Gourmet cuisine, wine on tap, and free-flow gelato: what techies eat in Silicon Valley's fanciest office canteens

Silicon Valley’s tech giants have taken workplace dining to the next level, with themed restaurants, gourmet menus, and stunning designs – and at many companies, it is all free.

But employers seeking to offer their staff subsidised meals will not have that option if the city of San Francisco follows through with a policy that would ban new construction of workplace cafeterias. The proposal is an effort to encourage tech employees to stimulate the local economy by eating at restaurants within the community.

The nearby city of Mountain View already enforces the restriction, which will forbid Facebook from building an on-site cafeteria when it opens its offices there this autumn. However, the proposal will not affect companies with existing cafeterias, like Google, Apple, and Facebook’s main offices in Menlo Park, California.

Here are the gourmet perks currently afforded to the employees of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies.

Facebook has an on-site Philz Coffee

The social media giant offers employees free unlimited food spanning healthy and guilty-pleasure options. Many of the on-campus cafeterias at the Menlo Park headquarters are more like specialised restaurants, from barbecue joints and burger shacks to smoothie stands and ice cream shops. There is even an outpost of the uber-hip Philz Coffee on campus.

As one Menlo Park employee on Glassdoor put it, the meal benefits have its upsides and downsides – “pros: free food; cons: got fat”.

Employees at Facebook’s new Mountain View offices will not have that problem. When the location opens this autumn, free food will not be offered to employees there as part of a city restriction forbidding tech companies in the region from supplying fully subsidised meals to staff.

Apple employees do not get free food – but they do get subsidised cafes