The indiscreet charm of the weekday lunch

The restaurant pitch goes something like this:

Come in for lunch. It’s cheaper than dinner. We’ll give you a three-course meal for under $20. We’ll let you eat the kind of foods you wish you were eating at dinner. See—here’s a burger. A fried-fish sandwich. A ridiculously souped-up BLT.

Straightforward as this may seem, the recession appeal of lunch is not that it’s cheap. Not exclusively, anyway. It’s that while eating a leisurely lunch is less expensive than dinner, it is also, somehow, more of an extravagance.

This is something I did not need a credit crisis to tell me. I like to eat lunch at places that are simply not interested in dinner—places that devote an incredible amount of care to a meal that I have been strongly encouraged to pack in a brown paper bag and eat in front of my computer. Places so swamped on the weekends for that ugly-sounding meal we call brunch that their weekday charms have nearly been forgotten. Southport Grocery. Milk and Honey. Recently, Jam. These aren’t the “best” restaurants in Chicago—they’re something better. They’re preoccupied. With lunch. It’s a feeling I’m quite familiar with.

My love of lunch runs as deep as it does broad. Lunch to me is a Cubano (pace myself) and a cafecito (quickly devour) at Cafecito; a pastrami sandwich (really, Julia, pace yourself) at Perry’s; a white tablecloth on which natural light forms rectangles and triangles and rhombuses, as at Naha (pictured); a turkey club (no bacon, please, not in front of my father) and a plate of cookies at the Standard Club.

Deviating from the socially prescribed norms of lunch only makes it better. Breakfast is brief, dinner is prolonged, but lunch, we’re told, is one hour. (And for the industrious, much shorter.) Which makes the pleasure of a two-hour lunch break a deliriously guilty one. From the food ethicists, we’re told lunch cannot be junk food. I try not to think of these people when I sit in the park with a large order of McDonald’s french fries (or, making a concession to my conscience, Epic Burger). For the restaurant critic, lunch is supposed to be some kind of reprieve: In order to eat two appetizers, two entrées and two desserts later that evening, I’ve been urged by colleagues and friends and genuinely concerned strangers to eat raw kale for lunch. But I could never. Yeah, I’ve eaten at Taxim for dinner, but I’ve got to go back now that it’s serving lunch, right? North Pond’s summer-only lunch service is going to be over before I know it, Browntrout’s has just started, and the takeaway here is that I am not interested in skipping lunch at one of these places for a pile of raw kale.

Yes, there is something about my love for lunch that’s repugnantly aristocratic: It is the pleasure of being served. And from there, it’s sickeningly bourgeois: It’s the joy of copious, conspicuous consumption. Particularly the way I approach it, which invariably involves a level of gluttony and selfishness. Having been reared on a one-dessert, four-forks ratio, my relationship to the plates of food set in front of me as an adult can best be defined as proprietary. (A certain chocolate semifreddo at recently opened, lunch-centric Terzo Piano knows this already.)

So when I defy the sandwich/burger expectation and order a lunch entrée—the whitefish at the Gage, the trout at Sepia—I’m saying to lunch, “I’m going to give you the respect you deserve; I’m going to eat you with a fork.” But what I’m not issuing is an invitation for you to stick your fork in my lunch. And when I ask, “What should we get for dessert?” please know that I don’t really mean “we.” In fact, I think it would be best for both of us if we each order our own.

LUNCH LOCALES Southport Grocery and Cafe (3552 N Southport Ave, 773-665-0100). Milk and Honey (1920 W Division St, 773-395-9434). Jam (937 N Damen Ave, 773-489-0302). Perry’s (174 N Franklin St, 312-372-7557). Naha (500 N Clark St, 312-321-6242). Epic Burger (517 S State St, 312-913-1373). Taxim (1558 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-252-1558). North Pond (2610 N Cannon Dr, 773-477-5845). Browntrout (4111 N Lincoln Ave, 773-472-4111). Terzo Piano (159 E Monroe, 312-443-8650). The Gage (24 S Michigan Ave, 312-372-4243). Sepia (123 N Jefferson St , 312-441-1920).

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