Workplaces and their customs changed forever this decade. But it’s perhaps no surprise that the people most eager to collaborate in person are those in artistic fields; after all, it’s so much harder to make something remotely. Among certain groups, that spirit of connectedness and communication flourishes even during mealtime, as colleagues share lunch or dinner and chat about work — or not. At restaurants, the so-called family meal has long been an essential tradition: employees feeding one another between moments of chaos. But the ritual isn’t just limited to the food industry. Here, T joins the table at a Mexico City architecture firm, a West End theater, a professional chef’s London kitchen, a New Jersey artist’s studio, a Manhattan fashion brand and a Los Angeles production company to see what creative people are eating, saying and thinking when they sit down to share a meal.
Ava DuVernay
Filmmaker, 52, Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles
I always say a movie set is like a small town. It has a hospital, which is the medic. It has police, which are the security officers. It has a school for young people and a mechanic … and it has a mayor, which is me. The town also has two restaurants. One is a diner, what we call craft services, where you can graze on granola bars, chips and fruit all day long. But at lunchtime, that’s fine dining: There’s an actual menu, and you get utensils. On some sets, you’ll see “brown bag lunch” on the call sheet, which means “everyone go do their own thing” — I hate that. There’s real value in convening during the workday.
In the early years, my producing partner, Paul Garnes, and I made movies on really low budgets, and he had a whole strategy. Week one, give ’em the good stuff: salmon on Wednesday, steak on Thursday, lobster on Friday. Week two? Hot dogs, burgers, a big pot of spaghetti. The way to people’s patience and imagination is through food; you’ve got to make sure the crew is well fed and happy. There’s nothing like the second half of a long day when you didn’t like the lunch.
At the [Historic Filipinotown] campus for [my company] Array, which we call a narrative change collective, we’ll get all the departments together for a meal about once a month when I’m in [Los Angeles]. We’re 19 people in total, though we also invite visiting friends and colleagues. We use different spaces: sometimes we’re inside in the Tavern, our kitchen with a 20-foot-long handmade wood table; sometimes we’re outside in an area called Queen’s Court, where we have a mural by the Dominican artist Evaristo Angurria that I commissioned in 2019. For a while, we’d vote on the restaurants we’d bring food in from. At another point, we’d invite chefs to cook on campus. We like to support P.O.C.-owned spaces, so now we order from favorite local restaurants like the Park’s Finest, Fixins Soul Kitchen and Little Fish. On set, it’s daily sustenance, so the timing is strict. But on campus, it’s much more flexible — we finish when we finish. In either space, we try not to talk about work. That’s my one rule: This is time for leisure.
To do your best, you should feel that you’re wanted, that you’re comfortable. Breaking bread is a way to engender that sense of community. Sitting down, inviting people to be themselves, sharing a good meal — these are the building blocks.
Jeremy Lee
Chef, 60, Soho, London
At Quo Vadis, we serve food steeped in regionality: Italy, France, Britain, nods galore elsewhere. [The private members’ club and restaurant] is nigh on 100 years old, and we cherish its timelessness. I’ve always worked in kitchens where produce was at the core, and that’s reflected in the staff food.
In restaurant kitchens, there are inevitably leftovers, and they’re a vital part of our [daily employee] breakfasts. You have all these vegetables from the night before that you strew in big pans and crack eggs over — the whole shakshuka rage. There’s also real butter, good jams, great-quality yogurt. It just harks back to Mom and Dad: the simpler, the better.
The kitchen itself is just shy of 20 [people], but the whole crew consists of everyone who works in a West End club: cooks, kitchen assistants, waiters, managers, sommeliers, housekeepers, reception, the bar team and delivery folk, should they walk through the door — about 50 or 60 in all. A day usually starts at 7, when deliveries begin. The cooks get in at 8 and, though the numbers vary, we’re usually between 20 and 40 for [staff] breakfast at 11; there’s also lunch around 4 for the evening crew. Everyone eats quickly, in 30 minutes or so, right in the dining rooms. You want to get really good food into everyone’s bellies, warm and nourish them, have them leave full of vim and vigor.
On the day a new menu is launched, at the beginning of each month, we send up all the dishes for the entire crew to try: Tasting is better than describing the dishes orally, and it’s vital so they can talk with confidence at the table. Otherwise we don’t really have a hierarchy, so [the schedule of who cooks the staff meal] is very loose; we try to get as many people as we can involved as often as possible. When the work is split equally and fairly, it’s fun to do and the food is better. We’ve had pan risottos, biryanis and jollof rice. I remember coming in one day and the [team] had just made this incredibly elaborate salad, like a Niçoise to the power of 20 — almost medieval in scale, with everything on it, asparagus and chard and riots of vegetables — and everyone went berserk. When everyone makes time to eat together, it’s a very happy scene.
Tatiana Bilbao
Architect, 52, Colonia Juárez, Mexico City
I started my own office [in 2004] when I was 31, and I wanted to create an organization that works horizontally: Everyone sits at the same table and we discuss every project, even the interns who are afraid to speak. We push them: “Do you have any ideas? You’re sitting at this table just like the rest of us.”
We’ve been sharing meals since the beginning. When we were fewer people, each of us would bring part of the meal — I might bring soup, for example — and we would complement it with a salad we’d buy nearby. The main [architectural] feature of the office today is our fourth-floor terrace, which is used for many things, but most profoundly for food. Every day, from about 1 to 2 p.m., there are more than 25 people [gathered outside] who bring their own meals. We’re a creative office, so we need to be together — we need to eat together to produce together. Lunch is a very big thing in Mexico, but [limiting] the amount of time you take allows you to have a more open afternoon: Now people leave at 5, which doesn’t happen at many other [Mexico City firms], and Fridays we finish at 3.
Before the pandemic, we hosted evening barbecues nearly every week. Once we’d fully returned to the office in 2023, people started to organize cookouts themselves (though less frequently), especially on days when we’re welcoming or saying goodbye to [an employee]. Sometimes it’s one person [who sets it up], sometimes it’s a group, and they’re always planning in the office chat: “Who’s coming?” We’ve grilled meat or done different kinds of quesadillas. Sometimes people say, “Now I want to cook my food” — Argentines make choripan [chorizo sandwiches], for instance. Occasionally the staff ends up partying and drinking beers and doing tequila runs late into the night — very a la Mexicana. My husband, who’s a gourmand, comes sometimes and says, “You could’ve made this nicer!” But it’s not about the food. The initiative is the important thing. It’s about sharing — the possibility of care from others.
Cai Guo-Qiang
Artist, 66, Chester, N.J.
When people would come to work on construction projects or to help harvest crops in my hometown of Quanzhou, China, my family would feed them. Now it’s a custom for me to do the same with co-workers and collaborators. Starting not long after I moved to Tokyo [in 1986], I had one or two assistants, and there was always a photographer around because I needed to document my work making gunpowder paintings with Japanese paperboard on my kitchen counter, where we also always ate together. My wife, Hong Hong [Wu], would help cook. It’s a way to express appreciation.
When I moved to New York [in 1995], Hong Hong still cooked for the team, but we were maybe three or four people. We lived in the Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village — the studio and home were a unified space. Then the team grew and [in 2003] we had our baby girl, Wenhao, so I found a separate space for the studio, although it was always anchored to the idea of home.
Now we have two studios — one in New York’s East Village, renovated by [Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm] OMA in 2015, the other built [in 2017] by Frank Gehry in New Jersey, where I mostly live on-site — and two chefs, both Cantonese, who cook lunch for the entire staff (and occasionally dinner for anyone working late). On average, the meal lasts around 30 or 60 minutes, depending on whether we have a lot of business to go over that day. In both studios, we use the dining tables almost exclusively for meals — the New Jersey one is made from an old stable door — but they’re very important spaces where we can ask questions and move things forward. The chefs will make a fish and papaya soup and oyster pancakes, which is my wife’s recipe from Fujian. Our friend [the chef] David Bouley, who recently passed away, once came to the studio and was so amazed by that dish that he invited my wife to his kitchen to make it and later put it on his own menu [at the New York City restaurant Bouley at Home]. He called it Hong Hong.
In a sense, cooking and making gunpowder paintings are very similar. First you prepare the studio — clean the floor, lay out the canvas — which is like prepping the kitchen. Then you set out different types of gunpowder and paper and stencils, which is like adding spices, pepper and salt. Before ignition, I cover the painting, like putting a lid on a pot; after the explosion, I sometimes ask my assistants not to lift the cover because I want the smoke to burn through the canvas a little bit more — to cook longer. One of our chefs, Ahuan Zhou, has been with us for more than 20 years and she understands what I’m doing, maybe even more than my assistants. Sometimes she’ll say, “Cai, please, you need to open it now or it’ll burn!”
Louis McCartney
Actor, 21, West End, London
I grew up with my brother in a little Coast Guard cottage overlooking the Belfast Lough in Ireland, where our lives were centered around the dinner table. We’d be outside playing with sticks, pretending we were knights, and we’d come in starving to beautiful, fresh food: bangers and mash with dark gravy, or dumplings and noodles with a deep, delicious broth. You’d sit there and you’d start to understand conversation. That really prepared me for my [acting] career.
When I got to London last year to play [the lead] Henry Creel in the West End production of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” (2023), I’ll admit it was a little lonely, but our play — a prequel to the Netflix series that examines my character’s origin story — is very ambitious. All our roles are taxing. In the TV show, Creel is a psychotic killer, but he’s also a little boy trying to escape his terrible past. There’s also magic everywhere [onstage], but each time I discuss this show, I find myself talking about the people in it, the lifelong friends I’ve made and how one thing we always try to do is eat in the same room.
The double [performance] days, Friday and Saturday, are brutal. The first show runs from 1 to 4, so you have to be at the theater at 11:45. Then, between 4 and 6:25 (which is our call time for the 7 p.m. one), there’s not a lot you can do other than eat. There are 35 of us in the cast, ranging in age from 17 to 56, and we [usually] all go down to the green room in the substage, which is rough and ready. Everyone finds a place to sit down, relax and talk. No matter how much I eat before a show, I find myself empty, so I like to have a big meal. There’s a taco place [nearby] on Kingly Court, or a good fish and chips is always nice. There’s no catering, but I like that: Everyone is eating different food. You pick at other people’s bits and bobs.
If we didn’t have that space and time together, I’d probably just be on my phone, going a little bit brain-dead. I’m a West End baby (this play is my debut), but I think what we have is special. When you’re at a table, engaging in conversation, that’s what actors always chase: connection.
Joseph Altuzarra
Fashion Designer, 41, Financial District, New York
Before I started my brand, Altuzarra [in 2008], I’d worked only [at fashion brands] where you would eat at your desk by yourself. From the beginning, one of the important things for me was that I wanted everyone to take time to sit and have lunch together. I like the lunch table because there’s no hierarchy — we talk about our kids, our families, “Real Housewives” or whatever intellectual topic du jour. But we don’t talk about work.
I grew up in Paris, where meals are sacrosanct. You leave work; you go to a restaurant; you have an hour that’s completely devoted to lunch. I came to the States [to attend college] and, when I first saw people eating at their desks, that was a big culture shock.
When we moved into my office in the Woolworth Building [in Manhattan’s Financial District] seven years ago, I told the architects about this tradition of us eating together. For the lunch area, I wanted something that felt intimate and welcoming, and I didn’t want it to be in the kitchen. We ended up with this space that’s like a nook with a big, square table where we can fit three or four people on each side: It’s where the design team has meetings or talks about the collection, but it’s also where [the staff] gathers to eat, usually for 30 to 45 minutes. There’s not a specific time we sit down but, once you hear the rustling of someone’s lunch bag or a plate hitting the table, people start to congregate; everyone is welcome. I have the same thing every day — a turkey sandwich on well-toasted gluten-free bread with avocado, mayo and cucumber from [the sandwich and salad shop] Lenwich: I’m really a creature of habit. But my mom [who worked at J.P. Morgan in Paris] also hosts lunches in the showroom, where she gives career advice to some of the younger people on the team. She’s fancier than I am — she’s ordered Italian and Mexican and sometimes makes her famous chocolate chip cookies, too.
I think creative directors tend to self-isolate, but I don’t believe I always have the best ideas. These lunches are a good reminder that we’re a community of thinkers and designers. I’m excited to come to work every day — obviously because I’m excited about the job, but also to be with these people I love.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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