The Humble Gourmand

For most folks, eating lunch at the office is basically a last resort. It falls after:

1. Eating out with real friends
2. Eating out with work friends
3. Bringing lunch from home
4. Eating out with enemies
5. Wandering the office fishing for lunch invites, wearing your most effective sad face

Office food, especially when you work at larger companies, trends toward either a generic catered option of dry sandwiches and bland salads or an underwhelming cafeteria outsourced to Aramark or someone else who makes your middle school lunch ladies seem like Thomas Keller. The food may be free, but, honestly: at what cost?

Fringe Benefits

Recently, I’ve visited two companies that are turning the company cafeteria into something closer to a culinary dream, complete with star chefs, menus worth looking forward to, no need for reservations, and no check to pay at the end of the meal.

Google, long known for its amazing campus and equally valued employee benefits, has 17 gourmet cafés on its main campus in Silicon Valley — staffed by 20 chefs and 700 total culinary staffers. Just a few miles closer to San Francisco, Facebook recently started getting into the game, hiring away one of Google’s top chefs and offering employees three meals a day.

When I visited Google’s campus in Washington, DC a few months ago, I managed to make it in for a “request day,” where the chefs made some of the campus’ most requested dishes. In this case, there wasn’t much of a culinary theme to tie things together – besides the obvious, “stuff people really seem to like” — but no matter. At one end of the buffet, you could pick up a healthy portion of Mediterranean cucumber salad, complete with a variety of dressings made in-house, perfect greens, and freshly toasted pine nuts. As you worked your way down the aisle, you came across side dishes like a carrot pistachio lentil couscous, sautéed haricots verts, and wild rice pilaf. The entrées that day included spinach or turkey lasagna, wild king salmon, and the famous Google Luther Burger — a blood-thickening combination of a bacon cheeseburger on a bun made from Krispy Kreme donuts. Trust me on the blood-thickening part: I tried it, and didn’t forget about it for at least two days.

At Facebook in Palo Alto, I managed to make it to the cafeteria for another loosely defined day, “American Eclectic.” In addition to some great salads, the Facebook team put together a really mean chicken Cordon Bleu with a sauce supreme and a variety of eclectic pizzas, including one with chorizo, red onion, and green olive – plus the typical cheese and pepperoni varieties. Both companies frequently theme their menus around particular countries or regions, both to expose the staff to different cuisines and to delight the relatively large number of employees from around the world. To wit: this week’s menu at Facebook features Germany, Cuba, Italy, the Philippines, and the American South.

Jobs at Facebook and Google have become a bit of an Avalon for great chefs. In what mythical place, after all, can you go about creating food you can be proud of, based on a vision you create, appreciated by hundreds or thousands of people, making great money, and never have to work a weekend?

In fact, at web startups like these, the opportunities can be even bigger. Google and Facebook have the resources to allow their chefs to serve almost anything they want — free-range meats, organic produce, and hand-made sauces. Their chefs have become known for amazing versatility as well as the ability to provide fantastic food in health-conscious ways. When it comes to the paydays, some of the early Google chefs were made quick millionaires when the company went public in 2005, and it’s a sure bet that the Facebook staff is racking up the pre-IPO stock options.

You might think that working as a corporate executive chef would be a step-down when it comes to profile, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Charlie Ayers, Google’s first chef, has published books and opened his own restaurants, and has had profiles published in The New York Times. One of Google’s current chefs, Preeti Mistry, was part of this season’s Top Chef cast.

The Future of Food

Other companies are starting to get involved in the trend, even if they don’t have the resources to hire top chefs full-time or staff a complete kitchen. The aforementioned Charlie Ayers’ recent ventures involve helping smaller startups in Silicon Valley do some of the things he did at Google. Clients such as LinkedIn and Ning now provide daily lunch to their staff, catered by Ayers.

As food becomes a key benefit to employees in the Bay Area, it will be interesting to see whether companies in other industries and areas adopt similar options. The benefits aren’t merely the free meal, but lower expenses on items like insurance and sick days, by providing healthy food. Imagine how American cuisine and the American waistline might change if the California winds blow eastward and your average Nebraskan is exposed to healthy and eclectic meals on a daily basis. Minus that Luther Burger, of course.

Header photo of Google cafeteria from Flickr user toonbobo

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