This Party Is the Most Fun You’re Going to Have on Your Lunch Break
If you’re like me, you usually spend your lunch break at your desk, eating a burrito, sending emails, and scanning Twitter. It’s a largely mechanistic experience that typically ends with my cleaning salsa debris off my desk. Hardly stimulating.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A new event called Lunch Break is spicing up lunch hours in New York and Los Angeles with midday parties intended to replace your sad desk lunch with dancing and actual human interaction. Going down from 12:30–2:00 pm on Friday afternoons, Lunch Break features the usual nightclub benchmarks—a DJ, drinks, glowsticks, a fog machine relentlessly pumping clouds of smoke into the crowd—but it also happens to occur during daylight hours and include a free bagged lunch. The party is intended to break up the workday and reenergize attendees for the afternoon homestretch.
Bored with my standard Chipotle run, I decided to check it out.
The first L.A. incarnation of Lunch Break was held at Hollywood’s Sound nightclub this past Friday, August 7. Known as one of the best venues in town, Sound hosts electronic A-listers including Derrick Carter, Nadastrom and L.A.’s much-beloved Night Bass party. As such, there’s usually a fat line to get in. For Lunch Break, however, I walked right up to the bouncer, showed him my ID, and strutted into the club. (I was, you see, still very caffeinated from my morning coffee.) There were no lists and no self-important scenesters nudging their way to the front by name-dropping, which already made me like this party a whole lot.
Once inside, the club was typically dark, with a sexayyyy remix of Janet Jackson’s “If” blasting through Sound’s famously top-notch sound system. While the space is usually so packed that you can’t walk a straight line without bumping into some club babe’s sweaty body, today there was spacious room on the dancefloor and—wait for it—ample space to sit down. You could even sit in the VIP areas without getting reprimanded. It was clubland heaven.
DJ SOSUPERSAM
Like Brooklyn club Verboten hosting morning yoga sessions, Lunch Break expands on the trend of nontraditional events happening during a venue’s off-hours. It also has some crossover with Daybreaker, an early-morning, alcohol-free event that offers an alternative to nighttime clubland hedonism. Today, the crowd consisted of maybe 100 people dressed in their Friday business-casual best. In attendance were photographers, designers, accountants, social media experts and more. Entrance to Lunch Break was free and included one complimentary cocktail, although the cocktails were said to be light on the booze and heavy on the Perrier, the fizzy-water company sponsoring the day’s event.
As is the case at most nightclubs, roughly half of the crowd on the dancefloor was actually dancing while the other half stood around talking. At the bar, I met Aldo, who works in post-production at an office near the club. “There’s actually a theory that people work best when they have two drinks in them,” he said, while testing that hypothesis and assuring me he was indeed going back to work after this.
Three people presumably not thinking about Excel sheets
I hung out on the side of the club, people-watching and eating my free lunch, which featured a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a banana, a granola bar, and a can of grapefruit-flavored Perrier. Things on the dancefloor got hyphier as the party went on, with even the attendees who had clearly come by themselves dancing hard as the music peaked.
As Lunch Break neared its closing, DJ SOSUPERSAM went balls-to-the-wall with back-to-back bangers, including Mariah Carey’s “Emotions,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” and R. Kelly’s immortal “Remix to Ignition.” Three girls in sunglasses FaceTimed themselves busting moves for the poor schmucks stuck back in their office. I finished my sandwich and got out on the dancefloor, momentarily forgetting all of the items still populating my to-do list. When it was over, I emerged from the club slightly sweaty and totally sober, ready to dominate the rest of my workday.
Altogether, it totally beat a burrito coma.
On average, Katie Bain goes to Chipotle three times a week. She’s on Twitter.
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