Shmooze or LOSE

Oh, did you think getting ahead in 2023 wouldn't require leaving the couch? Stop scrolling and think again

- KEVIN WEST

Remember the sounds of pre-Covid New York? I hear crescendos: the Philharmonic at fortissimo, the approaching A train, any good cocktail party around 7:15, and—perhaps the most avid sound of the busy city—the lunchtime gabble of business and gossip in a crowded restaurant. Three years of forced retreat in the Berkshires had made me a stranger to all that music. I tended my vegetable garden and wrote a cookbook, mostly alone except for FaceTime hangs and Zoom meetings. So the soundscape at Le Rock, when I walked into the Rockefeller Center restaurant at the lunchtime peak earlier this year, was the sound of being alive once again, IRL. My lunch date—a writer, mother, philanthropist—had just flown in from Costa Rica. I had come down for a conference. Our rendezvous led, entirely by chance, to a second reunion. Seated at the next table was Bronson van Wyck, the party planner, a pal from way back whom I hadn’t seen in eons. At that night’s dinner at Jupiter, the next person over was long-lost fellow foodie JR Ryall, the pastry chef at Ballymaloe House, Ireland’s legendary countryside restaurant. The next day at the conference, I ran into a favorite colleague from Australia, who invited me to a networking lunch, which led to an offhand comment, which evolved into a thoughtful conversation, which eventually resulted in a plum assignment to go to Perth. “So glad to have run into you,” said my Aussie friend. “The unplanned meetings are always the best.”

Moral of the story: In-person still matters. Screentime is no substitute for what generations of businesspeople, hostesses, entrepreneurs, bankers, art advisers, fundraisers, and social climbers have always known: Success means showing up, turning out, pressing the flesh, being in the room.