Even in music, though, we found the same result. Music reviews that used more present-tense verbs were more persuasive.

One of the big turning points for this project came when he asked me to do the whole book as a PowerPoint presentation. (I think he was a little fed up with wading through my prose—one of the downsides of being a really fast typist.) The requirement to boil everything down into short presentation snippets was incredibly powerful. We got into a rhythm in which he would give me “assignments” and I would do my best to complete them, and eventually after more than a year, we had something he felt comfortable moving forward with.

Most of the chefs on the 50 Best list had made their impact by focusing on innovation, on what needed to change. But as I thought about the impact I wanted to make, I focused on the one thing that wouldn’t. Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

I stayed late every night that first week designing a template for those line-up notes, so they would be beautiful as well as clear and well-organized. That was unreasonable, but the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and I wanted those notes to be as thoughtful, as beautifully presented, as the lavender honey–glazed dry-aged duck we brought to our guests. In this case, the people on staff were the recipients of my hospitality, and I wasn’t going to stand up and talk about excellence without modeling it myself.

To this day, I can’t say for sure what Moira Hodgson was trying to tell us. But the more we learned about Miles and the approach he took to his work, the more inspired we became about how we wanted to approach ours. That throwaway reference turned out to be the greatest gift anyone could have given us. We had been looking for a way to put our ambitions and values into language, to find words for what we wanted to be. Researching Miles gave us eleven of them. I had learned from my dad the importance of intentionality—knowing what it is you’re trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal. From Danny, I’d learned the importance of articulating that intention to our team.