Why lunch? “It’s almost subversive,” Crespo explained, over a plate of Servan-Schreiber’s red rice and spiced lamb meatballs. “It feels a little naughty telling people it may last until four o’clock and they have to cancel all their plans.” Servan-Schreiber said that lunch felt more “recreational” than a rushed breakfast or a formal dinner. “Plus,” she added, with a glimmer in her eye, “you’re not obliged to invite couples!”

Last fall, in London, the chef Hugh Corcoran, the publisher Frances Armstrong-Jones, and their friend Oisín Davies opened a restaurant that serves only lunch, and a lot of people in the small world of the city’s restaurant reviewing got disproportionately worked up about it. The restaurant is called the Yellow Bittern, after an eighteenth-century Irish poem about a sad bird in a “wineless place,” and includes a bookshop in the basement. It is open only on weekdays and accepts reservations by phone or, supposedly, postcard. It does not take credit cards or have a written wine list. When it’s cold out, you have to ring a doorbell to get in. This is the litany of quirks that begins every discussion of the Yellow Bittern, whose most idiosyncratic feature is actually its ability, deliberate or not, to activate a full complement of resentments, allegiances, and anxieties via bowls of soup and dollops of rice pudding served exclusively between the hours of twelve and four-thirtyish.

The Belfast-born Corcoran and the English-born Armstrong-Jones are romantic partners as well as co-proprietors, complicating the traditional man-at-the-stove/woman-in-the-front-of-the-house dynamic with a prole/posh overlay: his father was an auto mechanic; hers, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, first Earl of Snowdon, who was once married to Princess Margaret. These biographical facts were tantalizing to the British press. That the couple managed their own P.R.—that is, they simply answered questions about their restaurant, sometimes on the fly—and dressed in old-timey woollens and brogues made them irresistible. In the Guardian, Jay Rayner wrote that Corcoran “has about him the mien of a 1930s small-town butcher who has a lovely piece of gammon put aside for you,” and poked fun at “Lady Frances’s” whispery locutions. The Yellow Bittern, he suggested, walked “a fine line” between simplicity and taking its patrons for fools.

The real drama started about two weeks in, when Corcoran, who is also a writer, took to Instagram to denounce diners who treat restaurants like “public benches,” parking themselves at a table for hours, only to “order one starter and two mains to share and a glass of tap water” for a party of four. He continued, “At the very least, order correctly, drink some wine, and justify your presence in the room.” His frustration was understandable for a small businessman (even if it demonstrated a certain obliviousness to the many reasons a person might decline alcohol—do pregnant women, or Muslims, say, merit a seat at his table?). But some people did not appreciate his attempt to impose a more languid, indulgent rhythm on the midday pause, accusing him of entitlement, whining, “giving a giant middle finger to rather a lot of London,” and running “an 18-seat piece of performance art within which diners are unsuspecting subjects of a dining diktat delivered with all the fiscal charm of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

It probably did not help that Corcoran proudly proclaimed himself a Communist, displaying a portrait of Lenin in the Yellow Bittern’s dining room and a hammer-and-sickle tattoo on his right forearm. Or that he claimed that a unionized railroad worker would “definitely be able to afford” a meal at the restaurant, while regretting that it was likely inaccessible to “Deliveroo guys on bicycles,” whom he identified as “the new lowest rank of the proletariat.” A meat pie for two costs forty pounds at the Yellow Bittern. The average lunch break in the U.K., for workers who have one, lasts thirty-three minutes. Nevertheless, Corcoran argued that he was creating a “democratic space” and even an antifascist one, free from “technology and exclusivity” and “people who pay with their watches.”

However eccentric his politics, Corcoran’s message was clear enough: he was taking a stand against the vending machine, the crumb-covered keyboard, the putrefying banana, the leaden ciabatta, the tragic hummus wrap from Pret. As the controversy spread across the Atlantic, he told the New York Times, “Is this the kind of society that we were trying to create? . . . We have to fight for lunch.”

Expressing an earnest opinion is the British equivalent of walking down a crowded street wearing a “Kick Me” sign. Commentators lined up to administer their licks, with a surprising number of them pummelling the idea of lunch itself, as though the meal were some kind of abominable kink. “What I find shocking is that four people might go out for a weekday lunch at all, let alone order main courses,” Hilary Rose wrote, in the U.K. Times. “How do you find the time, and the money? What does your boss think? I haven’t been out for a weekday restaurant lunch in decades, and even when I go out for dinner, I never have a main course.” That may qualify as a personal matter, but the middling status of lunch in the hierarchy of meals invited all manner of projection. The phrase “it’s only lunch” had never seemed more disingenuous, Jonathan Nunn observed in the magazine Vittles, writing that the Yellow Bittern was “a rich text, even before you get into the important matter of whether the food is any good.”

In March, I invited a friend—an editor, alas, not a signalman or plate layer—to join me for the two-o’clock sitting at the Yellow Bittern. Just for kicks, I had tried to make a reservation by postcard, sending a Joachim Beuckelaer painting of a head of cabbage. (Embarrassing to be so on-theme bougie foodie, but it was what I had on hand.) A few weeks went by with no reply. Figuring that the postcard had got lost, I e-mailed Armstrong-Jones to book a table. Nobody seemed to mind the technological intrusion.

When the day arrived, I buzzed. Armstrong-Jones escorted me through a yolk-colored room with an English Oak banquette along one wall and to a snug table near the kitchen. The kitchen comprised a single oven and two induction burners, underneath a large casement window that was pleasingly left open. Corcoran stood behind the counter in a billowing blouse and a burgundy sweater vest, surrounded by the day’s offerings: a hotel pan full of roasted guinea fowl; a plate of butter; a cherry-colored cast-iron pot of stew. Cooling nearby were a few loaves of speckled soda bread baked by Davies.

It was lunch, so there was sunshine, streaming into the dining room, backlighting the cursive lettering on the plate-glass windows. I felt as though I had just put on a cloche and pulled up a seat in the cafeteria of a Hopper painting. A white-haired man consulted the menu with reading glasses, attached to his neck with an ENGLAND 2015 strap. (Rugby, if I had to bet.) The table was set with a posy in a parfait glass and a pot of Colman’s mustard. I scanned the room and saw an old-school reservation book lying open on a stool, paperweighted by a cordless phone. It seemed natural in the setting, rather than stagy.

We decided to comport ourselves as Corcoran’s ideal patrons: hungry, thirsty omnivores constrained by neither watch nor wallet. We started with sherry apéritifs, per Corcoran’s suggestion. I ordered celeriac soup: a homely beige mush, equally heavy on pepper, butter, and cream and devoid of croutons or other crunch-giving garnishes. I loved it. My friend had a crab-and-watercress salad. It was quiet but spoke wittily to notions of lunch by forgoing the fruit element (apple, mango, orange) that often characterizes such dishes. No cantaloupe balls at this luncheon!

We continued with the polemical meat pie, a simple green salad, a Pinot Noir from Alsace, Irish cheeses, and a piece of chocolate tart so dense that it resembled Ultrasuede. The bill was a hundred and seventy-five pounds—about two hundred and twenty-five bucks, before Trump tanked the dollar. The food was excellent, if not revolutionary. Its aggressive plainness paradoxically reminded me of the Dolly Parton saying “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” (It takes a lot of imagination, too.) What I appreciated most was the sense of a presiding intelligence in the room, a philosophy expressed with passion if not perfect coherence. Corcoran enlivens the table with endlessly debatable ideas alongside his rabbit in mustard sauce and Scottish langoustines.

I lingered after the meal to speak with Corcoran and Armstrong-Jones. Why lunch, I wanted to know, when dinner would offer a surer route to solvency and acclaim? Corcoran answered first, doubling down on his manifesto: “We live in a society that promotes this idea of constant production—you know, if you’re not in work working, then you should be doing something to be a good worker. To just cut all that and say, ‘Actually, I’m gonna drink a bottle of wine and eat a lot of food in the middle of the day,’ right?”

Armstrong-Jones focussed on the practical benefits of lunch, which also inspired the name of a culture magazine that she publishes, Luncheon. “I had three young children when I started it,” she said. “It was about the day, instead of being about what happened the night before and you feel like you’ve missed out on everything.”

Dinner can almost feel like a domestic space: proposals, breakups. “Lunch is more convivial,” Corcoran said. “People hardly ever get in arguments,” Armstrong-Jones added. Corcoran nonetheless wanted to be clear that he was no lunch naïf. “We shouldn’t forget the dark side of lunch,” he joked, noting that Spain’s ubiquitous menú del día—several courses for a reasonable price, historically set by the government—was conceived by Franco during a period of economic hardship.

Along with sustenance, the money I spent at the Yellow Bittern had bought me time. Time away from the computer and the phone, time outside the family sphere, time to catch up with an old friend—pleasures that, like all luxuries, are difficult to source and can be even more difficult to defend, depending on one’s tolerance for self-indulgence and inequality. British class hysterics aside, the furor over the Yellow Bittern may best be understood as an exercise in the political limits of self-care, individual action, and the iconoclastic stand. Demanding that diners justify their presence in the room, the Yellow Bittern justifies their absence, for better or worse, from the world outside.

Even if lunch is not quite the anti-capitalist oasis of Corcoran’s telling, it has long been associated with the right of working people to restore themselves midway through their daily toil. “Workmen at their benches drop their tools, the stairs resound with hurrying feet, and from every exit pour jostling hordes,” the journalist Granthorpe Sudley wrote in a 1901 article titled “Luncheon for a Million.” In the 1896 Presidential election, William McKinley courted the labor vote with the promise of “A Full Dinner Pail.” (At the time, many people called the evening meal “supper,” so “dinner” in this case meant “lunch.”) In maybe the most famous image of lunch, ironworkers in flat caps and overalls pause for a break eight hundred and fifty feet above the ground on a steel beam. They are supposedly enjoying sandwiches and coffee, but the photograph was in fact a publicity stunt, intended to promote the RCA Building as it was being constructed.

Until women entered the workforce in significant numbers, lunch was also the most gender-segregated meal. Middle-class women whipped up quiche Lorraine and ambrosia salads (often with the help of Black domestic workers, who were excluded from Social Security). With their children’s lunchtime needs accounted for by the National School Lunch Act of 1946—passed after wartime physicals revealed widespread malnutrition—housewives visited department-store canteens and tea rooms like the Syracuse branch of Schrafft’s, “the daintiest luncheon spot in all the State.” Before sliced bread became widely available, women’s magazines were full of advice “on social distinctions and the thickness of bread in sandwiches,” according to the food historian Laura Shapiro. The trick to getting the bread thin enough for distinguished company was to butter the face of the loaf first, slicing as close to the spread as possible. Peanut butter, meanwhile, was introduced as “a high-end spread” popular at ladies’ luncheons, intended to be mixed with enlivening elements, such as celery or nasturtiums.

Recently, when I visited New York, people were lining up for patty melts and cherry-lime rickeys at S & P Lunch, in Flatiron. (It began as S & P Sandwich Shop in 1928, but was known as Eisenberg’s between the late fifties and 2021, after which it was revamped by new owners.) As a public institution, the lunch counter, devoid of tricky reservations and élite tables, represents a certain idea of equality. It is no coincidence that, in 1960, four Black students at North Carolina A&T chose to challenge racial discrimination at a whites-only lunch counter, taking a stand by sitting down on stools below a placard advertising fifteen-cent lemon-meringue pie. The protest and the images that it produced were the picture of American democracy, galvanizing public opinion and accelerating the movement: an unbroken line of citizens seeking simple fare in side-by-side solidarity.