ONE: The Bridge

“As graduation approached, Huang got a job at Denny’s. The nationwide restaurant chain was known in that era for its burnt coffee, its reconstituted powdered eggs, its reheated sausage patties, and its round-the-clock operating hours. Huang loved the place. He began as a dishwasher and worked his way up to server. “I find that I think best when I’m under

adversity. When the world is just falling apart, I actually think my heart rate goes down,” he later said. “Maybe it’s Denny’s. As a waiter, you’ve got to deal with rush hour. Anyone who’s dealt with rush hour in a restaurant knows what I’m talking about.

I was fortunate enough to be part of the management team for the great Daniel Boulud. Daniel is so renowned in my industry he is known by his first name alone; it is also the name of his Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, which he opened in 1993 after years as the acclaimed chef at Le Cirque.

Chapter 7: Setting Expectations

“These restaurants paved the way for what was to come a few short years later: Kung Pao Pastrami at Mission Chinese and the Cheezus Christ pie at Roberta’s, a barely converted, concrete-floored, graffiti-covered former warehouse in Bushwick.

He said: “I am so excited to be here; I believe in and love this restaurant with all my heart. I’m also clear about what my job is, which is to do what’s best for the restaurant, not to do what’s best for any of you. More often than not, what’s best for the restaurant will include doing what’s best for you. But the only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.” I loved this. It was a profoundly confident display of leadership—both a rallying cry and a way of telling the team, right away, exactly what they could expect from him as a leader. I was inspired to use that same approach as a template for my own first-day speech. Except that Christopher had worked as a server and a manager at Union Square Cafe for years before that promotion. He knew every inch of the restaurant, and every one of the people in that room, down to their favorite cocktails and the names of their pets. People trusted him. He’d earned the right to give that speech. I hadn’t.

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.