Michael Moynihan: Revive a lunchtime culture by stepping out for a taste of art

Where is the lunchtime theatre of yesteryear, he asked — the noontide talks, the events of noon to two pm?

As it happens, his timing was particularly good. Cork city centre has something to offer the lunchtime rambler.

Everyone is probably aware of the upcoming renovation of the Crawford Art Gallery, and it’s offering an interesting series of lunchtime chats about that process from August 17-24.

On Friday week, for instance, Dr Chiara Chillè will give a talk at the gallery about general principles of conservation followed by a detailed look at her work in the Crawford; the following Monday registrar Jean O’Donovan will outline her preparations for packing and moving the Crawford’s diverse collection of artworks and objects safely and securely (for more see crawfordgallery.ie).

These chats — and more like them — are on at 1.15pm in the Crawford’s Lower Gallery. An ideal setting and time for a quick infusion of culture and information.

If you cast around there are other examples. This very week in the Cork Arts Theatre on Carroll’s Quay — just over the road from the Crawford — there’s a lunchtime option.

Running until Saturday, Meltdown of an Irish Tour Guide is written and performed by Jack Walsh (“A 70 minute whirlwind of 40 characters, including landlords, tourists, historical figures and even a moonwalking squirrel, as a tour guide selling Ireland as a wonderful land of ceol, cailíní agus craic struggles to keep a roof over his head”) and can be seen at lunchtime today and tomorrow. They take the 1pm performance time seriously, too: “For the lunchtime performances, patrons can choose a Lunch & Show ticket for €18, which includes soup or sandwich option, served from 12 noon until ten minutes before the performance time.”

(Check out corkartstheatre.com).

This is encouraging to see — a variety of entertainments available in the heart of the city.

If you can travel west to UCC there are even more choices, with public lectures and concerts going on during the college year: 1.10pm in the Aula Maxima for the concerts. True, holding public lectures at 11 in the morning might be a stretch even for those of us with understanding bosses, but if the traffic lights went your way making one of the lunchtime concerts wouldn’t be an impossible ask.

One of the significant impediments to lunchtime theatres, lectures, or concerts isn’t traffic congestion or even geography. It’s the disappearance of the very concept of lunchtime

The TV show Mad Men features Roger Sterling, the rakish advertising agency owner who admonishes a colleague at one point: “Aren't you even going to have any of this? Look, we've got Oysters Rockefeller, Beef Wellington, Napoleons. If we leave this lunch alone, it'll take over Europe.”

That was the sixties, though. Who could afford a lunch of that size now? Who could afford the time to eat it?

The erosion of lunchtime isn’t particular to Cork, of course, but it’s funny how attitudes to the midday meal break can be redolent of a particular time and place.

A few years back when writing about Cork in the eighties I spoke to Dan Byrne, who bridged very different working practices decades ago when moving from Ford to Apple.

One of the striking aspects of work in Ford going back to the seventies, he said, was the lunch arrangement: “There were four canteens.

“There was a canteen for the men on the factory floor. There was a canteen for the office staff. There was a canteen for the grade nines, i.e., management. There was a canteen for the directors.

“Each one of those canteens was used every day. Every single day there was a set lunch — catered by someone who was no Michelin star chef. The food was terrible. Genuinely. I would guess that the inmates in Mountjoy received better food.

“At one o'clock you went to the canteen, religiously, and you were back at your desk at one thirty. The bell went at one, you went to the canteen — workers, office staff, everybody.

“We all had our own tables and you ate with the same guys every day. I ate with many of the finance guys who worked across the road in Dunlop House, but who'd come across to the canteen every day at one.”

Does that kind of regimented approach to lunch exist any more? Doubtful. The time when companies thought of providing canteen services to workers is certainly long past.

Older readers can probably recall — either first or second-hand — the golden age of such subsidised work canteens, which were a major advantage in many large organisations. Yours truly can recall, for instance, the great cheap scones of the Dáil self-service.

The decline of the work canteen coincided roughly with a decline in the status of the work lunch in itself. 

Was this due in part to the ever-quotable Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street forty years ago? When Gekko spat out “Lunch is for wimps” he anticipated the generational change which now sees many people eat at their work station rather than venturing out of doors.

Part of that is reality, of course. Buying a lunch five days a week is an expensive business even if you’re going for a basic sandwich, never mind a banquet befitting Roger Sterling. The change in working practices means many people are not even in an office five days a week; for some the lunch break can mean a stroll to their own fridge rather than heading outside to a deli counter.

But leaving your place of employment, even temporarily, to enjoy your lunch is important whether you’re learning about an art gallery or enjoying a one-man show. The Harvard Business Review published an interesting study on the importance of lunch a few years back; though you might have expected a dismissal of lunch as a waste of time, the study’s title set out a pretty unambiguous position (‘Take Your Lunch Break!’).

The study recommended setting aside time for lunch, prioritising lunch and doing so with colleagues, and taking lunch visibly — as in, leaving your work station to do so.

There are other pluses to breaking out of the mournful munch at your desk around lunchtime.

Take the obvious health benefits from getting out to soak up some vitamin D and breathe in something that hasn’t been filtered through an air-conditioning system. Add in the positive dividends for the entire city from having more people walking around town around lunchtime — it’s often pointed out that the middle of Cork in the middle of the day isn’t always a welcoming spot, and this could change that perception.

And there are institutions around Cork which make getting out for an hour rewarding for the brain as well as the tummy.