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And everyone in the restaurant, whether they were working or eating there, benefited from the wonderful alchemy that comes when fervor has the room to run. Kirk eventually became close with Garrett Oliver, the mad genius who runs Brooklyn Brewery. So when Leo, through his friendship with Julian Van Winkle, got an empty Pappy barrel from the legendary Kentucky distillery, we shipped it to Brooklyn Brewery, and Garrett aged a custom beer for us in it. It was an extraordinary outcome—a genuinely special, playful collaboration that would never have come about if our wine director had stayed in charge of the beer program.

When we saw what a tremendous success we were having with the beverage programs, our management team came up with a list of every aspect of the restaurant that could benefit from some attention, including linens, side work, and educational training. These were less shiny, but they would make a real difference in the experience of those who worked there, and on our bottom line.

An example: the guy who took over CGS (which stands for “china, glass, and silver”—sexy as it gets, right?) dedicated himself to reducing breakage. He discovered the racks in the dish room were half an inch too short, so the stems poked up above the top when the glasses went through the dishwasher. A couple of new glass racks later, and he’d eliminated loss by 30 percent. That’s serious money, and a major morale booster, as it also meant that we no longer ran out of water glasses in the middle of service.

Then he sent the handyman out for thick rubber matting, installed it on the stainless steel table that held plates waiting to be washed, and bingo— no more chips on the raised rim at the bottom of our expensive, handmade ceramic chargers, either.

These weren’t line items lost on a manager’s to-do list, crowded with a thousand other things, but minor, inexpensive fixes implemented by a young person paying close attention. These small shifts saved the restaurant thousands of dollars in the first couple of months. And while some of these programs affected the guests more directly than others, you didn’t have to know what the linen closet or the glass racks looked like to feel the effects.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.108-109

Related Quotes

Much later, a guest at Eleven Madison Park would tell me that while most people save the best bottles of wine in their cellars for celebrations, he drinks his best bottles on his worst days. I thought of my mom’s funeral immediately when he said that, because that was exactly what we did that night. The party was perfect; she would have loved it.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.17

Invite Your Team Along

There’s a fascinating and possibly overlooked advantage that businesses with strong cultures have: when an employee comes up in the organization, any other way of doing things just feels wrong.

And wrong is how EMP felt when I walked in on my first day.

In retrospect, I can now name everything that was going sideways and tell you what I did by way of correction. In the heroic version of this story, I struck a masterful pose and enumerated a number of inspirational management tenets, all of which transformed the restaurant within the week.

But the truth is, Danny’s way of doing things—the way he treated his employees and guests—was so baked into my consciousness that for the first few months I was acting on instinct alone.

Mostly, the team needed to be brought along. They needed to feel seen and appreciated. They needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained. They needed discipline to be consistent. They needed to feel like vital and important parts of an exciting sea change, not obstacles to making it happen.

From a management perspective, we needed to return to first principles, and at Union Square Hospitality Group, the first principle is to take care of one another. The fine-dining squad hadn’t come from within USHG—and even if they had been able to absorb this crucial, employee-centered aspect of the culture, they’d been so focused on making their mark on the restaurant that they’d let this central principle fall by the wayside. That’s why Danny had insisted the next GM come from within the company; for him, that aspect of the culture was not negotiable.

To bridge the gap between the two factions, improving communication was going to be key. At the same time, we needed systems, so everybody would know what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it.

It was my hope that both fixes would make the team feel safer—and inspire them to come along on our mission. There was a lot to be done to make the restaurant better, but there would be no point to doing any of it if the people who worked there didn’t love coming to work. If I couldn’t succeed in getting hearts and minds on board for the bigger project, then the grand vision of a push toward excellence would be dead on arrival.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.62-63

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.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.63

We spent a lot of time in our manager meetings talking about how to make this more efficient. We ended up stealing a solution from baseball, where the catcher has to communicate with a pitcher sixty feet away: sign language.

After the host brought you to the table, the captain would hand you menus and ask about your water preference. Moments later, and without any visible communication—often before the captain had even left the table—your server would be at the table, pouring your preferred water choice.

It wasn’t magic; the captain had discreetly signaled your preference to one of their colleagues using a hand gesture (wiggled fingers for bubbles, a straight chop for still, and a twist of the fist for ice) behind their back. Another issue was that the room felt busy. It took a lot of people to execute hospitality at this level, but too many bodies moving swiftly around a room—even one as big as the dining room at EMP—can feel chaotic. In a bustling brasserie, servers zigzagging through the room lends an exciting energy; in a fine-dining setting, the commotion feels disruptive.

So we established traffic patterns for the staff like the ones on city streets, though they were imperceptible to our guests. Corners had invisible stop or yield signs. Most of the room was one-way only, and the traffic moved clockwise. In a two-way corridor, you hugged the wall to the right, as you would if you were driving.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.123

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.

GuidaraUnreasonable Hospitality
p.251