviting you to leave the Microsoft Teams calls and Google Calendar invites behind as you pass to the other side.
Marceline does the same trick with a literal bridge. Then comes a tunnel-like walkway that opens into an airy space that can't pretend to be Paris or New York while feeling quite unlike London. Everything works together to transport guests into their safe space, because a restaurant for workers is a canteen, but a restaurant for decamped workers is a speakeasy.
To get going, the City of London needed coffee. Private members' clubs had been gathering points for merchants and nobility since forever, but it was a mid-17th-century mania for coffee that threw disparate people together, and kept them sober enough to remember what each other had said.
Coffee houses were "open to all ranks . . . no decently attired idler was excluded, provided he laid down his penny at the bar", writes John Timbs, whose 1872 guidebook Clubs and Club Life In London demonstrates the problem. Its first two-thirds, on private members' clubs, is a trudge. Notables of each generation disappear into self-created small worlds where they debate house rules, blackball undesirables and write odes to the deputy chief treasurer. Nothing much else happens.
Then in 1652, Pasqua Rosée opened a café near the Royal Exchange and within a couple of decades there was a central bank and a thriving insurance market, as well as about a hundred new joint-stock companies and a hype bubble forming around rumours of sunken treasure in the South Seas.
The problem with private members' clubs hasn't changed since the 17th century: closed doors keep the world out and the word in. For this article, I asked dozens of known and notable gossips about their favourite places; none suggested a club. Several recommended avoiding them whenever possible. Strong opinions were volunteered unbidden about The Groucho Club and 5 Hertford Street in London, Core in New York, Club C+ in Hong Kong and numerous outposts of Soho House. They can be exclusive, and are usually expensive, but the central casts don't change often enough to keep things interesting.
For being indiscreet it's better to be part of a scene than a clique. Camilla Wright, co-founder of the scurrilous Popbitch newsletter and website, names among her historic favourites Zilli Fish, a seafood-led Italian restaurant in London's Soho. The mini chain was better known for its owner, celebrity-chef Aldo Zilli, than for the quality of its specials. The closure of the original Zilli Fish in 2012 went unmarked by broadsheets, whose critics had mostly ignored its opening 15 years earlier.
What Zilli Fish had instead of acclaim was pulling power.
"In the noughties this was the perfect lunch spot to bring people to spill gossip. Every table around you seemed to run on sauv blanc and gak [cocaine]," said Wright. "Not only could you end up with your lunch guests giving you stories but also half the waiting staff; the next table; people walking by the floor-to-ceiling windows, seeing you in there and joining you for a digestif; the owner, other celeb patrons . . . "
The City's intensity of purpose once meant it was this scene writ large. Peter Rees, the town planner who managed the City's rapid expansion in the 1980s, considered the informal free flow of information an economic necessity.
"It was much too big a gamble to allow the financial centre of London to disperse," Rees told the Financial Times in 1989. "We had to keep the core of the financial community healthy and preserve the gossip network of people meeting and talking in restaurants, and wine bars, and pubs. The alternative approach of moving the new offices down the road to Docklands would have risked all that."
A lot has changed since the 1980s. Bank compliance departments generally discourage trade ideas originating over a bottle of claret, while the share-price-sensitive stuff spreads quicker electronically than in person. Even old-school types who distrust secure message services now prefer a more transactional approach when trading information. A fair percentage of recent rumours in the London market have passed through a single coffee shop in Mayfair, where the typical conversation is shorter than a single espresso.
Stories can still travel at the speed of lunch, but not many. The trick to catching them is to be in the right place, as it advertises your availability for when the right time comes. One noted City newshound would arrange all his meetings at The Wolseley, a grand café next door to The Ritz, because being seen there regularly made him an ally of the C-suite and grandee types who go to The Wolseley.
"Others seeing you gossip, and thus gossiping about what you're gossiping about, is a great protection," said Ed Hammond, a former deals reporter for the FT and Bloomberg, whose talent for goss-gathering was recognised by rivals and regulators alike. Hammond's favourites included The Wolseley and the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, "because even if the gossip was hollow, important people saw you having it".
The City's central meeting point of the moment is The Ned, a food court in a hotel that was once the Midland Bank headquarters. Bar stools scattered around the atrium are hostile to gossip (too close, too loud, too high a risk of live music) but work well for seeing and being seen. Stopping by The Ned is like being in 10 restaurants at once. Membership buys access to a bar in the old bank vault that's built for clandestine conversations, but it's the cacophonous corporate speed dating free-for-all going on upstairs that keeps the place busy.
Another thing often mentioned is hierarchy, and the common misconception that exclusive means expensive. "Our prices discriminate because we can't" is a classic visual gag from The Simpsons but, for society-hub restaurants, things rarely work that way. There's no social cachet taken from getting behind a velvet rope that unhooks for money alone.
The Wolseley in its prime was more exclusive than any private members' club, in spite of being a zero or two cheaper than its immediate neighbours. Getting in was the easy bit. Once through the door, an unspoken code would determine whether your table would be in the inner circle, the perimeter viewing gallery, or a Siberian annex next to the lavs. Front-of-house organised each zone like real time wedding planners. They always knew your place.
"Ultimately, it's about having a good maître d'," said Adam Hyman of Code Hospitality, an online community for restaurant insiders. "Unfortunately the role of the maître d' is a dying art as many operators view them as an added expense. They're worth their weight in gold in knowing how to properly sit a dining room, and how to read the room."
The place to be on Manhattan's Upper East Side in the 1980s was Mortimer's, where socialites competed for a window table with the fashion industry insiders of Park Lane and Lexington Avenue. Mortimer's took on the character of its owner, Glenn Bernbaum, a retired rag-trade executive and unapologetic snob, who reserved his charm for those he considered worthy of the compliment. Getting in meant staying friends with Bernbaum, which was no easy feat.
A restaurant identical to Mortimer's is the setting for People Like Us, a waspish satire by Dominick Dunne of New York's social elite. Dunne, a Hollywood film producer-turned-novelist, was ostracised from the New York scene after Women's Wear Daily published excerpts of his first draft.
"It's far better than Le Cirque, which is a chic-er restaurant," Dunne said in a 1988 interview. "It's the fact that it's not chic that makes it so chic. There's nothing that the rich like better than a bargain that's exclusively for them."
Social circles often form around the restaurateur, not the restaurant. What seems to help is when guests can see something of themselves in their host. There's comfort in knowing the person guarding the door is "one of us".
Sometimes the connection is obvious. Green's Restaurant and Oyster Bar was the 1980s hang-out for London royals and civil list hangers-on because its ever-present owner was Simon Parker Bowles, the Queen consort's ex-brother-in-law.
Mad Men © Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Other times, what guests see in the maître d' is aspirational. Lawyers still gather at The Seven Stars in Carey Street, behind the Royal Courts of Justice, where an imposing Australian with the stage name of Roxy Beaujolais has presided with more authority than any High Court judge.
Nearby is El Vino, the most celebrated of the Fleet Street journalist drinking dens. Through the 1980s, El Vino was run by Geoffrey Van-Hay, the Jeeves-like son of a police officer whose many dislikes (the unkempt, uncultured and uncouth; nonconformists; socialists; women) matched those of the day's popular press.
At the other end of the spectrum was Irish restaurateur Peter Langan. A notorious degenerate, Langan became a human shield for diners at the London West End celebrity haunts he co-owned, Odin's and Langan's Brasserie, by behaving far worse than they ever would.
Langan was a fair cook, an art collector with a good eye, a friend of the artsy set and a chronic alcoholic. Gossip columnists ate up the (often embellished) stories of his drunkenness, vulgarity and brazen sleaze. "Vomiting hither and yon was established as his party piece and entered the mythology," writes Brian Sewell in A Life With Food, Langan's sort-of autobiography, which Sewell pieced together from Langan's handwritten notes after his immolation in 1988. So lurid was his reputation for debauchery that any diner at his restaurants who didn't act at least slightly dissolute wasn't joining in the fun.
Then, as now, a Private Eye lunch is the most prized invite among London's chattering classes. Approximately a dozen of the magazine's contributors gather fortnightly to talk about all the stories they couldn't get past the lawyers, which encourages selected guests from politics and media to be similarly indiscreet.
For most of Private Eye's run the lunch was held in an upstairs room of the Coach & Horses, a scuzzy Soho pub more commonly known as Norman's, after its former landlord Norman Balon. Like the magazine, Balon made full use of establishment connections while adopting take-no-prisoners acerbic offensiveness as a personal brand. His self-regard far exceeded his interest in the finer points of hospitality, such as engaging in small talk and learning to cook. His ghostwritten memoir, published in 1991, is called You're Barred, You Bastards.
"People were so taken aback by the rudeness of Norman and the awfulness of the food that it slightly put them off their guard," said Adam Macqueen, a Private Eye staffer and author of its official history.
"These days we have them further up the road in a private room at Noble Rot, in the building that used to be the Gay Hussar. There's a slight feeling that the ghosts of all the politicians and the KGB handlers who were trying to get them to spill secrets there over the years are giving us a helping hand."
Elsewhere, the ghosts of Lunchtime O'Booze are being exorcised. Buzz has moved to places like Marceline, with its laptop-friendly bar area, house-pressed green juice and strategic reserves of crayons and dog biscuits. Restaurants made for bashing expense accounts the old way can feel by comparison like taking part in a historic re-enactment.
"We've noticed a shift in the habits and behaviours," said David Bardot, global managing director of Roka, a group of robatayaki restaurants that in its 20th year of operation recently added a weekday set menu. "Long, leisurely lunches where the food and drinks flow are still very much in existence, but the amount of people visiting for a quicker, more modest meal, is definitely increasing."
But while diners eat cleaner, their gossip has been getting more grubby. Rumours of real importance arrive digitally, so what's left to talk about tends to be scandal.
While diners eat cleaner, their gossip has been getting more grubby
The City's biggest word-of-mouth stories this year (or rather, the ones to have reached this author) are about sex, drugs and related messiness. They're rollicking tales, but their dissemination has probably not added much to the nation's GDP. When Peter Rees was working to preserve the Square Mile's soft power, this was probably not the type of information exchange he had in mind.
Has something important been lost? Possibly. It's not the gossip necessarily, since good stories always travel, but the stuff around it. An average work day has less time and fewer opportunities to learn about a person's trade in their own unfiltered words. Everyone has to get by on a little less conversation.
Long lunches inspire deep thought. The critic Robert Applebaum, in Dishing it Out, his 2011 book about why society needs restaurants, keeps coming back to the phrase "surplus enjoyment". It's a concept popularised by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, but since his definition would exceed the remaining word count several times over, my paraphrasing will have to suffice.
Very approximately, surplus enjoyment is any illicit or immoderate pleasure from inessential activity. Restaurants fit the definition because, while we all need to eat, no one's daily survival depends on choosing between a deluxe bento from Nobu or a porterhouse steak from Hawksmoor.
Business lunches double the surplus. Any enjoyment is on someone else's time and, ideally, someone else's money. Pleasures are stolen from toil. All the best workweek lunches are illicit, immoderate and entirely inessential.
Gossip has the same appeal. It's the extra sauce, an oofy garnish on workaday normality. Maybe that's why gossip is described in similar ways to food and drink. We serve the tea, spill the beans, stir the pot, dish it up. A good rumour can be juicy, spicy, salty and delicious, in ways that a good PowerPoint presentation cannot.
But maybe that's overthinking it.
No office is so happily industrious that leaving isn't an escape. No job is so important that it can't be interrupted by stories someone doesn't want you to hear. Gossip and lunch pair naturally, because who doesn't appreciate an opportunity to bisect a workday with word from the grapevine and a two-sip martini?
Bryce Elder is the FT's City Editor, Alphaville
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