Once a symbol of expense accounts and corporate excess, the three-martini lunch is being reimagined for a new working world.
[This article was produced in paid partnership with Cooper’s Cut at Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge.]
“The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency,” former US president Gerald Ford famously declared in 1978.
Not being American, I can’t say whether that’s true, but what I can say is that from my own experience – three martinis would probably prove the opposite.
The 1970s (and the 60s and 80s, for that matter) were the halcyon days of the liquid lunch. From Wall Street to Fleet Street, lunchtime drinking flourished, and cocktails and business became comfortable bedfellows.
The three-martini lunch became shorthand for a particular kind of working life: long afternoons, generous expense accounts and deals done as readily across a restaurant table as behind an office door. Whichever side of the Atlantic you were on, lunch wasn’t simply a break from business. Lunch was business.
Fast-forward almost half a century and I find myself about to put Ford’s theory of efficiency to the test.
I’m at Cooper’s Cut, the restaurant inside the Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge, where the newly launched Power Lunch comes with the option of pairing your meal with not one, not two, but three martinis.
Before you start mentally clearing my diary for the afternoon, there is a catch. These are not the martinis you are used to.Instead, the three drinks have been reworked for the modern working day: smaller serves, lighter spirits and a progression designed to take you through lunch rather than take you out of action.
The first is sweeter and sparkling, intended as a welcome; the second turns savoury to accompany whichever dish you choose; and the third takes its cue from the other great lunchtime pick-me-up, coffee.
It is, in other words, the three-martini lunch redesigned for people who actually have to work after lunch.
What is a power lunch?
At its simplest, a power lunch can be broken down into its two constituent parts. First, the power: being in a room where decisions are made, deals are struck and relationships forged. There was power in getting the right table, in who you were sitting with and, just as importantly, in who might spot you sitting there.
Then came the lunch. This couldn’t be a sandwich eaten over a desk. The restaurant had to be sophisticated enough to impress, the table good enough to be seen at and the drinks worthy of the occasion. The martini, with all its theatre, ritual and unmistakable sense of occasion, was almost purpose-built for the job.
The culture predates the phrase itself. Anyone who has watched Mad Men will recognise the world of 1960s Madison Avenue, in which cocktails could be as much a fixture of the working day as the meeting room. But it wasn’t until 1979 that Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg published America’s Most Powerful Lunch, documenting the extraordinary lunchtime ecosystem at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant [which makes it fitting that I’m revisiting the ritual in another Four Seasons].
The New York restaurant wasn’t simply somewhere powerful people occasionally went for lunch. It functioned almost like a second office. By the mid-1980s, around 90 per cent of customers in its Grill Room, the dining room that became particularly associated with the power-lunch crowd, were reportedly eating there at least once a week. Lunch wasn’t an interruption to the working day; it was part of it.
The rise of the three-martini lunch
The timing of the three-martini lunch is particularly interesting because the martini itself was evolving.
The earliest versions were relatively gentle affairs, often made with equal parts gin and vermouth. By the 1910s, two parts gin to one part vermouth had become standard; around the Second World War, it was closer to three-to-one.
By 1954, the taste for drier martinis had become so established that even American bureaucracy had taken notice. That year, US tax rules governing pre-mixed bottled martinis were changed to permit a gin-to-vermouth ratio of five-to-one, rather than the previous three-to-one.
At almost exactly the same moment, the three-martini lunch was becoming a phenomenon in its own right. One of the earliest known newspaper references appeared in the Atlanta Constitution in 1954, linking the habit with those fortunate enough to have “generous expense accounts”.
That detail matters. The power lunch took place in public, and conspicuous spending has long been one way of signalling status: you didn’t simply have money or influence, other people could see that you had it. A sought-after table, a generous expense account and another round of martinis all communicated that you belonged in the room.
It was also a very particular kind of room. The corporate worlds in which the three-martini lunch flourished were overwhelmingly male, at a time when professional success itself was coded in distinctly masculine terms. The post-war ideal was the company man: confident, competitive and able to hold his own in the boardroom and at the lunch table too.
The increasingly dry martini fitted neatly into that image. There was nothing soft or disguised about it: predominantly spirit, almost colourless, unsweet and served with increasingly little vermouth. Its strength was part of its identity.
It also had something few drinks could rival: instant recognition. The angular V-shaped martini glass, with its long stem, clear contents and olive or twist, gave the cocktail a silhouette all of its own. Like a champagne flute, you could spot one across a restaurant and know immediately what the person holding it had ordered. For a culture in which being seen at the right table mattered, it was a remarkably visible drink to be seen drinking.
When the three-martini lunch became political
All that conspicuous consumption eventually attracted attention beyond the restaurant.
During the 1976 US presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter turned the three-martini lunch into a symbol of an unfair tax system, arguing that wealthy executives were effectively receiving a subsidy for lavish business lunches while ordinary workers paid for their meals out of their own pockets. Gerald Ford’s famous defence of the three-martini lunch as “the epitome of American efficiency” was a response to exactly that debate.
The tax advantages attached to business entertaining were gradually curtailed – however its decline can’t be pinned on politics alone.
The expense account, so central to its rise, became less generous. In America qualifying business meals and entertainment could generally be fully deductible but the Tax Reform Act of 1986 cut that allowance to 80 per cent, and in 1993 it fell again to 50 per cent. Suddenly, picking up the bill for another round wasn’t quite as attractive to the company paying for it.
Attitudes towards drink-driving were changing too. In 1982, President Reagan established the Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, tasked with raising public awareness, strengthening enforcement and encouraging states to tackle the problem more aggressively. Legislative change followed and over the following decades, behaviour that had once been treated with remarkable casualness became increasingly socially unacceptable.
By the end of the century, then, several of the conditions that had allowed the three-martini lunch to flourish were disappearing. But, being social creatures, our appetite for mixing business with pleasure would never truly disappear; it simply needed to evolve.
The three-martini lunch, reimagined
Which brings us back to Cooper’s Cut.
If the original three-martini lunch evolved around the way people worked and drank in mid-century America, well, Cooper’s Cut is doing much the same – just in London, some 70 years later.
Instead of asking how much gin can be squeezed into a martini, the question here is how you preserve the ritual, and pleasure, of three cocktails over lunch without writing off the rest of the working day.
The answer lies in less alcohol, smaller serves, but no less ceremony. The distinctive glass remains, as does the garnish, and each arrival at the table still has the unmistakable theatre of ordering a martini.
All three work from a base of Quarter Proof, a British brand specialising in mid-strength spirits -part of a wider shift towards lower-ABV cocktails that don’t require drinkers to sacrifice the occasion itself.
The first uses its take on London Dry, with elderflower and sparkling wine. Intended as a welcome rather than a pairing for the first course, it’s bright, lightly sweet and aperitif-like – a gentle way into proceedings.
The second moves firmly into savoury territory, combining Quarter Proof Grain Spirit with caper brine and a delicious blue-cheese-stuffed olive. Designed to sit alongside the food, its umami and soy-sauce notes give it the savoury depth and bite of a proper martini.
Finally comes Quarter Proof Agave with coffee and salted caramel, a lighter take on the espresso martini that hits the spot. Part cocktail, part post-lunch coffee, it feels particularly well judged for a power lunch: a final flourish before it’s time to get back to business.
After years in which Zoom calls, hybrid working and eating lunch in front of a laptop threatened to make the business lunch feel obsolete, sitting down opposite someone arguably carries more weight than it once did.
A restaurant offers what another video call cannot: time, hospitality and the chance for a conversation to wander somewhere unexpected.
Gerald Ford may have been onto something about the efficiency of the three-martini lunch after all. It just took the martini a few decades to catch up.
About Cooper’s Cut
The Power Lunch at Cooper’s Cut is priced at £45 for two courses or £58 for three, with an optional Three Martini Mid-Day pairing (£39).
https://www.fourseasons.com/towerbridge/dining/restaurants/coopers-cut
About Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge
Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge offers a unique blend of history and luxury in one of London’s most iconic neighbourhoods. With unparalleled hospitality and a commitment to excellence, the hotel caters to both business and leisure travellers alike. Featuring three distinguished dining outlets, an award-winning spa, and luxurious hotel residences, the hotel provides an unforgettable experience in the heart of London for all guests.
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