Bonus: Working Lunches with James Harding

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1:12Would you say that as a journalist and you're meeting someone, do you think you'd get a better interview or conversation with them in a restaurant over food, or would you rather go to their office or in a separate room? You like to do it over food. Oh, always. Isn't that interesting? There's a sort of unwritten hierarchy of getting to know and understand a person. So the lowest and the least meaningful is anything that you can find on social media. The next step up is the email. Then there's a telephone call. Then there's a meeting. And the best of all, no, the second best of all is a meal. Probably the best of all is a walk.

1:55I love it. It's revealing. It's revealing the way people are in restaurants, isn't they, as well? It's really revealing. You know, why people, we always say, why do people go on a date in a restaurant? Well, you see the way the person you're with treats the waiter. You see the way they, how long they take to choose the wine. You see if they get upset about having to wait too long for their food. A lot of people I know, not so much anymore, will say they really like to interview a candidate for a job over food. That tells you a lot. One person even told me that if they don't put their chair in to the table, then they think badly of them, which I was surprised at.

2:33Michael Bloomberg said he wouldn't hire anyone who asked for a glass of wine at lunch if he was being interviewed. Oh, really? Which is a bit tough. Norman was sitting next to him and said, I wouldn't hire anyone who did it. Well, he didn't. Yeah, I can see that. But you might not if you were being interviewed. Have you interviewed prospective people who are going to work for you over food? In a restaurant? Yes, a lot. And what does it tell you? You look to get away from the language and all the predictable formulas of office professional working conversations. It's interesting. I spoke to someone who runs HR for this kind of enormous investment business, and she was saying to me, and I'm no good at this, so the reason why I was so interested was that she's so good at it.

3:28She was saying that when she interviews someone, this is for a job, not for a story, she books in for five hours. The first three hours she talks about, asks them about their life until the age of 21. And then after that she'll talk about their working life. And if you think about it, that's so difficult to do these days. Often it can be so intrusive. But also we all know that's what it is, that we're all playing out those stories in different ways. And you're more likely to get anywhere close to that in a restaurant and you're more likely to get anywhere close to that over food. I mean, even the fact we're having this conversation, you know, the trick of this whole podcast, of course, is that if you call up and say, hi, I'd like to talk to you about your family and your background and your working life, and you're like, please no.

4:19If you say, by the way, why don't we get it together? Let's talk about some horseradish and see where that goes. Did your grandmother cook? Did your father cook? Yes, yes. And then you remember parts of your life. Oh, Renzo, Richard's partner, I remember in the 70s when they were doing the Pompidou, we went home for lunch every day. And the idea for him of having a business lunch was intolerable. He could not conceive of the idea that you would discuss work over food. For him, you worked and then you ate. I think it's changed now. I remember one of my favorites. This was 50 years ago. The truth is there were some.

4:53I mean, one of my favourites was being invited and someone said, we're going to have lunch in my office. And going and arriving at lunch in the office. And then arriving, I was on one side of the desk and he was on the other side and said, do you mind if we have lunch? And I said, no, of course not. And the person came and served him up lunch. And me not. And I just sat there going, we are going to... But you do learn so much about people. Funnily enough, having lunch. I remember interviewing someone once and we had this lunch and it was soup. And then it was something else, maybe a coffee. And I was like, this is weird.

5:29Are you just trying to get me in and out here as fast as possible? And it was like, cigar? And I said, no, I don't want a cigar. But then we sat for two hours. We weren't really having lunch. We were having, well, he was having a cigar. I remember I once went to lunch with the head of a bank. It was his bank. It was a guy called David de Rothschild. who has a bank called Rothschilds. And at the end of lunch, this cheese trolley came in, Ruthie, and it's this amazing collection of the two of us having lunch. And there was an amazing trolley of cheeses. And I remember him saying to me, oh, I'm going to get into terrible trouble.

6:04And I remember thinking to myself, with whom? Who are you going to get in trouble with? It's your bank. You chose the cheese trolley. But he was a sort of charming, he's a very, very charming man, in fact. But you did learn a lot about people and the way in which they interacted with others. I also love the meal. And I will wake up and think, oh, I wonder what's going to happen. Do you think about that? Do you think about that when you wake up? I have a granddaughter, Ivy, who you know, and she says that she goes to bed thinking that she has lunch early enough, she can have a second lunch, around three.

6:35Other people, you know, chefs often say, and I do it when I'm coming into the River Cafe and I'm cooking lunch, I think, what do I feel like eating today? You know, what would be the lunch? So it's certainly just the meal itself, but there's also who you're going to take a break from the screen or the writing or the editing or just the back and forth of it all and be with the person over a lunch or dinner. I really love that. Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair.

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