Why The Three-Martini Lunch Faded Away

Drinking three martinis at any point over the course of a day will probably take a toll on you. It's a cocktail made from pretty much just gin or vodka plus a splash vermouth, so it'll certainly pack a punch, whether or not you chase it with those skewered olives used to garnish the drink. But drinking three martinis at lunch? In the middle of the workday? It takes a certain kind of person to do that and still function — although with the three-martini lunch, functioning afterwards may be beside the point. For some, it's an enticing prospect, but there's a reason we don't hear about them so often anymore.

Three-martini lunches, or "liquid lunches," are generally associated with the milieu depicted on shows like "Mad Men." This glamorous world of businessmen, usually in mid-century America, centered around such cushy jobs that the individuals could afford to go off at lunch and knock back three cocktails before returning to work, all written off as a tax-deductible business expense. (As for Don Draper himself, he was mostly a whiskey man.) This practice is true to what was happening at Madison Avenue in the 1960s, with various businessmen insisting they were more creative after these drinks.

What changed? Well, day drinking gradually became stigmatized, going from a lavish lunch activity to a flask stashed in one's desk drawer. Business changed as well, encouraging a competitive, rise-and-grind attitude rather than decadent laurel-resting. Perhaps most importantly, the tax deduction went away — for a while, anyway.

Once upon a time, drinks consumed while conducting business (however vaguely) could be written off entirely as "entertainment expenses," and were fully tax deductible. This first became controversial in the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy called for laws to change (they didn't). In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter spoke out against the three-martini lunch. He saw it as an example of the unfairness of tax laws: The working class was hard-pressed to find tax breaks, while greedy executives could swill cocktails at lunch essentially free of charge. The law changed in 1986, first becoming 80% deductible, then just 50% deductible.

For a while, that was that. Then, in late 2020, Donald Trump decided to bring it back. Ostensibly an attempt to reinvigorate restaurant business, the deductible gave most of the benefits to the aforementioned cocktail-swilling executives — though only for two years. (Trump is himself a longtime teetotaller, who instead drinks as many as 12 diet cokes a day.) Did it rejuvenate restaurants and bring back the chic days of luxurious lunches? Well, no — but there was a brief window where one could have relived those old times, perhaps drinking one martini how Ernest Hemingway drank them, the second like Winston Churchill, and the third in a more modern style, spiced up with a bit of wasabi.