Traveling Feast: What to Order and Not Order During a Business Meal
I never liked business lunch meetings, especially if it was with a more senior person. One tomato stain on your shirt and you look sloppy. One dot of balsamic vinegar on your tie and you look more junior than you ever wanted to be. Well, here is a way to relax during your lunch meetings. Let’s first start with the dos & don’ts of what foods to order:
Don’t order:…
- Pasta, especially linguine or angel hair. The sauce gets everywhere and the noodles are way too long to make a clean bite out of.
- Balsamic vinegar as your salad dressing. Duck, because those dark spots always manage to fly. The same is true of soy sauce, incidentally, but if you are at a Japanese restaurant, it’s pretty hard to avoid.
- Spinach. Nothing is worth having green between your teeth
- Huge sandwiches. They can come pretty thick & you don’t have a jaw like a snake.
- Soup. Can be messy and requires slurping.
Do order:…
- Chicken breast: you can’t go wrong here
- Any type of fish other than lobster: fish fillets, like salmon or sea bass, shrimp and other easy to eat seafood is a safe bet.
- Baked or mashed potato
- Mixed vegetables
- Salad with any light colored dressing
At the end of the day, these are not hard and fast rules, only some recommendations. The most important thing is to order something that you feel comfortable eating and that does not attract too much attention, whether for its price, messiness or elaborate presentation. The focus should be on you and what you have to communicate, not what you ordered.
The aim here is to be comfortable and relaxed enough to concentrate on the business conversation, and not worry about dodging any flying stains that are coming at you faster than heat seeking missiles.
In terms of choosing your wardrobe to minimize mishaps, a dark stain on a dark jacket is much less noticeable than on a light one. So dark clothing is the way to go. If you don’t want to look like Johnny Cash, a dark jacket with a light colored blouse or shell is always sharp looking.
If all goes wrong, a smile will soften the blow of any dish of pasta landing on your lap. Self-deprecating humor usually lightens the mood and, let’s face it, it’s happened to just about all of us.
If you’ve done all the right things, and your lunch partner has done all the wrong things and has spinach between his or her teeth, point it out right away. He or she will appreciate not having to go on to another meeting and have someone point it out there.
If you fail to mention it out of politeness, your lunch companion will know you saw it and decided to let him or her look foolish. Even Martha Stewart would agree that “this isn’t a good thing.”
So now you have a better idea of what to order, what to wear, and what to do should something go wrong. My last piece of advice is: Bon appetite!
