The museum cafés, meanwhile, were the redheaded stepchildren of USHG, and I loved it. We were flying under the radar and had lots of creative freedom as a result. I immediately set out to implement my vision: to make the cafés at MoMA corporate-smart and restaurant-smart. But what I discovered almost immediately is that walking that line is really, really hard. Every decision I made seemed to expose the natural tensions between improving the quality of the experience the guests were having and doing what was best for the business. Restaurant-smart meant leading with trust—including allowing the people who worked for me to do what they felt was best for the guests. Corporate-smart meant running a tight ship. Which was right?

Chapter 9: Working with Purpose, on Purpose

“We were satisfied with our mission statement—to be the four-star restaurant for the next generation—but that was the what.

We needed the how.

Chapter 16: Earning Informality

“The approach we used to combat this was what we called earning informality. When I started dating my wife, I called her dad Mr. Tosi; I knew I’d earned his trust when he finally told me to call him Gino. Informality is something you earn.” 9Guidara, “Unreasonable Hospitality”, p.181)

Chapter 17: Learning to be Unreasonable

“It is impossible to get a reservation at Rao’s. Rao’s, which opened in 1896 and serves homestyle Italian American food in Harlem, is a New York institution. And when I say it’s impossible to get a reservation there, I mean it: they don’t take them. A select few people “own” tables, and you can’t eat there unless you’re invited by someone who does. After years of asking everyone I knew, I finally managed to wrangle myself an invitation.

Not every guest wanted a history lesson during their dinner. Many were charmed and wanted to engage with us. But some people were there to talk to their companions or to eat; they wanted us to drop off their food and leave them alone. I had stripped the team of their authority to read the table and deliver an appropriate level of detail—to tailor the service experience to the guest. In my pursuit of a sense of place, I’d actually made the meal less hospitable.

Worse, it was essentially the same mistake I’d made the year before, when I’d hesitated to promote a general manager. Once again, the guy known for talking about how much he trusted his team had acted as if he didn’t trust them at all.

In truth, I’m not surprised I made this mistake—and I’m almost certain I’ll make it again in the future. My compulsive attention to detail is one of my superpowers; it’s how I take aim at perfection. But that tendency also means I’m always walking a tightrope between my desire to guarantee excellence by controlling everything and knowing I want to create an environment of empowerment and collaboration and trust among the people who work for me. Like excellence and hospitality, these two qualities—control and trust—are not friends.

Epilogue

“For the first time, we made plans to do a complete renovation of the restaurant. There had been lots of physical changes to the room over the years, but we’d always been making tweaks to what still felt like Danny Meyer’s restaurant. It was time for it to become completely, entirely ours. The renovation meant we’d be closed for a few months. By then we knew that without our team, the restaurant was just four walls, some tables, and a stove. We couldn’t afford to lose a single one of them, so we opened a whole new restaurant in the Hamptons—a more casual offshoot, which we called EMP Summer House, and moved the whole group out there with us. That project was both creatively satisfying and commercially successful, not to mention wildly fun.