Unreasonable Hospitality

Unreasonable Hospitality – Will Guidara

A Letter from Simon Sinek

“On its surface, this is a book about a talented entrepreneur who helped transform a middling brasserie in New York City into the best restaurant in the world. However, this book is much bigger and more important than that. It is a book about how to treat people. How to listen. How to be curious. And how to learn to love the feeling of making others feel welcome. It is a book about how to make people feel like they belong.

Most people think of hospitality as something they do. Will thinks about service as an act of service—about how his actions make people feel. And he recognized that if he wanted his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he had to obsess about how he made his employees feel. The two cannot be separated: great service cannot exist without great leadership.

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Hospitality Economy

At the reception afterward, we ran into Massimo Bottura, the Italian chef of Osteria Francescana, a Michelin three-star based in Modena—and number six on the list (not that we were counting). He saw us, started laughing, and couldn’t stop: “You guys looked pretty happy up there!

When I was young, my dad gave me a paperweight that read, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” That’s what I was thinking about when Daniel and I wrote, “We will be Number One in the world,” on a cocktail napkin.

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 now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we’re trying to build? Do they have integrity; are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself—and my team—happily spending a lot of time with?

That word “unreasonable” was meant to shut us down—to end the conversation, as it so often does. Instead, it started one, and became our call to arms. Because no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable. Serena Williams. Walt Disney. Steve Jobs. Martin Scorsese. Prince. Look across every discipline, in every arena—sports, entertainment, design, technology, finance—you need to be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist.

That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our lives, but too many companies have left the human behind. They’ve been so focused on products, they’ve forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don’t think for a second that it doesn’t matter. In fact, it matters more.

The answer is simple, if not easy: create a culture of hospitality. Which means addressing questions I’ve spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?

When you create a hospitality-first culture, everything about your business improves—whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing your profitability.

Chapter 2: Making Magic in a World that Could Use More of it

““People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” This quote, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the great American writer Maya Angelou, may be the wisest statement about hospitality ever made.

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.

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.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones.

Chapter 3: The Extraordinary Power of Intention

“His stamina and selflessness were amazing to witness, but I now realize he never would have been able to achieve what he did as a businessperson, as a husband, or as a father without mapping out his days with precision, organizing his priorities, and setting his nonnegotiables. For my father, intentionality wasn’t a luxury or business philosophy; it was a requirement. I inherited from him an understanding of the importance of this concept—as you’ll see, “intention” is a word I use a lot. Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters. To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

The cornerstone of the company’s culture was a philosophy Danny called Enlightened Hospitality, which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else, including the guests and the investors. This didn’t mean the customer suffered; in fact, the opposite. Danny’s big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth, and they would take great care of the customers—which is exactly what they did.

Neither EMP nor Tabla was pretentious, but they were fancier places than I’d ever pictured myself working at; I was (and still am) more cheeseburger than foie gras. Not for the first or last time, I turned to my dad for advice. He addressed my concerns this way: “It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits. You can always take it down a notch later, but it’s harder to go the other way.” A month later, I was a manager at Tabla, running the front-door team. My education had begun.

Chapter 4: Lessons in Enlightened Hospitality

“Table transformed contemporary Indian cuisine in the United States—and the engine behind that transformation was Chef Floyd Cardoz, who cooked food inspired by his Goan heritage.

Tough as he was, it was impossible not to love Floyd and his huge grin. The childlike wonder on his face as he watched us taste a mind-blowing new dish for the first time was a gift as inspiring as his food. Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little, making sure that everything’s perfect—and they smile, too. That’s how we were with Floyd. Tabla was his big crazy dream, and everyone who worked for him would do whatever we could to help him make it a success.

Danny’s partner Richard Coraine would often tell us, “All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.” Randy was that person.

It was from him I learned: Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

Danny has always understood how language can build culture by making essential concepts easy to understand and to teach. He is brilliant at coining phrases around common experiences, potential pitfalls, and favorable outcomes.

These were repeated, over and over, in emails, in pre-meal meetings, and between staff members at USHG. “Constant, gentle pressure” was Danny’s version of the Japanese phrase kaizen, the idea that everyone in the organization should always be improving, getting a little better all the time. “Athletic hospitality” meant always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making an already great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error). “Be the swan” reminded us that all the guest should see was a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface—not the webbed feet, churning furiously below, driving the glide.

My favorite was “Make the charitable assumption,” a reminder to assume the best of people, even when (or perhaps especially when) they weren’t behaving particularly well. So, instead of immediately expressing disappointment with an employee who has shown up late and launching into a lecture on how they’ve let down the team, ask first, “You’re late; is everything okay?”

Danny encouraged us to extend the charitable assumption to our guests as well. When someone is being difficult, it’s human nature to decide they no longer deserve your best service. But another approach is to think, “Maybe the person is being dismissive because their spouse asked for a divorce or because a loved one is ill. Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone else in the room.

Because when you start focusing on extending the charitable assumption to the people around you, you find yourself giving it to yourself a bit more as well. We were introduced to many of these concepts on our very first day, at the meeting for new hires. Those meetings were in themselves unusual; my Cornell friends had gone on to work for large restaurant companies who didn’t do anything of the sort. And the importance of those meetings within USHG’s culture sent an immediate signal: “There’s a certain way we do things here, and it’s bigger than teaching you how you move through the dining room or how to spiel a dish.

Cult” Is Short for “Culture”

Friends working at other large hospitality companies across the country could never believe my work stories. Some of them went so far as to make snide remarks: “Oh, you’re working for the cult. . . .” I knew what they meant; between the shared internal language, our avowed dedication to our bosses, and our unconventional commitment to taking care of one another, there was a slightly devotional feeling about USHG. But I have since come to realize that a “cult” is what people who work for companies that haven’t invested enough in their cultures tend to call the companies that have.

Chapter 5: Restaurant-Smart vs Corporate-Smart

“It was on that call that he introduced me to the concept of restaurant-smart vs. corporate-smart. He described the distinction between the two. In the simplest terms: Where do the highest-paid people in the company work? In the restaurants themselves, or in the corporate offices? That says a lot about how the company is run.

In restaurant-smart companies, members of the team have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they tend to feel a greater sense of ownership, they give more of themselves to the job. They can often offer better hospitality because they’re nimble; there aren’t a lot of rules and systems getting in the way of human connection. But those restaurants tend not to have a lot of corporate support or oversight—the systems that make great businesses.

Corporate-smart companies, on the other hand, have all the back-end systems and controls in areas like accounting, purchasing, and human resources that are needed to make them great businesses, and they’re often more profitable as a result. But systems are, by definition, controls—and the more control you take away from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be, and guests can feel that.

Restaurant-smart companies can be great businesses, and corporate-smart companies can deliver great hospitality. But their priorities are different, in ways that fundamentally affect the guests’ experience.

It was thrilling to see what was possible. One afternoon, Hani flagged one of my reports—he’d noticed that food costs at a particular restaurant were way up, and for the second month in a row. He pulled another of my reports from the pile; the restaurant was selling a lot of lobster. Yet another report: lobster prices had skyrocketed. A quick call to Ken to confirm: yup—demand had outpaced supply, and prices had gone through the roof. A call to the chef: Were we undercharging for the dish? Definitely, given what we were paying for the ingredient, but he couldn’t raise the price high enough to get costs in line without sticker-shocking our guests. So the path forward was clear: the dish, popular as it was, had to come off the menu, at least until lobster prices dropped. Luckily, the chef had been playing with a scallop dish he could replace it with. Meanwhile, in our office: “Will! Figure out who else in the company is selling lobster.” Another series of phone calls. . . . Lobster season at Restaurant Associates was over.

In a restaurant-smart company, that phone call most likely would never have happened. And if the controller did happen to catch the mistake (if the company had a controller at all!) and reached out to the chef, they’d likely be told to stay in their lane. But overhearing that phone call taught me that someone in corporate wielding that kind of control isn’t always unwelcome. The chef’s bonus was tied to his food costs, and if his numbers were consistently below par, he’d be out of a job. That explained the relief I’d heard in his voice when Hani told him where he’d been bleeding. Our back-office efficiency meant that guy didn’t have to worry about the numbers and could go back to being a chef. We weren’t stealing his creativity; we were returning him to it.

And because I was working upstairs and downstairs, I had an almost preternatural sense for what the spreadsheets were telling me. Naturally our disposables line was high!

There’s no replacement for learning a system from the ground up.

Former navy captain David Marquet says that in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority. I was learning that, taken too far, corporate-smart could be restaurant-dumb.

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?

But the experience showed me that creativity was going to be the main ingredient in striking a true balance between restaurant-smart and corporate-smart.

I needed the right partner, so I reached out to another notorious perfectionist: Jon Snyder, who owns il laboratorio del gelato, a company on the Lower East Side that makes small batches of dense, world-class gelato from chef-quality ingredients.

I’d managed 95 percent of my budget aggressively, leveraging MoMA’s brand to get excellent gelato at a steep discount, and the beautiful cart for free. I’d earned the right to splurge on those spoons, the one small detail I believed would dramatically transform the experience of getting an ice cream at the cart. This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.

And when, at EMP, we threw ourselves into the concept of Unreasonable Hospitality, that 5 percent worked harder than it ever had before. One of my favorite examples: a family of four from Spain was dining with us on the last night of their New York City vacation. The children at the table were incandescent with excitement, and for the most wonderful reason: thick snow was falling past our massive windows, and they’d never seen real snow before. Spur of the moment, I sent someone out to buy four brand-new sleds. After their meal was over, we had a chauffeur-driven SUV whisk the whole family up to Central Park for a special nightcap: a few hours of play in the freshly fallen snow. That 5 percent, spent “foolishly” (really, with tremendous intention), allowed us to create those special memories for our guests.

Chapter 6: Pursuing a True Partnership

“My dad has always said: Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want. So he asked me straight-out: “What’s your dream job?

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.

The bo ssäm at Momofuku was a pork shoulder, cooked for hours, which you wrapped in lettuce at the table with oysters. It was, hands down, one of the most delicious dishes you could eat in New York.

Luckily, I had an ace advance team already in place at EMP. Sam Lipp, an enthusiastic guy with an unrivaled passion for making people happy, had gone over to EMP a few months before, along with our colleague Laura Wagstaff; the two of them had been among my best managers at MoMA. So before I started, I took Laura out for a drink.

Laura is relentlessly can-do, a brilliant problem-solver, and a tireless advocate for the people who work for her, which is why I’m never happier than when she’s next to me, whispering in my ear. It’s Laura who tells me when a staff member needs a little TLC, when I’m being too intense, and when my attention is on the wrong thing. She’s the one who taps my shoulder and says, “Hey, this needs a little finessing,” or “You gotta chill out a little bit.” (If it isn’t already clear, I think every leader should have a Laura—someone who feels comfortable telling you when you aren’t acting as the best version of yourself.)

There were plenty of standards in place, but no real systems to communicate them. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of inconsistency.

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.

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.

Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool. I’ve passed this advice on to those joining my own: no matter how talented you are, or how much you have to add, give yourself time to understand the organization before you try to impact it.

It didn’t even matter who was right and wrong, though, because nobody was communicating effectively. The front-line staff weren’t talking to one another because nobody was talking to them, and they weren’t listening to one another because they felt like nobody was listening to them. So I spent my first few weeks sitting down with every single member of the team and hearing them out. That was a whole education in itself; I learned a lot of information about the restaurant it would otherwise have taken me a long time to figure out. Those meetings also taught me that time spent goes a long way. Sitting down with people shows them you care about what they think and how they feel and makes it that much easier for them to trust that you have their best interests in mind. For this reason, I’d later ask the managers to stop sitting together during family meal, which the staff shares together before the restaurant is open. By spreading out, they’d learn, as I had, that the meal is a perfect opportunity to gather ideas and perspectives that might otherwise slip through the cracks.

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be. I thought about that often when I was sitting down with the new team at EMP. It was tempting to weed out everyone who had a reputation as a less-than-stellar employee; eventually, some folks would need to be managed out. But first, I needed to make sure a hidden capability wasn’t lurking behind someone’s subpar performance.

My biggest takeaways were: Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear. And your team can’t be excellent if you’re not holding them accountable to the standards you’ve set. You normalize these corrections by making them swiftly, whenever they’re needed.

And make those corrections in private. I can still feel the flush of shame and horror that crept up from my collar when I was screamed at in the dining room by the chef de cuisine at Spago; I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. And while it was a terrible experience, it was also a privileged peek at a mistake I never wanted to make.

Correct an employee in front of their colleagues, and they’ll never forgive you. In fact, the wall of shame that goes up may mean they can’t even absorb what you’re telling them. Issue the same correction in private, though, and it’s a different exchange.

Whether criticism or praise, it’s a leader’s job to give their team feedback all the time. But every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well than what they could do better, or they’re going to feel deflated and unmotivated. And if you can’t find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that’s a failure in leadership—either you’re not coaching the person sufficiently, or you’ve tried and it’s not working, which means they should no longer be on the team.

These rules help your team to feel safe—especially if you practice them consistently. Consistency is one of the most important and underrated aspects of being a leader. A person can’t feel safe at work if they’re apprehensive about what version of their manager they’re going to encounter on any given day. So if you’re the boss, you need to be steady, controlling your moods so you don’t end up taking out that morning’s squabble with your spouse on a server with a wrinkled shirt.

This is the ideal—but let’s be honest: every once in a while, you’re going to mess up. When you do, apologize. There’s an inherent intensity that comes with being passionate about what you do, and on occasion, it can get the better of you. I’ve certainly expressed exasperation and disappointment in ways that weren’t textbook illustrations of how to handle a correction in the workplace. But every time, I’ve made sure to apologize—not for the feedback itself, but for the way I delivered it.

In spite of this mushy talk about listening and learning, at heart, I’m a systems guy. And in 2006, EMP desperately needed some systems.

But it can be much, much more than that: A daily thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team.

This basic transfer of information was vitally important, especially because so much was changing. At Danny Meyer’s other restaurants, managers offered printed line-up notes, including new menu items, new wines, and information about new farms and producers, so the material could be taken and studied at home. But, probably because they were moving so fast, that practice had fallen by the wayside at EMP.

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.

In those early days, I sat down with one server, a smart, personable guy who should have been perfectly suited to our new mission. At our meeting, though, he seemed drained and overwhelmed. When I asked what was up, he pushed a giant packet of paper across the table—the notes he’d been given on the wine list. “I just don’t think I’m going to be able to get on top of this,” he said, and I couldn’t blame him; I was lost myself by page three. Employees who aren’t succeeding tend to fall into two camps: the ones who aren’t trying, and the ones who are. The end result may be similar, but the two need to be handled differently: you’ve got to move heaven and earth to help the people who are trying. This was one of those times. Yes, I wanted EMP to have one of the best wine lists in the world and knowledgeable servers who could expertly guide our guests through it, but drowning them in detail wasn’t the way to get there. Expectations were too high. We needed to solidify our foundation before adding more stories. We needed to slow down to speed up.

Ultimately, this is one of a manager’s biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

Chapter 8: Breaking Rules and Building a Team

“When you ask, “Why do we do it this way?” and the only answer is “Because that’s how it’s always been done,” that rule deserves another look.

When you get too caught up in showing your prowess—“Look at what we can do!”—you’re losing focus on the only thing that matters, which is what will make your customer happy.

In restaurants—and in all customer-service professions—the goal is to connect with people. Hospitality means breaking down barriers, not putting them up! We would spend the next ten years coming up with systemized and intentional ways to break down those barriers. Some of them were complex, but the first one was easy: Create a genuine relationship, and do what you need to in order to connect with the people you’re serving.

Our intention was to usher in a more elegant style of service, but I found if I hired people who had worked in fine dining, they already had too many bad habits. So we started looking for people with the right attitude and philosophy of hospitality.

We were looking for the kind of person who runs after a stranger on the street to return a dropped scarf, who stops by with a plate of cookies to welcome a new family to the neighborhood, or who offers to help carry a stranger’s heavy stroller up the subway stairs. The kind of truly hospitable person, in other words, who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.

It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught. And what better way to appreciate the exquisite nature of Daniel’s food than to spend six months ferrying plates from the kitchen to the table? More important, while we were teaching people the technical points a little bit at a time, it would give them the opportunity to fully absorb the culture we were building, long before they became point person with a guest. And how we chose which people to invite onto the team became central to our success.

At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.

In truth, hiring was hard before we got the culture of the restaurant fully dialed in. When we had an opening, I’d find someone good to join the team—not necessarily impeccably trained, but energetic and enthusiastic about the mission. But even if that person was all charged up when they got hired, the residual negativity of some of their colleagues would eventually infect them. The fine-dining crew was still being snooty, and some of the remaining members of the old guard weren’t ever going to get on board. Three or four times, I hired someone I thought showed promise. But they’d last only a month before the flame of their enthusiasm dimmed and died, and then they’d quit. So the next time a position opened up, I didn’t race to fill it. Instead, I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time. Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect the tiny flame of their enthusiasm, that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out.

We found each other on one of the first days of school and quickly discovered we’d both grown up in restaurants. In 1950, Brian’s grandfather built the fine-dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called “Seattle’s fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.” His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis’s Instagram account for 2020.)

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.

I’m always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times, think about what we’re doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

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.

Still, a hundred and fifty people worked for us at EMP, and every one of them had to be aligned with the mission. We needed language. Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

Over the next month or two, I worked with the team to create a list of the words that came up over and over again when critics and other musicians talked about Miles:

Cool

Endless Reinvention

Inspired

Forward Moving

Fresh

Collaborative

Spontaneous

Vibrant

Adventurous

Light

Innovative

When companies expand, they often say, “The bigger we get, the smaller we have to act.” (This was a mantra at Shake Shack.) At EMP in the early days, we went the other way. We were a single restaurant—part of a bigger company, but operated as if we weren’t, with a huge amount of autonomy. We were little, but we wanted to act big.

Choose Conflicting Goals

Hospitality and excellence. Those two concepts? They’re not friends.

I had a different point of view. I wanted our team members to understand that hospitality elevates service not only for the person receiving it, but for the person delivering it.

I wrapped up that first strategic planning meeting by telling the team, “The moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality, you understand there’s nobility in it. We may not be saving people’s lives, but we do have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to—and I see that not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility, and a reason for pride.

I’ve made it my mission to help the people who work for me see what’s important about what they do. Even at MoMA, we didn’t see our guests as a bunch of customers looking for lunch; we saw them as museumgoers—people on an adventure, realizing their dream of being inspired at one of the greatest modern art museums on earth. That simple shift had an automatic and profound impact on how our team acted, and on the hospitality our guests received.

I speak to people across industries and in different fields. When I encounter someone who thinks their work doesn’t matter, it’s usually because they haven’t dug deep enough to recognize the importance of the role they play. When I spoke at a real estate conference, it was easy for me to tell when someone was operating with passion and purpose. Many told me they sold houses; the great ones understood they were selling homes. This applies to every industry I can think of. You can be in the financial services business, or in the business of providing people with a plan so they can provide a future for their families.

Chapter 10: Creating a Culture of Collaboration

“I also had a lot of faith in the guy I was talking to. His name was Leo Robitschek. Maybe you’ve heard of him—he’s one of the foremost mixologists in the world now. But at the time, he was working at EMP while putting himself through medical school.

Leo had always been full of great ideas, but he was also the squeakiest wheel, the person on the staff who never failed to let you know why what you were doing was fundamentally flawed and never going to work.

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.

It Might Not Work” Is a Terrible Reason Not to Try

The Best Way to Learn Is to Teach...

The spirit of collaboration that came out of the ownership program was inspiring to all of us, but asking someone to take over an entire department was an enormous commitment. So when John Ragan began a weekly meeting called Happy Hour, dedicated to the wine, beer, and cocktails on our menu, we encouraged the team to step in and give presentations of their own.

When you spend this much time encouraging your team to contribute, you’d better make sure your team knows that your doors are always open to ideas. There’s a better way to do everything, and I made it clear: if you had an idea for how we could improve, I wanted to hear it. The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future. Dismiss them that first time, and you’ll extinguish a flame that’s difficult to rekindle.

Chapter 11: Pushing Toward Excellence

“Two responses are possible when you realize that perfection is unattainable: either give up altogether, or try to get as close as you possibly can. At EMP, we opted for the second. It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly. That’s the very definition of excellence: getting as many details right as you can. Sir David Brailsford was a coach hired to revitalize British cycling. He did so by committing to what he called “the aggregation of marginal gains,” or a small improvement in a lot of areas.

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.

Maybe people don’t notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful. In any great business, most of the details you closely attend to are ones that only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will notice. But if I could institute a system that demanded that the entire team think carefully about even the most rudimentary of tasks, I was creating a world in which intention was the standard, and our guests could feel it.

Chapter 12: Relationships are Simple. Simple is hard.

“One of Richard Coraine’s most often repeated sayings was “One size fits one.” He was referring to the hospitality experience: some guests love it when you hang out at the table and schmooze, while others want you to take their order and disappear. It’s your job to read the guest and to serve them how they want to be served.

You have to know the people you’re working with. Some people are totally pragmatic about criticism; correct them privately and without emotion, and they’ll receive the reproach in exactly the spirit in which it’s offered. Three minutes later, they’ll have apologized for the mistake, taken the note, and the two of you will have moved on to chatting about last night’s Mets game.

Other folks are sensitive to criticism. This isn’t necessarily a negative characteristic—it’s usually an indication they want to do a good job and feel deeply wounded at any suggestion that they haven’t. But those people are going to react, no matter what you say or how gently and diplomatically you say it, so you’d better spend some time planning exactly how you’re going to deliver the feedback. And you’d be wise to budget time to spend with them afterward, so you can sit with them and let them know that they’re still loved.

Then there are the people who can’t or won’t hear what you’re saying unless it comes with a little thunder. If your reprimand is too mild and conversational, they won’t believe you’re serious. With these people, you’re going to have to get into it a little bit, even if that’s not your usual managerial style.

Most of us have no difficulty at all in delivering praise; that’s the fun part of being a boss. But it’s hard to criticize someone. So I spend a lot of time with my managers talking about criticism—how to deliver it, how to receive it, and maybe most important, how to think about it. We all want to be liked, and when you give someone a note about what they could be doing differently and better, you run the risk of losing their goodwill. That’s why I say there is no better way to show someone you care than by being willing to offer them a correction; it’s the purest expression of putting someone else’s needs above your own, which is what hospitality is all about. Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment.”

People who are gifted at hospitality tend to be sensitive. They notice everything, feel deeply, and care a lot. These are superpowers, though that tenderness can also make them a handful to manage. I’ve heard many frustrated managers complain about these employees: “They’re so needy! They need so much reinforcement! I have to walk them through every decision; I have to hold their hands through every change!” But these tendencies are often what make these people so good at their work; they need to have delicate antennae. It takes compassion to know when a guest is intimidated by the room—and a light touch to dial back the formality so they don’t feel condescended to.

I knew these sensitive people needed extra time and love. But those Thanksgiving toasts created a space where the staff could be vulnerable with their peers, and they needed that, too. If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they’ll never be fully known by the people around them.

Chapter 13: Leveraging Affirmation

“It’s not lost on me that not all businesses have the relationship with the media that restaurants do. But every business has external stakeholders, whether those are board members, social media followers, or members of the community you belong to. When someone out there catches your company doing something right, leverage it, and when that external affirmation comes, direct it to the people responsible. If a distributor compliments you on always getting your orders in on time, ask them to say it again once you’ve gotten the person responsible on the phone.

It reads:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Chapter 14: Restoring Balance

“I reminded myself: If adding another element to the experience means you’re going to do everything a little less well, walk it back. Do less, and do it well.

Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. It shows an understanding of your abilities and an awareness of what’s happening around you. People who refuse to ask for help, who believe they can handle everything on their own, are deceiving themselves and doing a disservice to those around them. As Danny Meyer used to say, hospitality is a team sport. If you let your ego get in the way of asking for what you need, you’re going to let the whole team down, and the hospitality you’re delivering is going to suffer.

Chapter 15: The Best Offense is Offense

“A leader’s role isn’t only to motivate and uplift; sometimes it’s to earn the trust of your team by being human with them.

We were creative in how we saved money, and we got creative in how to make money, too. (This, incidentally, was a whole lot more fun.) No matter how you try to sugarcoat it, managing expenses is playing defense, and we had decided to play offense to get through the crisis.

Even when we were down, we’d played offense, and it had worked. Not only had we made it through the recession alive, but we’d emerged stronger than before.

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.

There is, by the way, no better way for a leader to figure out why an idea isn’t working—or how it can work better—than to walk a mile in the shoes of the people you’ve charged with implementing that idea. In general, this is good practice. If you’re the CEO of a hotel chain, work the front desk at one of your hotels a couple of times a year; if you run an airline, take a shift at the ticket desk, or serve drinks and pretzels in economy. Not ceremonially, either—do the job. I bet you’ll be surprised by what you learn; I always was.

Chapter 18: Improvisational Hospitality

“Christine McGrath was a host and reservationist, as well as a skilled calligrapher. Since handwritten notes were a big part of what we were doing in those early days, we were already stealing her from her duties on a regular basis. She was the obvious person to step into the role full-time. I hired an additional host to free her up, and just like that, we had a designated person in place to execute our ideas—Eleven Madison Park’s first official Dreamweaver.

That changes when you leave with a story that’s good enough to put you back in the moment, as if you were living it all over again. That’s why we took the Legends so seriously. If people were coming to us to add to their collection of experiences, then we saw these not as extra flourishes but as a responsibility: to give people a memory so good it enabled them to relive their experience with us.

The true gift, then, wasn’t the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend.

Giving More Is Addictive

It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness.

But, as oxymoronic as it may seem, you can also be proactive about improvisational hospitality. This is simple pattern recognition: identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort.

Gifts, to me, are deeply meaningful, which is why I get so mad when a business gives me a cheap tote with a branded USB drive. Try harder! Do better! Gifts are a way to tell people you saw, heard, and recognized them—that you cared enough to listen, and to do something with what you heard. A gift transforms an interaction, taking it from transactional to relational; there is no better way than a gift to demonstrate that someone is more than a customer or a line item on a spreadsheet. And the right one can help you to extend your hospitality all the way into someone’s life.

Chapter 19: Scaling a Culture

“Maya Angelou famously said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” The more space we gave ourselves to dream, and the more trust we gave one another, the better we got.

Thankfully, there were people close enough to me to tell me the truth. I had a number of conversations with senior staff, who told me there was ambiguity where there shouldn’t have been any: “Nobody’s making decisions, and when someone does step up, they’re accused of making a power grab. You have to name a GM, Will.”

But all I heard was: You need to work harder. You’re not here and you need to be, so you better figure out a way to shoehorn an extra hour into the day so you can do your new job and this one, too. No matter how guilty I felt, I was able to rationalize it away. “How bad could it be, when our guests were so happy?

Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready. So long as they are hungry, they will work even harder to prove that you made the right decision.

Chapter 20: Back to Basics

“Too many people approach creative brainstorming by taking what’s practical into consideration way too early in the process. Working with Jonathan and Dan reinforced what I’d always believed: Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable. Or, as I like to say, don’t ruin a story with the facts. Eventually, you’ll reverse engineer your great idea and figure out what’s possible and cost-effective and all the other boring grown-up stuff. But you should start with what you want to achieve.

The second mistake I’d made was more serious. I’d wanted to make sure every idea we had was communicated properly, so I’d insisted the team learn a spiel. I’d made them performers, ruling out any possibility of a real, quality conversation between them and the guests. Of course the experience had felt inauthentic to Wells; there had been no room for Natasha to connect with him. I had taken away her ability to be herself at the table.

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.

For every course, the table was set with fresh silverware, new wineglasses were placed, food was served and spieled, wine was poured. After we were done eating, the plates were cleared, and the table was crumbed. Those six actions happened for every single course—which meant that over a fifteen-course menu, we were being interrupted ninety times over the entirety of our meal. And that didn’t even include the introduction to the menu or any mid-course check-in.

Ninety times—when our stated goal was to create an environment where people could connect over the table, where, as I had said a thousand times, the service and the food and the environment were mere ingredients in the recipe of human connection. That is unreasonable, but it’s not hospitality.

We’d always believed we should serve what we wanted to receive. Serve only what you want to serve, and you’re showing off. Serve only what you think other people want, and you’re pandering. Serve what you genuinely want to receive, and there will be authenticity to the experience.

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.

Appendix

“But I also have to give some credit to a class called Organizational Behavior—mostly because they made us read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and by Spencer Johnson.