7 Working Lunch Ideas For Summer

A working lunch has one real constraint, and it is not the menu. The food has to be eaten with one hand while the other stays on a keyboard, or in the twenty minutes between two meetings, by people who are not going to leave the building. Everything else follows from that.

Summer adds the second constraint. A Brisbane office is air-conditioned right up until someone books the meeting room, and then the door is shut, eleven people are talking over the top of each other, and lunch is sitting on the table for two hours. Food that was excellent at half past eleven is not automatically excellent at one.

So the useful question is not what sounds good in summer. It is what is still good after an hour on a warm table, eaten standing up, without cutlery. Cold food wins in January for the obvious reason, but only the right kind of cold — things built to be eaten at room temperature, rather than things that need a fridge to stay honest.

Here are seven we send out most in the warm months, and what each one actually does once it has left the kitchen. Any of them works as a corporate working lunch. Two of them only work if the food and the people arrive at the same time, and we have said which.

1. Bento Box

A bento box is a container decision as much as a food one. The compartments are the point: dressing stays in its own corner, the wet salad never leans against the rice, and a lunch packed at seven in the morning still looks assembled at noon. Nothing served off a shared platter has that protection.

It also suits a room where everybody has ordered something different. A box has a name on it, so nobody hovers over a tray working out which piece is theirs — people take the box back to their own screen and the meeting keeps moving.

The thing to watch is rice. Rice that has spent a night in a fridge comes back chalky and firm no matter how good it was going in, which makes a bento a same-day order rather than a night-before one.

2. Brioche Slider

A slider is a small burger, and it earns its place because it is the one warm format that survives being ignored for a while. Brioche is enriched with butter, egg and a little sugar, so the bun stays soft for hours where a plain roll would be dry by eleven.

The failure mode is always the bottom bun. A patty laid on bread at six in the morning has steamed into it by nine and the base turns to paste. Sauce goes inside, the wet ingredients sit above the bread rather than against it, and assembly happens as late as the delivery run allows.

Order sliders for a room with nowhere to sit. One hand, no plate, no cutlery, and nobody has to put a laptop down to eat.

3. Greek Salad

Horiatiki is tomato, cucumber, green pepper, olives, oregano and a slab of feta, and no other salad reads as summer on a table quite so quickly. It is also the one that fails quietly when it is dressed too early.

Salt pulls water out of tomato and cucumber. A salad dressed at nine for a one o'clock lunch arrives sitting in a pool of its own liquid with the cucumber gone soft, and there is no fixing it at that point. Send the dressing separately and pour it at the table. It takes ten seconds and it is the whole difference between a good salad and a wet one.

Feta and olives carry most of the salt already, so it needs far less than people expect. See more fresh salad for corporate catering.

4. Vietnamese Rice Paper Rolls

The best summer lunch we make and the fussiest to handle. Rice paper rolls are cold, light and finished — nothing to assemble, nothing to heat, no cutlery — and two of them alongside something else is a genuine lunch rather than a snack.

Two rules, neither negotiable. Lay them in a single layer and never stack them, because the wrappers stick to each other within minutes and tear apart when they are lifted. And keep them out of the fridge where you can: cold turns the wrapper tough and cloudy, so a tray held at room temperature for two hours beats one that has been chilled since morning.

5. Seafood platter

The most impressive thing on this list and the one with the shortest fuse. Prawns get about two hours out of the fridge in an ordinary room and closer to one above thirty degrees, which in a Brisbane January means the platter has to arrive when the people do.

So order it for an occasion rather than a Tuesday — a client lunch, the last day before the break, anything where everyone is at the table at the same moment. If the food might sit on a bench while a meeting runs over, order something else and keep the seafood for a day the timing belongs to you.

Oysters fade first, prawns hold longest, and the lemon goes on at the table rather than in the kitchen.

6. Sushi

Sushi is the working lunch people ask for most in summer and the one most often ordered a day too early. Sushi rice does not like cold. An hour in a fridge is enough to bring it back firm and chalky, which is why supermarket sushi at four in the afternoon tastes of very little.

Nori runs on the same clock. A rolled piece has roughly twenty minutes of snap in the seaweed once it meets wet rice, and after that it is chewy rather than crisp. None of this makes it bad — it means a sushi platter is at its best in the first hour and merely fine by the third.

Order it for the front of the lunch window rather than the end, and leave it out of the office fridge while you wait.

7. Vietnamese Banh Mi

A Banh Mi platter is a baguette split and packed with pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, coriander, chilli and a marinated meat, and it is the best value hot-weather lunch we do. The pickle and the chilli read as cool in a way a plain sandwich never manages.

Everything depends on the roll. That crust is thin and crisp by design, and it softens the moment pickle liquid touches it, so the pickle is drained and pressed before it goes near bread. A banh mi built at five in the morning is a different sandwich by midday, which is why ours are made as close to the delivery run as the kitchen can manage.

Cut into halves it works standing up, and it is filling enough that the people who said they were not hungry take one anyway. Click to see more Vietnamese catering.

Four things make a summer working lunch land, and none of them are about the menu. Tell the kitchen what time the food is being eaten rather than what time you want it delivered, because those are two different problems and only one of them is ours to solve. Split the order into what can sit and what cannot, and put the cannots at the front of the window. Order about a third more of the vegetarian than the headcount suggests, because everybody eats it. And take the wrapping off at the last minute rather than the first.

Everything is made by hand in our Fortitude Valley kitchen the morning it goes out. Order by 4pm and it arrives the next day with no last-minute surcharge, delivery from $19 on orders over $150 across more than 50 Brisbane suburbs, Saturday at the same rate, or pick up from 7am at 159 Knapp St.