Lunch as a Way of Life

These are not good times in the City of Angles, with gunfire peppering the streets and the worry about new riots circling slowly overhead. But I am pleased to report today that even in the midst of chaos, the human spirit prevails. We still have time for a nice lunch while on our way to hell.

I mention this because the midday meal has finally been institutionalized in L.A. through an organization called Lunch Dates. It was bound to happen. Lunch, as it is practiced in Southern California, is only slightly less important than death and considerably more important than work.

It took a smart young entrepreneur named Bob Schwartz to figure out a way to cash in on this by setting up the only dating service in town that concentrates on the hours between noon and 2 p.m.

He reasoned that not only was this unexplored territory, but it went along with Safe Sex. Unless you are an exhibitionist of major proportions, you are not likely to engage in what the French call le sport while dining on chicken salad at the Mirabelle.

Schwartz, who is a 1984 summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, put this all together two years ago to emerge as a Matchmaker for Our Time.

“Lunch is very serious here,” he said the other day. He is a slim, curly-haired man with the engaging manner of a reconstituted maitre d’. “I know of nowhere else in the country where it plays such a prominent role in life. So why not use it?”

He’s right. In places like Bakersfield, where lunch is known as chow, it consists of baloney sandwiches in a paper bag. In Long Beach, they eat last night’s tuna casserole out of little Tupperware containers.

But in L.A., by God, we make a reservation, go somewhere, meet someone and perform. We’ve even invented a verb form to properly describe the ritual. We don’t just eat lunch. We do it.

So Schwartz, who was an honors graduate in psychology, utilized his skill in understanding the human condition to begin bringing people together at restaurants throughout L.A. What better way to utilize a good education?

Those who join Lunch Dates pay $395 a year and are guaranteed 24 dates. They meet, they eat, they take each other’s measure and handle the tab according to the success of the venture.

Then what? Well, as my friend Nick Mazzoni used to say, what consenting adults do beyond the cannoli is nobody’s business but their own.

Schwartz is quick to point out, by the way, that his is no escort service. Occasionally, he will get a salesman out of Des Moines who, having seen the movie “Pretty Woman,” will say “Can you send someone over in 15 minutes?”

These calls usually come in the evening when lunch is not served. Schwartz informs them he is not what they think, and the salesman are left to talking dirty to the anonymous women who answer 900 numbers.

Mostly, however, things run pretty smoothly. There have been no instances of Schwartz putting a nice girl together with a psychopath or a nice boy together with a feminist.

He has refused membership, he says, to a couple of dozen people based on “impressions of instability.” If the guy drools, for instance, or the woman insists she was the Virgin Mary in a past life, he shows them the door.

Twice he has had to revoke memberships, however. One was because the guy was a chronic complainer and no one liked him.

The other was a man who created a mathematical formula into which Schwartz was supposed to compute a woman’s vital statistics. Her total number had to fall into a certain range to qualify her for lunch.

“A woman is not a mathematical computation,” Schwartz says, “so I threw him out.”

Club members are fairly specific about the kind of date they are looking for. Schwartz asks them to be realistic. He tries not to match an unattractive woman with a Hollywood-handsome man, for instance.

“One woman wanted a rich, 6-foot-tall Japanese,” he says thoughtfully in the Westside attic he calls his office. “I don’t know of any 6-foot-tall Japanese.”

Schwartz is aware of one marriage and innumerable “associations” that have blossomed during lunch and have gone into breakfast.

The worse complaint he has heard by those who have been paired with someone they couldn’t stand is “no chemistry.” That means they had no rapport, not that they ran out of drugs.

Well, OK. While Lunch Dates fits right into L.A.’s skewed style of human bonding, it does seems a little desperate to me to have to pay money to find someone to do it with.

But then as Nick Mazzoni once remarked, “Anyone that will get you through the lunch hour without stealing your martini is probably worth the risk.”

Bon appetit .