At workplaces including Ava DuVernay’s production office and the fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra’s atelier, the staff meal is a way to fuel the creative process.
Interviews by Michael Snyder
Photographs by Sean Donnola
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.
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