Speaker 1: You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair,
Speaker 1: would you say.
Speaker 2: That, as a journalist and you're meeting someone, do you
Speaker 2: think you'd get a better interview or conversation with them
Speaker 2: in a restaurant over food or would you rather go
Speaker 2: to their office or in a separate room. You like
Speaker 2: to do it over food.
Speaker 3: Always there's a sort of unwritten hierarchy of getting to
Speaker 3: know and understand the person. So the lowest and the
Speaker 3: least meaningful is anything that you can find on social media.
Speaker 3: The next step up is the email. Then there's a
Speaker 3: telephone call, then there's a meeting, and the best of all, no,
Speaker 3: the second best of all is a meal. Probably the
Speaker 3: best of all is a walk.
Speaker 2: It's revealing. It's revealing the way people are in restaurants,
Speaker 2: aren't they as well? That you might? You know why
Speaker 2: people say why do people go on a date in
Speaker 2: a restaurant? Well, you see the way the person you're
Speaker 2: with treats the waiter. You see the way they how
Speaker 2: long they take to choose the wine. You see if
Speaker 2: they get upset about having to wait too long for
Speaker 2: their food. A lot of people I know, not so
Speaker 2: much anymore will say they really like to interview a
Speaker 2: candidate for a.
Speaker 3: Job over food.
Speaker 2: That tells you a lot. One person even teld me
Speaker 2: that if they don't push their chair in to the table,
Speaker 2: then they think badly of them, which I was surprising.
Speaker 2: Michael Bloomberg said he wouldn't hire anyone who asked for
Speaker 2: a glass of wine at lunch if he was being interviewed.
Speaker 3: Oh really, which is a bit tough.
Speaker 2: Norman was sitting next to him and said, I wouldn't
Speaker 2: hire anybody who didn't, but you might not if you
Speaker 2: were being interviewed. Have you interviewed perspective? People are going
Speaker 2: to work for you over food.
Speaker 3: In a restaurant, Yes, a lot?
Speaker 2: And what does it tell you?
Speaker 3: You look to get away from language and all the
Speaker 3: predictable formulas of office professional working conversations. It's interesting. I
Speaker 3: spoke to someone who runs HR for this kind of
Speaker 3: enormous investment business and she was saying to me, and
Speaker 3: I'm no good at this, So the reason why I'm
Speaker 3: so interested was that she's so good at it. She
Speaker 3: was saying that when she interviews someone, this is for
Speaker 3: a job, not for a story. She books in for
Speaker 3: five hours. The first three hours she talks about asking
Speaker 3: them about their live until the age of twenty one,
Speaker 3: and then after that she'll talk about their working life.
Speaker 3: And if you think about it, that's so difficult to
Speaker 3: do these days. Often it will be so intrusive. But
Speaker 3: also we all know that's what it is, that we're
Speaker 3: all playing out those stories in different ways. And you're
Speaker 3: more likely to get anywhere close to that in a restaurant,
Speaker 3: and you're more likely to get anywhere close to that
Speaker 3: over food. I mean, even the fact we're having this conversation.
Speaker 3: You know that The trick of this whole podcast, of course,
Speaker 3: is that if you call up and say, hi, I'd
Speaker 3: like to talk to you about your family and your
Speaker 3: background and your working life. Please know if you say,
Speaker 3: by the way, why don't we get it together, let's
Speaker 3: talk about some horse additions where that goes.
Speaker 2: Did your grandmother cook? Did your father cook? And then
Speaker 2: you remember parts of your life? Oh, Lorenzo Richard's partner,
Speaker 2: I remember in the seventies when they were doing the Pompado.
Speaker 2: We went home for lunch every day, and the idea
Speaker 2: for him of having a business launch was intolerable. You
Speaker 2: could not conceive of the idea that you would discuss
Speaker 2: work over food. For him, you worked and.
Speaker 3: Then you ate.
Speaker 2: I think it's changed now.
Speaker 3: I remember one fifty years ago. The truth is there
Speaker 3: were some. I mean one of my favorites was it
Speaker 3: being invited and someone said, we're going to have lunch
Speaker 3: in my office and going and arriving at lunch in
Speaker 3: the office and then arriving and I was on one
Speaker 3: side of the desk and he was on the other side,
Speaker 3: and do you mind if we have lunch? And I said, well,
Speaker 3: of course not. And the person came and served him
Speaker 3: up lunch and me not, we are going to But
Speaker 3: you do learn so much about people find off having lunch.
Speaker 3: I remember interviewing someone at once and we had this
Speaker 3: lunch and it was soup, and then it was something else,
Speaker 3: maybe a coffee. I was like, this is weird. Are
Speaker 3: you just trying to get me in and out here
Speaker 3: as fast as possible? And then it was like a
Speaker 3: cigar and I said, no, I don't want a cigar.
Speaker 3: But then we sat for two hours. We weren't really
Speaker 3: having lunch, we were having well he was having a cigar.
Speaker 3: I remember I once went to lunch with the head
Speaker 3: of a bank. It was his bank. It was a
Speaker 3: guy called David de Rothschild who has a bank called
Speaker 3: roth Child. And at the end of lunch, this cheese
Speaker 3: trolley came in Ruthie, and it's this amazing collection of
Speaker 3: the two of us having lunch, and there was an
Speaker 3: amazing trolley of cheeses. And I remember him saying to me, Oh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to get into terrible trouble thing myself with
Speaker 3: who who you can get drob with it to your bank?
Speaker 3: You chose to cheese, Johnny. But it was a sort
Speaker 3: of chart. It's a very very charming man in fact.
Speaker 3: But you did learn a lot about people on the
Speaker 3: way in which they interacted with others. I also loved
Speaker 3: the meal. And I will wake up and think, I
Speaker 3: wonder what's gonna happen?
Speaker 2: Do you think lunch? Yeah, you think about that when
Speaker 2: you wake up. I have a granddaughter, Ivory, who you know,
Speaker 2: and she says that she goes to bed thinking that
Speaker 2: she has lunch early enough she can have a second
Speaker 2: lunch round three other people.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Chefs often say and I do it when I'm coming
Speaker 2: into the River Cafe and I'm cooking lunch, I think,
Speaker 2: what do I feel like eating today, you know what
Speaker 2: would be the lunch.
Speaker 3: So it's certainly just the meal itself, but there's also
Speaker 3: who you're going to take a break from the screen
Speaker 3: or the writing, or the editing, or the just the
Speaker 3: back and forth of it all and be with the
Speaker 3: person over at lunch or a dinner. I really love
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table for in partnership
Speaker 1: with Montclair