At Google, Hours Are Long, But the Consomme Is Free

But even that is more cost-effective than having thousands of employees leave the campus, eat lunch and come back, said spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger. Nearly every employee at headquarters eats at least one meal a day there, she added. "And no one brings their lunch."

On my visit, I saw many of the usual trappings: a salad bar, buffet-style service and plastic trays. But some of the food seemed delivered from a white-tablecloth restaurant. One week, according to menus Google provided, chefs featured the "tuna tower": a collection of "mixed organic greens, carrot matchsticks, and Asian dressing topped with sliced, seared Ahi tuna, diced ginger root and lime, toasted coconut, basil, mint, cilantro, pickled cucumber and peanut praline." Earlier This month, a menu at Cafe 150 touted egg rolls "stuffed with Szechuan duck confit, Sonoma foie gras and julienne celery root . . . served with huckleberry-ponzu jelly"; Bloody Mary consomme with "house made crab, saffron, and celery gelee"; and, for dessert, potato chips covered in chocolate and sprinkled with fleur de sel.

For my first meal at Google, I sampled the salad bar spread, which included a cold Japanese udon noodle salad, grilled tofu dressed in Asian flavors and a Southwestern corn fritter. The choices were overwhelming, and what I tasted was delightful. Unfortunately, I was trying to conduct an interview at the same time -- a huge distraction.

Food -- particularly free food -- has always been a perk offered by fast-growing technology companies, especially during the late 1990s. Even today, if they no longer provide a free lunch, many big tech firms offer an impressive discounted one. And because this is California, organic, sustainable, local produce is emphasized at cafeterias at eBay, Yahoo, Palm and Cisco. But Google takes it to a level as phenomenal as its growth.

The meat dishes are nitrate-free. Seafood follows guidelines from the Monterey Bay Aquarium to prevent overfishing. Eggs are from free-range farms. And, on the rare occasions that chefs fry food, they recycle the grease into biodiesel fuel.

From the beginning, Google placed an emphasis on food. The founders hired chef Charlie Ayers, who once cooked for the Grateful Dead, to run their first cafeteria. But, like some other early employees, Ayers received stock options, and he cashed them out and moved on once the company went public. Google decided to build lots of smaller cafes, each with its own executive chef and theme.

In addition to the 11 cafes, open mostly during mealtime, 44 stations between work areas are filled with expensive snacks: four varieties of bottled water, six kinds of Naked Juice, vitamin waters and lots of bottled beverages I'd never heard of, such as litchi-flavored iced tea. Each station is equipped with an espresso machine. And when I visited, dozens of scoop-your-own bins were filled with Clif Bars, chocolate malt balls, almonds, cashews, soy nuts and Gummi Bears. It's like going to Whole Foods, loading up with whatever you want and not paying the bill.

But here's another rub: With so much good food, employees are getting fat.

The staff nutritionist's mission is to squelch the "Google 15," the weight many new employees pack on in their first year. Google's on-site doctor is handing out free pedometers. Last month the snack system was overhauled to ban trans fats, and the help-yourself bins were replaced with baskets of appropriately sized snack packets, each under 300 calories.

Some employees complained loudly on internal message boards. They missed their high-fat, high-sugar deadline treats.

They're not going so far as to boycott the cafes, though. Before lunch, employees form long lines at the doors, waiting for them to open.

Google's free lunch might not last forever. At most high-flying tech firms, "once the stock starts falling down or there's any struggles with growth, food is one of the first perks to go," said Bay Area tech consultant Tim Bajarin, who has eaten at Google. Then again, he adds, "given the incredible revenue Google continues to bring in, I don't see that happening any time soon."

Indeed, I hear that Google has five more cafes under development. That's five more reasons to stick around and eat.