Roger Collis

IT’S “martini weather,” my boss used to say when I was working in the Midwest a hundred years ago. “I’ll let you buy me lunch at Tony’s.” Which gave us no end of encouragement for the budget meeting that afternoon. Less benign was the ad agency’s invitation to self-destruct at the notorious pre-presentation lunch at the All America Club in Chicago..

Times, of course, have changed. Not that I really regret the passing of the Great American Three-Martini Lunch. It was always great to catch up on corporate gossip, although it sometimes led to some strange business decisions. But I do draw a line at the neo-puritan cult of minimalism: “Let’s do lunch, we don’t need to eat,” an editor in New York suggested the other day. Or, “We assume you had lunch on the plane.” The best strategy is to fill up with two power breakfasts to last you through the day. Click here

SOMERSET MAUGHAM famously said that to eat well in England you must eat breakfast three times a day. Well, things have improved over the years, especially if you’re on expenses. But the old cynic would surely be amused by the constant appeal for the Great British Breakfast among the business community. Not that the three-hour lunch has gone entirely out of style, but “doing breakfast” is the most powerful success symbol. Last month, after 146 years Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, bastion of the male chauvinist business lunch, finally opened for business breakfasts. Click here