A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I got together for our final summer lunch together for the year. She’s a teacher, you see, so during the summer she has a lot more time to do things like take our son on fun outings, work on projects around the house, and meet up with me for lunch. As always, though, the summer has wound down, and she’s back to work again, which means no more weekday lunch dates for us.
It being our last weekday lunch together for a while, my wife decided that she wanted to make it memorable and step outside our normal set of restaurants. She picked the place, and we met up and had a good meal. The place she picked, though, isn’t one that would have occurred to me in a million years as a lunch spot, and it got me to thinking about the differences between men and women.
Now, I should point out that lunch is kind of a big deal for me. It’s not exaggerating to say that the quality of my lunch is the single greatest factor in determining how well my day goes. A good lunch will brighten my morning with anticipation and suffuse my afternoons with the warm glow. A bad lunch, on the other hand, can put me in a funk for the entire day. As a consequence, I’ve given a lot of thought to the question of how to optimize my lunch experience, and the types of food and restaurants that do best in helping me toward that goal.
I tend to favor simple, hearty, unpretentious food when it comes to lunch. Not that I don’t enjoy refined meals — indeed, for dinner I love going out to a fancy restaurant, or trying all manner of interesting culinary techniques when cooking at home. At lunchtime, though, I’ll nearly always choose a great deli sandwich, or the kind of hole-in-the-wall ethnic joint that serves food so authentic and delicious that I don’t even care about the less-than-perfect score it got from the health inspector.
My wife, on the other hand, picked a nice Italian restaurant for our last summer lunch date. She had a lamb panini served on artisan bread. I had a plate of fusilli with lamb ragout. The salad we split had baby greens, heirloom tomatoes, and shavings of aged romano, set off with a light, fresh vinaigrette. We sat under a little arbor while we ate, in a private corner of the enclosed patio. It was a lovely, elegant meal with delicious food and classy ambiance, and one that I never would have picked for lunch.
At first, I chalked this up to my own personal tastes, which can tend toward the eccentric at times. As I got to thinking about it, though, I realized that nearly all of my male friends and co-workers favor things like pizza, sandwiches, burgers, and cheap Thai or Indian food when they go out for lunch. On the other hand, all of the women to whom I described our date thought it sounded perfect. So maybe it isn’t just me.
The interesting question is why this dichotomy might exist, but unfortunately I haven’t a clue. So, instead, I’ll throw it out to you, dear readers: what’s your favorite lunch? And why?
Photo Credits
“Prawns Marinated in White Wine” benjiordonez @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
“Sandwich lunch” Mandi Gaga @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
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