By SAM DILLON
MEXICO CITY --
It's 3:30 p.m. and the Mexico City state's attorney, Samuel del Villar,
is
seated at a
conference table in a meeting with a dozen subordinates. Nobody has eaten
since
breakfast, if
then. Stomachs are growling.
It's time to
go out to a restaurant for lunch. Instead, del Villar says, "Let's just
eat here." Aides ferry
in a tray of
BLT sandwiches, and the city's top prosecutors lick bacon drippings from
their fingers
through a meeting
that continues past 5.
Del Villar's
improvised meal one recent afternoon might seem routine to Americans, but
here it was a
sign of a dramatic
cultural shift. Mexico City's leisurely lunch, which may wander for three
hours or
more, from an
opening tequila through several courses and plenty of conversation, has
been as
characteristic
of this capital and its way of life as evening tapas are of Madrid and
the late-night
churrasco dinner
of Buenos Aires.
But many Mexico
City residents are giving up the once-sacrosanct tradition because, like
del Villar,
they have grown
too busy, or because they now follow an international corporate schedule,
or
because they
consider fast-food dining more efficient. Many working-class Mexicans simply
can no
longer afford
the slightest culinary extravagance.
"There's been
an enormous change," said Guillaume Martin, who for 15 years has managed
the
Estoril restaurant,
an elegant eatery in the Polanco neighborhood frequented by executives
and
government officials.
"When I started in this business, people would fill our tables at 3, and
many
would still
be seated at 7 or 8 p.m. drinking cognac. Now by 5, practically everyone's
left. Lunches
are getting
earlier and shorter."
The meal is called
la comida in Spanish, which is usually translated as "lunch." But don't
confuse la
comida with
el almuerzo, which also translates as lunch but is something quite different,
a mere
late-morning
snack, often a tamale purchased on the street and gobbled on the run.
La comida is
the main culinary event of the day in a capital city whose biorhythms have
adapted to
the singular
schedule of the vast government bureaucracy. Most middle or senior government
officials work
from 9 or 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., break for lunch until 6 p.m., and return
to work until
late evening,
often until 10 or 11 p.m., even midnight.
Within this peculiar
schedule, officials or business people with a generous expense account
have over
the years made
the afternoon meal a long feast. In its classic expression a few decades
back, senior
functionaries
would regularly begin with a plate of tacos, graze their way through a
rich soup, a
steak, and a
rice dish or baked potato, and wash it all down with a few whiskys. Many
would only
wobble back
to work after sipping a cognac with espresso.
Some social historians
trace the meal's origin to Spain, where public offices also shut down in
late
afternoon. But
it has been classically Mexican in its languorous pace and voluptuous quantities.
"This long meal
has been a form of compensation, a special retribution for the suffering
that you go
through as a
public servant, ready to serve at any moment of day or night if the boss
calls," said
Javier Gonzalez
Rubio, who transferred to the private sector recently after working for
several years
in the Mexican
White House, known as Los Pinos, as an aide to President Ernesto Zedillo.
Mexico has passed
through years of economic crisis, and only the most senior officials can
today
afford the long
lunch in its classic form. Lower and mid-level officials still keep the
same hours but
eat simple food.
Javier Becerra
Marquez, the press coordinator to the borough president of Mexico City's
downtown
Cuauhtemoc section,
keeps a typical schedule and eats like thousands of other government
employees. Breakfast
is minimal, and he is at his desk before 9 a.m.
One hectic recent
afternoon he could not break away for lunch until 4:30, when at an open-air
corner eatery
he ordered a peppery tripe soup with tortillas, followed by a dessert of
fried bananas.
He was back
on the job by 6, worked until 10, and once at home, ate a few tacos before
bed.
"Many days, we're poorly fed," Becerra said.
The corollary
to the lavish lunch has been the abbreviated breakfast. A 1997 study commissioned
by
McDonald's,
which now has 52 restaurants in the Mexican capital, found that "many people
here
didn't eat breakfast
at all," said Manuel Juarez Torres, a company spokesman here. Seeing an
opportunity,
McDonald's has been marketing a Mexicanized form of its McMuffin breakfasts
with a
slogan that
attacks Mexico City's long-lunch habit head on: "Breakfast is the most
important meal of
the day."
But traditions
die hard, Juarez said. Most Mexico City residents still plan their day
around lunch,
albeit one that
is considerably shorter than it was in its classic period, which most food
experts trace
to the 1950s.
The president then was Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, an enthusiastic gourmand who
made it
his pattern
to loiter at table following the afternoon meal, calling for a set of dominoes
and playing a
few rounds with
his friends.
In contrast,
aides to Zedillo count on one hand the times he has spent the afternoon
at a restaurant.
A frugal man,
Zedillo instead almost always lunches in private at the presidential residence.
He has
explained this
as a preference for spending time with his family. But his pattern seems
to fit the
national mood,
in which many Mexicans who live outside the capital view Mexico City's
long lunches
as a sign of
profligacy they associate with government waste. People in Monterrey, Mexico's
northern business
capital, are particularly critical.
"This long lunch
originated with Mexico City's government bureaucracy," said a business
executive
who is a Monterrey
native but now spends part of each week in Mexico City. "Monterrey has
a
business culture.
Time is money. When you go to lunch, you arrive, you order food and you
talk
business. Once
that's over, you can chat about other things."
"In Mexico City,
the point is to build relationships with influential people who can do
favors for you,
so you spend
time telling jokes and gossiping," he continued. "You start lunch by chatting
about
many topics
other than the business at hand, then you eat, and only at the end will
anybody tell you
what they really
wanted to talk to you about."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company