By Sara Jewell

Learning that the Globe and Mail columnist is no longer going to write her infamous “Lunch With…”column reminded Sara Jewell of her own dining experience with the woman who spent six years serving up puréed celebrity for her readers’nourishment,or indigestion.

It’s the weekend of the National Writers’ Symposium in Victoria in the fall of 2001.

I haven’t signed up for one of the dinner groups. Luckily for me,a helpful journalism student informs me there’s still room in Jan Wong’s group going out for Chinese food.

Having run upstairs for my coat, I return to the third floor pre-dinner cocktail party just as Jan and friends are about to head down in the other elevator. You might say I threw myself at Jan – simply to make it into the elevator.

After regaining my balance inside, I announce I am going to dinner with them. I am the token non-Chinese person in this group of four.

On our way to Don Mee’s in the hotel shuttle van, I feel compelled to warn my companions about my inability to use chopsticks. This is the Jan Wong of “Lunch With…” fame. That I couldn’t eat Chinese food with chopsticks would be the first thing Jan would write in her notebook if she were taking me to lunch, and if she were still writing her column.

When we arrive at the restaurant in downtown Victoria, Jan informs the maitre d’ there will be six of us for dinner,not the four reserved earlier. He seems put out by this even though the restaurant is almost empty.

Jan is not impressed that he’s annoyed about getting more business. However, she’s pleased to see we’re sitting at a round table; it makes it easier for everyone to talk.

Once we’re seated, I realize I’m not the token non-Chinese in the restaurant. It concerns Jan that there are no Chinese people eating in Don Mee’s Chinese restaurant.

Jan spent six years as the Globe’s Beijing correspondent and then lunched for a living; she knows how to spot bad Chinese food.

As we open our menus, Jan says we all get to order one item but tells me she gets to veto mine if my selection is wrong. Whenever someone new arrives, Jan orders another dish and more tea (we end up a raucous party of nine by the end of the meal). She orders in Mandarin but still our waiters (there seem to be two or three) remain unimpressed.

On May 26th, Jan wrote her final column, explaining to her readers that Lunch With was “killed by my editors who want me to do something new.”

One of Jan’s favourite columns from the past six years is the tale of hosting her Aunt Ming’s birthday part. In a postscript included in her 2000 book, Lunch With Jan Wong, Jan refers to her family as “my one zillion relatives.”Her tales of that huge family are among my favourite as well.

Midway through our meal at Don Mee’s, I am struck by how much of a family we appear: everyone talking loudly at once,multiple conversations that criss-cross the round table, that start and stop and weave and flow back to Jan. We don’t bother asking for a bowl,we simply reach,we sample from dishes as they pass by.

At one point, seeing me struggle with a utensil, Jan grabs it from my hand and serves me herself. You don’t mess with a woman who knows how to hold a fork and a pen in the same hand, who knows how to skewer food and a reputation at the same time. This is a woman who asked Gene Simmons, the lead singer of the American rock band KISS, the size of his penis.

Speaking of which, what does the woman who started out as a news assistant to the New York Times Beijing correspondent in 1979, and who reported on business for the Montreal Gazette, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and Globe and Mail think about lunching with celebrities twenty years later?

“I don’t like being accused of doing a puff piece,” Jan says, thinking of an email response to her Gene Simmons column (January 26). “I think it’s serious journalism because these lunch dates are selling things to the public. That means the media shouldn’t ignore these people. [It’s like reporting on a corporation]. They’re no different, to me, in the amount of money they take from the public. If I can tell you what they’re like, you’ll be more informed.”

This Victoria dinner group is a mix of journalists from radio,TV, community newspapers and big city papers. Jan’s “holding court” at the dinner table, but there’s nothing pompous about her. She’s not wearing any makeup, she’s dressed in Pamela Wallin called her the “Hannibal Lechter of the lunch set.”

What made Lunch With memorable could also be blamed for its demise. Jan spent six years as the Globe’s Beijing correspondent.

“I wrote the standard famous author interview with its invisible journalist,” Jan explains in the introduction to the Lunch With book. You don’t mess with a woman who knows how to hold a fork and a pen in the same hand,who knows how to skewer food and a reputation at the same time

. Dinner With Jan Wong black velvet pants, a purple turtleneck and cardigan with a red shawl draped over her shoulders. We go into shock when she tells us she’s 49 (she has two sons, aged 8 and 11). Jan is blunt, funny, warm, focused, sharp and witty. She says, “That’s interesting” and means it. Sitting next to her, I sense a small but powerful woman. This could be why no one has ever walked out on a Lunch.

The Lunch column happened almost by accident. After she returned from Beijing in 1994 and took a year off to write her book, Red China Blues, Jan didn’t want to go back to being a business reporter. She became a features and news reporter. On Labour Day weekend in 1996, her editor asked her to interview author Margaret Atwood.

“I wrote the standard famous author interview with its invisible journalist,” Jan explains in the introduction to the Lunch With book. “My editor, Catherine Bradbury, asked for a rewrite in the first person. Atwood had given me one hour, barely adequate for print. So I added attitude and atmospherics and readers loved it.”

Jan thought the column would last six months.

In November 2001, she celebrated five years of Lunch and half a dozen of the previously skewered were given the chance to write in Jan’s usual space in the newspaper about their experience (Pamela Wallin called her the “Hannibal Lechter of the lunch.") also be blamed for its demise.

“I try to get beneath the surface, behind the image,” Jan explained in an interview in February. “Usually I’m interviewing people who have been interviewed a thousand times and I’m trying to get something the reader doesn’t know but would like to know.

I think readers have this basic common sense that nothing’s really perfect and if they read [in a celebrity profile] that so-and-so’s wonderful, they don’t believe you. I think you need a contradiction.You need that tension. I love it when they’re a bit hypocritical.”

That moment of tension was the highlight of Jan’s lunch. It took her two days of research and another two of lunching and writing to produce the Saturday column.

She discovered a theme for every one. The hardest part was getting the restaurant scene to come alive. “I pick a restaurant that will help the interview along by either completely disorienting the interviewee(s) or by framing them like a portrait. I’ve learned you don’t want a talking head. If you can witness a scene, an exchange, you’ve got action. You want people to feel like it’s lunch, not just another interview.”

As Jan writes in her final column, it simply got harder and harder to find people willing to Lunch With her.

“Celebrity writing is typically the last bastion of sycophantic, deferential reporting. Lunch With often brutal. Alas,[the column] has become a victim of its own success…I knew my lunches were numbered when both the Naked Newscaster and the Naked Chef turned me down.”

I ask her the obvious question:Who does she wish she’d had the chance to Lunch With?

“Osama bin Laden. I’d take him to Rodney’s Oyster House. Oh,realistically? Jean Chrétien.We’d lunch in the Auberge Grande Mére dining room.”

What’s next for the former queen of lunch?

Now that she’ll be writing features for the Globe’s Focus section, Jan admits she has to “regear” her brain for a different kind of interview. She’s going to continue doing what she does best: introducing us to the fascinating people who live in our neighbourhoods.No more celebrities. Jan wants to write about real people.

Some of the most memorable Lunch With columns profiled new immigrants trying to figure out the Canadian way. And her publisher wants another book. In fact, she now has a deadline for the outline.

Jan says she has no idea what to write. I suggest she write about her family, those one zillion relatives.

She says she’s thinking about a novel. “If you know how to write a novel, let me know,”she said to me when I first met her last year. “I don’t know how. It seems like it would be interesting.”

Sara Jewell is a freelance writer and broadcaster now experiencing life in rural Nova Scotia.