I spent the day at an iconic Wall Street steakhouse in search of the power lunch — but I was looking in the wrong place

• I spent a day at Delmonico's, a classic Wall Street steakhouse, as the team got ready for lunch.
• I saw how RTO and the latest iteration of office perks have transformed Wall Street's lunch culture.
• Though GLP-1s have swept the finance world, Delmonico's hasn't seen much of an impact.

A few weeks ago, I, someone who generally abstains from beef but is committed to understanding the modern power lunch, spent about six hours surrounded by hundreds of pounds of raw steak.

I arrived at Delmonico's, a storied Wall Street steakhouse, at 7:10 am on a recent Wednesday, late by the restaurant's standards. The first employees had already been there for 10 minutes, vacuuming the many dining rooms and unboxing lettuce in the downstairs prep kitchen. In spending the day at the nearly 200-year-old restaurant, which is now part business lunch spot, part tourist attraction, I saw how the latest push to keep employees in the office is transforming the way Wall Street dines.

On a typical day, Delmonico's will serve about 150 for lunch and 300 for dinner, Dennis Turcinovic, the owner, told me. The restaurant hosts around 25 weekly corporate events, and I saw private dinner menus for a defense tech giant, a law firm, and tech companies hanging in the kitchen. Their signature is the 18-ounce Delmonico ribeye, for $89, and a waiter told me the $46 mushroom risotto is an underappreciated menu standout. Employees are also quick to point out that the restaurant invented baked Alaska, a dessert that goes for $25.

Reservations open six months in advance to accommodate tourists planning trips to New York, but the chef told me that some business regulars have employees' personal numbers and can always get in. Turcinovic estimated that around 25% of diners are monthly regulars.

Walking around a deserted, ginormous restaurant felt semi-apocalyptic against the din of seemingly endless prep — the vacuuming lasted more than an hour, employees hauled potted plants across the dining room, line cooks talked over the white noise of knives on cutting boards.

Despite the churn of prep, Turcinovic said the business lunch at Delmonico's isn't what it used to be, partly because of how the pandemic changed our office schedules. But there's something else going on, too: companies are building their own swanky cafeterias or restaurants. Free, fancy food is one of the few perks employers are still investing in, as Wall Street in particular demands workers spend more time in the office.

Food makes the office more palatable, especially for younger employees who place a premium on boutique benefits. Turcinovic and a few other senior employees at Delmonico's mentioned JPMorgan's new $3 billion headquarters to me, which boasts a pub, coffee bars, and a food hall, including Little Dirt Candy, a scaled-down version of a Michelin-starred vegan restaurant. Turcinovic said he has a friend who works at the bank and dines in the building, both alone and with clients.

"They do bring them into the building. They do entertain them there because business can get done anywhere where there's food," he said, sure to add that there's something inherently different about going to a restaurant.

JPMorgan isn't alone in trying to turn the office into a dining hot spot: KKR, Meta, and Anthropic all seem to have a similar idea, to name just a few.

That's not to say no one on Wall Street goes out to lunch anymore. Even after some firms relocated from downtown to Midtown following 9/11 — a shift Turcinovic said the restaurant "felt" — Delmonico's still caters to high-finance tastes. Just look at the buckets of Saratoga water bottles throughout the dining room, the same ones I saw in excess at Tommy Bahama, surprisingly popular with the Midtown-based finance crowd, a few weeks ago.

For as long as Delmonico's has been feeding Manhattan's Financial District, there's no precise science to its daily popularity. Reservations were way down the day I visited, likely due to the combination of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Ramadan, public school break in New York City, and the post-restaurant week stupor. Yet last year, employees told me, Ash Wednesday was super busy.

Still, the dining room slowly came to life, much as it would have on a busy day. The bartender filled jars with limes and olives; someone queued up quiet music; servers clicked on table lamps.

Though GLP-1s have hit Wall Street, Turcinovic and others said they haven't really hit his restaurant, maybe because people want to indulge more when sitting at a steakhouse than in their corporate food hall. Sergio Jardim, the sommelier, told me he's not seeing a huge drop off in alcohol sales, either, though younger customers tend to drink a bit less. Martinis and Bordeauxs still reign supreme.

And some people were drinking by the time lunch service started, like the two older men at the bar with beers and fries, their faces illuminated by the muted CNBC channel playing on the TV. One guy sat with his AirPods in, next to a pair in button-downs, drinking what looked like whiskey.

A few tables of families and largely men in suits dotted the dining room, which by now smelled strongly of steak. The kitchen offered me something to eat, but I said no, thank you — I had to get back to my office, which had served our monthly lunch the day before.

I hoped that there might be leftovers.