World’s Longest Lunch

Just like MasterClass, the World’s Longest Lunch is one of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival’s most endearing and enduring events. It’s also something of a signature, able to encapsulate in a beautifully dressed, 400 metre-long table packed with revellers in some of Melbourne’s most iconic locations what the heart of the Festival is all about — a mass celebration of the joys of eating and drinking well. It’s also one of the most loved events in the program and has now spread from the city into regional Victoria with more than 25 separate lunches being held simultaneously across the state in botanic gardens, on bridges and in wineries.

The fate and the size of the Longest Lunch table have, over the years, provided something of a mirror to the fortunes and popularity of the Festival as a whole. In 1993, for example, when the Festival was in its inaugural year, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, one of the world’s great sporting arenas, was the chosen location for the World’s Longest Lunch, a statement-making move by a new event wanting to announce that it had arrived. But as the day of the first Longest Lunch approached, many seats on the 400-seat table were unsold, so Festival Chairman Peter Clemenger subsidised tickets for about 75 of his advertising company staff to fill the empty spaces. The event was a success, word of mouth spread and neither Clemenger nor anybody else has had to put their hand in their pocket to salvage the event again.

Every year now when the Festival announces its line-up of events, the location of World's Longest Lunch is one of the most anticipated pieces of information and space at the table is eagerly sought after. Over the years, the Longest Lunch has seen the table grow from the original 400 seats to over 1,000. The logistics of staging an event such as this, most often in untried locations, are mind-boggling, with caterers having to bring in generators, portable kitchens, fleets of staff and tonnes of food, not to mention the careful setting of a table that seats 1,000 people and bathroom facilities to cater to the sizeable crowd.

In 1999 the location for the World’s Longest Lunch was to be at New Quay Promenade, on the water in Docklands, but a forecast of inclement weather had forced a rethink of the location and so the table (and the kitchens, generators and everything else involved with World's Longest Lunch) was moved inside to one of the huge old storage sheds nearby. On the day of the lunch, however, the weather turned fine and (then) Festival Director Sylvia Johnson made the last-minute decision to move the whole lot outside again, saying that there “would have been a riot if we’d made people eat inside those dusty old sheds on such a beautiful day”.

One of the greatest feats of outside catering came with the 2005 event staged in the forecourt of Melbourne Museum, which was a collaboration between Gilbert Lau and Anthony Lui, from the Flower Drum, and Tony Le Deux, an independent caterer who was a driving force behind six of the Festival’s Longest Lunches. Not only was Le Deux allowed the rare privilege of working in the Flower Drum kitchen but he was part of perhaps the most ambitious menu the Longest Lunch had ever attempted: san choi bao, duck with wilted greens and ginger ice cream pyramids with Chinese glass jelly.

“To attempt a menu which required 1,000 crisp lettuce leaves and 1,000 servings of ice cream at an outside venue during the height of summer was madness,” says Le Deux. “But the day ran like clockwork, the entertainment was spectacular, the service efficient and Gilbert Lau remarked it was the best Chinese banquet he has had outside the Flower Drum.”

But with the World’s Longest Lunch, the panic backstage is rarely communicated to those sitting at the table. They are more likely to remember being served fish and chips by street-smart young kids on rollerblades on St Kilda Pier or the sight of a ballerina getting up onto the table set on St Kilda Road outside the National Gallery and the Arts Centre and walking the entire 400 metre length of it as people were eating without dislodging a single glass, napkin, plate or fork. Or they might remember when Jamie Oliver lent his support to the Marysville Longest Lunch by appearing at the event the year after the town had been devastated by the Black Saturday bushfires.

Those moments, the theatricality of such en masse dining and the feeling of camaraderie have made World's Longest Lunch the highlight of the Festival for many people, something that shows no sign of fading as the grand event enters its third decade.

World’s Longest Lunch, Telstra Dome, 2007; World’s Longest Lunch, Flemington Racecourse, 2008; World’s Longest Lunch, Marysville, 2009; World’s Longest Lunch, Fawkner Park, 2001; World’s Longest Lunch, Docklands, 1995.