Twelve years  ago I went on a two-day cruise around Tampa Bay on the then brand new Queen Mary 2, which joined the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria as part of Cunard Line’s legacy on the high seas that dates back to 1839.  Sad to report, while I found the ship itself impressive, the food onboard was atrocious at a time when it seemed oceanliners were just beginning to improve their food and restaurants.    
    Then last year I was invited to give two lectures aboard the QM2 on her Atlantic crossing out of Southampton, and I leapt at the chance. My wife, who as a child was a veteran of crossings on ships like the S.S. France,  Flandre, and Liberté, found the idea of seven nights at sea a little daunting, but I was thrilled to experience it for the first time.  I was praying the food would be better.
    This past June the QM2 emerged from a short make-over that brought in 6,500 pieces of new furniture, 4,000 new works of art, 438,00 square feet of new carpet, even ten more pet kennels.  Prices for this season, which ends in the fall (when the ship switches to warm water ports of call) run from $1,653 for inside rooms up to $21, 210 for the most posh of accommodations.  All include room, food, pool and gym, and all entertainment, which ranges from first-run movies and amazingly good Broadway-style musicals to a Shakespearean play.  The lowest fares are hard to believe for their economy, but even were you to pay $10,000 or more, you get far more luxury, service, and entertainment that you could expect for seven nights at even a mediocre hotel, restaurants, and shows in London or NYC.  No wonder, then, that this season’s crossings are almost sold out. 
    Our arc-shaped stateroom suite (left and above) looking out over the prow of the ship, with a modern art deco refinement, was exceptionally well-designed, from the bedroom, with King size bed, spacious and walk-in clothes and luggage closet—no need to slide bags under the bed!—to a well-equipped bathroom roomy enough to move around in easily.
    Service throughout, from our butler to the restaurant workers drawn from a wide range of internationals speaking many languages, were clearly trained in the British way of hospitality: Remember that Lord Nelson demanded that “England expects every man to do his duty” on an English ship, even if the crew are  mainly from Slovenia and Rumania.
    The options for dining seem endless, at least until you’ve eaten onboard for five days.  The two top-tier dining rooms, tied to your package, are the Queen’s Grill and the Princess Grill, where, as is the custom, you dine with the same people every night.  (You may ask to dine alone, and there were some who did, described by the staff as people who more or less spend their entire year cruising the world.)
    We ate each evening in the beautiful Princess Grill (right), where we were extremely fortunate to have six tablemates who could not have been more diverse or more affable,  including two Californians, a movie stunt coordinator and his wife, and two jolly retired Brits. We’d usually start with cocktails at the always packed Commodore’s Club lounge, whose bartenders get to know your cocktail preference on the first night, then proceed to dinner, where three nights were black tie.  The food was for the most part very good, as were the wine choices, though, except for one special each night, the menu never changed, so that four nights in, we had  pretty much ran through everything on it.  But it’s no hardship to have fine lamb chops or Dover sole twice in a week.  The cheese and dessert offerings were excellent, too.
    The menu at the more glittery Queen’s Grill is the same, and I see from the current menus that they’ve also added some Canyon Ranch Spa Selections, with calorie counts, though to me the idea of not splurging on the Queen Mary 2 is like driving an Aston Martin at the speed limit.         The Brittania Club restaurant (left) set for lunch is exceptionally handsome and sunny—when it is sunny—and the menu more or less overlaps with those at the Grills.  The King’s Court is where most people have breakfast, lunch and dinner and everything in between. It’s a huge place with tandem dining areas and the look of a cafeteria, which it is, and among the various stations there is hardly a cuisine or any kind of food you won’t find every day, from pancakes and freshly made eggs, to pizza and sushi, from Thai spring rolls to Indian curries, from New York-style sandwiches to London-style bubble-and-squeak.  I must say I was very impressed with the quality, not least because all the food had been brought aboard in Southampton (reprovisioned in NYC), yet freshness was never an issue.
    After all the days at sea, the dips in the pool, tea time, movies, quiet visits to the library, lectures, and even a daunting Planetarium show (right), our urge to get on American terra firma had set in.  Dutifully getting up just before dawn, we joined the throngs outside to watch the sun silently creep up over the magnificent New York skyline stretching from Brooklyn to Staten Island, with Lady Liberty in the harbor, holding her torch aloft. I half expected them to play “Rhapsody in Blue.”
    I had never seen New York from out at sea, and I suddenly felt that the gorgeous lines William Wordsworth had penned back in 1802 about London’s Westminster Bridge could not have been more aptly applied to New York: 

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. . . .
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

    There were a few eccentric people onboard who never disembarked from the QM2 and intended to sail back to England that afternoon, but for me the cruise had been just enough to make indelible impressions on me, so that I would probably never repeat it, content in the way I was once to join Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the Fourth of July fireworks in NYC.  My time onboard was unforgettable but never fleeting, and I feel that a second voyage might sap the wonder of it all.

    Last week Eater.com and its “partner,” Vox Creative, came out with a list of New York’s top Power Lunch restaurants, yet, with only three exceptions, few would ever be considered for a serious business lunch, where the emphasis is on business and lunch is secondary.  The Power Lunch thrives in NYC as nowhere else in the U.S. in restaurants that have been around for a very long time, including the just-closed Four Seasons in the Seagram Building.  Indeed, the term Power Lunch was concocted by Lee Eisenberg in an Esquire magazine story (October 1979) entitled  “America’s Most Powerful Lunch” about the Four Seasons (left), to the point of showing the Grill Room’s lay-out and who usually sat where.
      Earlier, in March 1976, the “Power Breakfast” was unofficially inaugurated (though the term was not used until 1980) at the Regency Hotel’s 540 Park Restaurant (below) by Preston Robert Tisch, president of the Loews Corporation, as a way for businesspeople to fit in an early meeting before the regular business day began. For the privilege of having breakfast—some regulars fit in two successive meetings—at what is now called the Regency Bar & Grill, you will pay $25 for eggs “any style,” $18 for yogurt with Granola, and $22 for pancakes.  But as someone said of the outrageous prices for the food, “You can’t really complain about the price, because it’s cheaper than office space.”
    After the Esquire article, the term Power Lunch caught on fast, and many restaurants sought to be part of the idea, including the well-established `21’ Club, a branch of the L.A.-based Michael’s, steakhouses like Sparks and Patroon, and high-end French places like Le Cirque in midtown; downtown in the Wall Street area private dining clubs were more popular for business lunches.
        The reason places like these were chosen was always about access and recognition from the restaurants’ owners and staff, preferential seating, and the ability always to get a table. From such considerations grew the idea of the “negative reservation,” which referred to a businessperson who dined most days of the week at an individual restaurant and called to relinquish their table only on those days they would not be coming.
        In such restaurants territory was critical to image: at the Four Seasons it was the Grill Room, at ‘21’ the first dining room by the bar (left), festooned with corporate toys. Being relegated to “Siberia” would be considered a demotion by one’s peers. That term originated in the 1930s, when a society woman named Peggy Hopkins Joyce (below) entered the class-conscious El Morocco nightclub in NYC and found herself being led to a less than desirable table. “Where are you taking me,” she asked the maître d’hôtel, “Siberia?”  Thus, the contortions and extortions that take place to assure being seated at an “A” table can be fierce. 
     It should be noted that an “A” table is not always the same thing in a celebrity-rich or fashionable restaurant as it is in a Power Lunch. At the former the most conspicuous table is the most coveted; at the latter, discretion is more the rule, and having distance between your table and your competitor’s in the same industry is assumed. 
      Every maître d’ can tell horror stories of being harangued by old and new guests for a very specific table, even if someone is already sitting there.  The young Sirio Maccioni, later owner of Le Cirque, on his first day as maître d’ at the high society restaurant The Colony back in the 1960s had to cope with Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Aristotle Onassis all coming for lunch and assuming they would get their regular table—the same one for each of them.   Sinatra was not happy but moved, Grant was wholly gracious, Onassis got the table but griped anyway.  (One can only imagine Rick’s dilemma in the movie “Casablanca” when freedom fighter Lazlo asks him for a table “as far away from [Nazi] Major Strasser as possible,” to which Rick wryly remarks, “Well, the geography may be a little hard to arrange.”)
    Lunch at fashion industry favorites like Polo Bar by Ralph Lauren is much more a matter of seeing and being seen than deal-making. But a Power Lunch is always a business lunch, even if little business is actually discussed, and for this reason, the trendier, the noisier, the more out-of-the-way and the more extenuated the meal, the less useful it is for business.  The food should never dominate, and the Three Martini Lunch has been dead and gone for two decades now.  You’ll now find far more bottled water and iced tea on the table than even a glass of wine.
        Just to show how unimportant food was to his business lunches at Le Cirque, the monstrous power-mad lawyer Roy Cohen would emerge from his limo carrying a bag with his own lunch and iced tea in it, which he handed to the maître d’ to have plated.  And, of course, everyone remembers the line in the movie “Wall Street” (below) when Gordon Gekko invites his acolyte to `21’ and five minutes later leaves him at the table, snarling, “Lunch is for wimps.”
       
So, I was amazed to find the Power Lunch spots in the Eater.com/Vox Creative article so out of tune with the established rubrics of what a Power Lunch is really about: “The iconic restaurants and traditions remain, but the idea of what power lunch means today has shifted significantly. For many, that rare-yet-cherished working lunch is more kale salad than mid-day porterhouse. And the power lunch spots of yesterday no longer attract the elite and powerful, as seen by the ever-changing trends and restaurant openings in New York. (In case you were wondering, ramen, raw bars, and tasting menus are in for the lunch crowd).”
        The article does mention `21’ Club, Odéon and Betony, but the rest are so fraught with problems for the Power Lunch crowd that they are clearly better suited for those willing to wait for a seat at the counter or to endure a gargantuan three-hour meal.  Thus, at Ippudo in the East Village, Eater.com/Vox Creative writes: “Get there early for lunch — no reservations, and eager lovers of the noodle soup will most certainly guarantee you a wait — and settle in for a ramen bowl, rice bowl, and small salad for lunch.”  At Eleven Madison Park (right), lunch is a seven-course affair: “Be forewarned—a table for two at lunch, without the wine pairing will cost you nearly $1,000 with service and taxes. But this is power lunch 101: So order the wine pairings and ease into a decadent meal.”
        Since the average Power Lunch meal in Midtown costs roughly $50 per person, a tab like Eleven Madison Park’s would be quite a stretch even for an investment banker on a roll, not to mention a Brazilian billionaire who never eats lunch before two PM.
        Balthazar does get a good business breakfast crowd, but its hugeness, its frenzied atmosphere and ear-splitting noise do not make it an ideal spot to discuss mergers and acquisitions.  And I wince at Eater.comn/Vox Creative’s  notion that “Nothing says power lunch more than a lobster bib.”
     
For any business person not located way over west in the Village, High Street on Hudson would be a trek during midday, when traffic is at its worst.  Still Eater.com/Vox Creative calls it “the new powerhouse lunch spot. If you’re there before 11:30 a.m. (official lunch hour), feast on an elevated breakfast sandwich or pick from the stunning selection of pastries.”  Does the photo of High Street on Hudson below look ideal for a serious business lunch?
    Santina, inconveniently located even farther west under the High Line, is “an easy yet trendy place to make your sprawling group lunch into an extended afternoon event.” The NY Times critic called Santina’s sound level “oppressive at peak capacity”—just the place to have a face-to-face with your toughest client!
        Lure Fish Bar’s “lively atmosphere brings Manhattan’s media elite to this Soho hotspot” for “a taste of the yacht life [in] a subterranean dining room designed to look like the boat of your dreams,” which might be fun after you clinch your multi-million dollar deal at a quieter venue uptown.
        Eater.com/Vox Creative is certainly correct that their choices are widely popular, the food very good, and they might be great fun for after hours business entertaining on expense account, perhaps followed by karaoke.  But I doubt even a VP of Marketing for Stella McCartney, Rag + Bone or Lululemon in the Meat Packing District is going to try to bring in business over saketinis  at Spice Market or Fatty Crab.
    Like most listicles in the foodie media these days, heat and buzz mean everything and anything, two terms antithetical to the Power Lunch crowd, for whom the last thing they want to hear over the booming sound system is Wiz Khalifa and Big Sean while a waiter explains why it’s taking fifteen minutes to get a chicken fajita.