A Case for the Lunch Special

Why the mid-day meal might be the most honest food you’ll eat all day.

Dinner gets the candlelight, the romance, and the theatrical unfurling of a tasting menu designed to impress. Brunch gets the cultural real estate. I’m talking bottomless mimosas, the hour-long waits, and the currency of a perfectly poached, Instagram egg. Lunch is the neutral ground, quietly waiting between work and play, holding out for the passion of a rushed break in the workday. We often eat lunch in the background of our lives unfolding, just a necessary moment to refuel for our next breath. It’s a pause in the day.

I’ve been thinking about the lunch special lately. We’re quick to write off that slip of paper tucked into a plastic stand on the simple, unornamented table of our favorite lunchtime service. The sole, three options for under fifteen dollars are a familiar comfort and we relinquish our taste for choice with a contented sigh of relief, in dreaded wait for our next obligation.

Dinner service is part performance. A graceful waitstaff dances with the front-of-house bustle. The kitchen is in full armor, with the expediter calling tickets and line cooks moving in a controlled fury. It can be an ecstatic experience, for food lovers, and a daily, harrowing nightmare for restaurant staff, but, dinner is the grand production of our idea of a restaurant: the lights, the service, and the plate-clanking action! We plan our unfolding lives around dinner. We get dressed, we arrive in condescending company, and perform right along with the staff, suddenly treating the proverbial water hole as the main event of our day.

But, possibly unsurprising to you as an avid eater of lunch, in many of even the finest of restaurants, lunchtime reveals what the eatery looks like when no one is watching. Is the broth made fresh or from a packet of powder? You’ll know for sure when there’s no time to soak in the ambience. Does the kitchen care about the story they’re telling, or are they uninterested in the journey? The lunch special offers honesty. It doesn’t have time to fabricate the answers.

The lunch special, if you haven’t figured it out yet, isn’t designed to win awards. It’s designed to move product. The goal is often to use what’s left from the weekend to feed the regulars who wander in at 1:15, with forty-five minutes left on their lunch break. And precisely because of this, because it’s not trying to impress you, the lunch special concedes the truth of your favorite spot.

Walk into any local favorite restaurant in America at 12:30pm on a Tuesday. Take note of who’s there, eating beneath unbuttoned conversation and the ephemeral cheer of short-lived respite. Are the tables are full of people from the cuisine’s country of origin? People who order without menus, who speak to the server in a language you don’t recognize? Order what they’re having. You can almost never go wrong.

This is the lunch special, unpretentious and barely advertised. It’s the food cooked for the sole purpose to feed, scaled up just enough to name the dish for the menu. It’s the perfect enchilada plate you crave, that tastes like someone’s mother made it, because someone’s mother did, at 9 this morning.

A lunch special that sings tells us a little more about the talent in the kitchen. We’re conditioned to believe that good food requires time, in all cases. Careful technique, long braises, and patient sears. And yes, some things really just can’t be rushed. But the lunch special operates on a different clock. It embraces the speed of the midday, because the people eating it have somewhere to be. This constraint, this pressure, produces its own kind of excellence.

We’ve been trained to save our appetites for dinner. To eat a sad desk salad at noon, so we can “indulge” later. But in skipping lunch or in treating it as a threshold to cross rather than a meal to savor, we miss something essential. We miss the restaurant at its most unguarded. We miss the chance to sit in a nearly empty dining room at 2 p.m., when the front-of-house and the server has time to tell you where they’re family’s from.

The lunch special isn’t trying to be beautiful and that’s exactly why it is.