Took a prospective client to lunch in Tribeca; ended up outside looking at eclipse with a crowd of happy strangers

Took a prospective client to lunch today at a restaurant she had been hoping to go to for a while, called Antiques Garage Tribeca. It was fun. From time to time my company lets me take bigger prospects to lunch to try to cement an early working relationship with them and in hope they will put us on a list of approved companies to do business with. I had chatted with this lady a few times before and she was very nice and down to earth. She told me she had been wanting to try this restaurant, which was about a block from her office. My COO and I took the A train down from 34th Street and got off at Canal, just a couple of blocks from there. Antiques Garage looked like a turn of the century ballroom with giant chandeliers, beautiful antique fixtures and red velvet upholstered benches.

Even the place settings were beautiful.

The restaurant was Mediterranean, with a mix of Greek, Turkish and Italian dishes. Since I’ve been trying to get a meeting with this woman from a particular advertising agency for a long time and she especially wanted to go here, I thought it would help her remember us if we were the first people to take her there.

The way things work with big advertising agencies is that the agency holds the control over some very large advertising budgets. They are hired by major brand names to strategize about the advertising messages they want to present to the world, to whom and how. These agencies then choose vendors like us who have advertising inventory that they use to fulfill their advertising objectives. There are many more of us, so we are always clamoring to get these people's attention, and offering to take the buying teams to lunch or bring them lunch at their office. Some advertising content providers even drop off gifts for these media buyers without speaking to them, indulge them in retail shopping trips or take them for spa days and supposedly bond over “mani pedis.” My company doesn’t go that far, but they will spring for a strategic lunch every now and then. Don’t envy most of these agency media buyers that much, by the way. They are notoriously young and underpaid and can’t afford to live in the same city where they work, and they are worked round the clock. There is high turnover in their profession. All of these lunches and other perks are the only compensation for this. In her case, as a director, she's probably doing fairly well, but her two junior team members will get a lot out of these free meals.

Planning this lunch I knew the two restaurants where sellers typically take her team and I didn’t want us to fade into the background of a hundred similar lunches. So I was excited to get this reservation, to find out she and two others on her team had RSVP’d and that our COO was coming along. From the beginning the meeting was very cosy and informal, not like a typical formal presentation at all, which was a nice change. This woman and I know so many people in common that we’d already chatted about, and it turned out we had each spent two years at the same company, but at different times. I did have to laugh that I was so excited to grab a 1:00pm reservation for five because when we walked in, the restaurant was empty but for us! The owner himself came and asked us which table we preferred. I made a wisecrack about it looking like I’d snagged their last table. He said, "I was expecting that joke." They had a very reasonable prix fixe three course lunch that most of the people chose. We all had an appetizer of manta, which were savory little triangles of phyllo dough stuffed with minced beef, pan fried and topped with yogurt sauce. These were yummy! I wasn’t that hungry, so that’s all I got. The others got lamb kebabs and grilled chicken salads. Lastly, we all shared triangles of pistachio baklava and profiteroles filled with crème Chantilly and enrobed in dark chocolate.

At some point during the conversation we noticed we were alone in the restaurant. I mean completely alone - the waiters were gone, the busboy, the bartender and the owner, all staff. Even the kitchen seemed to be deserted. It was like one of those scifi movies where people arrive in a town and everything is just as people left it, but the people are all mysteriously missing. My prospective client said, “Is there anyone who works here?” I joked that she could now go grab the place settings she had been admiring and shove them in her purse. We were wondering what was happening when a busboy came running in and said, "Come look at the eclipse!" So we all shrugged and got up, leaving bags and meals back there and walked down a third of a block to where the entire restaurant staff were standing outside a Plastics store and looking through what looked like a 1’ by 1’ square of plexiglass with a darker 8” by 8” square inside it. The restaurant owner explained that it was a handmade UV filter that the Plastics store owner had made, at which point he stopped and gestured to a man in shirtsleeves who was standing in the doorway of the Plastics store who gave a kind of a bow. Our restauranteur ushered us over and we each took turns looking through the UV shield at the eclipse, as it was now just about peak time for it. Although we aren’t right on the line in New York and it was only partial, the eclipse was beautiful and mysterious, and you could actually see the shadow moving further across the sun.

My new client and her team and my COO and I all chattered excitedly with the restaurant staff as we took turns looking through, and taking pictures of each other doing so. We would also invite passersby to join us and let them have a turn, and a happy little crowd formed and shared with the moment with us. It was the friendliest I had seen New Yorkers with a bunch of strangers in a long time, and it was truly a magical moment. Whether I end up getting a lot of business from our new friend and her company, I know we will not forget this shared afternoon. We were in what I consider to be the now somewhat pretentious Tribeca, but there was such an old fashioned neighborhood-y feel to the whole thing that none of that seemed to matter.