Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

By Will Guidara

This book is loaded with wonderful stories and insights on hospitality, leadership and culture. I’d recommend picking up the book since I only share a small percentage of the insights. 

Essential lessons in hospitality for every business, from the former co-owner of legendary restaurant Eleven Madison Park.Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world.

 How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality.

 

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. 

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 wanted to be number one, but that desire wasn’t just about the award; I wanted to be part of the team that made that impact.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I smoothed out the napkin and added two more words: 

“Unreasonable Hospitality.” 

Service Is Black and White; Hospitality Is Color 

When I was younger, I took a lot of pride in coming up with interview questions. 

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? 

But before I had the experience to let the conversation flow, one of my favorite questions to ask was, “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?” 

The best answer I ever got came from a woman I ended up not hiring. She said, “Service is black and white; hospitality is color.”

• Black and white means you’re doing your job with competence and efficient, “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection- that’s hospitality. 

 

“Unreasonable Hospitality”

• 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.  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. 
• The answer is simple: 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? 

 

CHAPTER 3 

THE EXTRAORDINARY POWER OF INTENTION

• When I was thirteen, about a year after our dinner at the Four Seasons (on the drive back from Sea World, of all places), my dad asked me what I wanted to do with my life. This might seem like a crazy thing to ask a thirteen-year-old kid, but my dad was incredibly intentional with his parenting, as with everything in his life. Every day, he’d wake up, get my mom out of bed, put her in her wheelchair, help her in the shower, then make and feed her breakfast—all before heading off to work. Fifteen hours later, he’d come home and do it all backward, always finding the time to watch me perform a new song I’d learned on the drums or help me with my homework. 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 business- person, 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.

Enlightened Hospitality 

• The cornerstone of the company’s culture was a philosophy Danny Meyer 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.

 

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 it was 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.

“All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.” 

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

Empower Others 

• Randy also instilled in us a sense of ownership by finding ways to demonstrate his faith in our judgement. “You okay if I get out of here a little early?” He’d ask, tossing me the keys to the front door. As a twenty two year old, I was thrilled to be left in charge. If the boss was gone, then I was the boss—which is why I worked harder when Randy was gone than when he was there.
• More important, I never forgot how much his trust meant to me, which is why developing a sense of ownership in the people who worked for me  would become a priority for me as soon as I was the one tossing the keys. 

Lessons Learned from Danny Meyer 

Language Creates Culture 

• Danny has always understood how language can build culture by making essential concepts easy to understand and to teach. 
• “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.
• “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’s 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.” 

Culture 

• 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.”
• To begin, Danny would ask everyone to introduce themselves with a line or two. But those introductions were also a meta-message. The fact that the head of the company was willing to use at least half of his meeting to take the time to hear from us individually made a big impression. It was our first indication that this central concept of enlightened hospitality— the idea that taking care of one another would take precedence over everything—was real. 
• For the rest of the meeting, Danny would walk us through every one of those phrases and the role they played in the culture, showing us right away that words mattered. He didn’t focus on the what—he focused on the why. As a result, those meetings were more like freshman class orientations at college than an introduction to company procedures. 
• Just being in the room felt like joining a movement or accepting a mission—a vibrant and exciting community more important than yourself. 

My dad didn’t just give advice; he always took the time to explain why, a leadership skill I’ve always tried to emulate.

• I’m so thankful to have had a leader like Hani at that point in my life; there’s so much I wouldn’t have learned if I had skipped steps. I thought of him often, later in my career, when I was managing young people hungry for more responsibility or a bigger title. Hani hadn’t been doing me a disservice by making me wait; he had been forcing me to strengthen my foundation, a solid base I relied on for years afterward. Waiting didn’t dim my ambition or hamper my progress; it taught me to trust the process—a lesson I would see the wisdom of when I was showing my own staff that the right way to do things starts with how you polish a wineglass. 
• There’s no replacement for learning a system from the ground up. 

95-5 rule

• Manage 95% of your business down to the penny and 5% “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.
• The Rule of 95/5 extended to how we managed staffing expenses, too. My experience in Hani’s office was never far from my mind when I was dealing with personnel; wherever we could, we worked to minimize expensive turnover and the dreaded overtime. But then, a few times a year, I would spend a truly obnoxious amount of money on an experience for the team, whether that meant closing the restaurant for a day so we could host a team-building retreat or hiring a DJ and buying a couple cases of Dom Pérignon for the over-the-top staff parties we were famous for. The Rule of 95/5 ensured that I wasn’t blowing the budget; I could afford these indulgences because I’d been so disciplined the rest of the year.

A few important lessons 

• My dad always said Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want. 
• 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. 
• Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool. 
• A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be. 
• Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion. 

Communication & Feedback 

• 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. 
• 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. 

Conduct a 30 minute pre-shift meeting everyday. 

• Consistency, inspiration, vulnerability are all important at these. 
• In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another. If that meant using a more basic napkin fold or simplifying the butter presentation so everyone had time to meet, then that was a trade-off I was willing to accept. How connected we were as a team was more important to me than anything. 

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.
• Knowing less is often an opportunity to do more. 
• In fact, I suspected blind faithfulness to those rules was why so many of those long-esteemed, established four-star restaurants had closed. Tastes change. 
• 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. 

Hire the Person, Not the Résumé 

• 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 day better. 
• So it didn’t matter if our new hires didn’t know a ton about wine or how to pronounce turbot. If they were excited about what we were up to, then we could teach them what they needed to know. 
• Fairly quickly, I implemented a new policy: everyone we hired started as a kitchen server, running food from the kitchen to the dining room. This meant they started at the lowest position in the dining room, even if their previous position had been a general manager somewhere else. 
• Practically speaking, this helped with the weeding process; if someone was going to balk at starting out as a kitchen server, they probably weren’t a good fit. And the system helped us to train people in a way that was truly comprehensive, because what we needed them to know was much bigger than the correct way to open a bottle of wine. 

Culture 

• It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught. 
• You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience. 
• It’s also why you’ve got to hire slow. It’s so dreadful to be shorthanded that managers tend to rush in and find a body to fill the void. I know what it’s like to think, We need someone so desperately—how bad could this person be? 

Build a Cultural Bonfire

• Make it cool to care. 
• We practiced it. And practiced it, and practiced it, and practiced it. 
• When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don’t have to hide your passions—you can sing them from the rooftops. And when the people you work with aren’t hanging back but cranking it all the way up, then you can meet them there; you don’t have to dim your light to succeed. 

CHAPTER 9 

WORKING WITH PURPOSE, ON PURPOSE

Don’t Try to Be All Things to All People 

• If you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view. The choices you make are always going to be subjective, a matter of opinion.
• What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged—or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you’ve been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn’t the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again. 

Articulate Your Intentions 

• Language is how you put intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture. 
• In the years to come, many would say “endless reinvention” was the defining characteristic of our restaurant, which did change, over and over again- not ever for the sake of change itself but because in order to be the best in the world, we had to be authentic. 

Find the Win/Win/Win

• Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, spoke eloquently at the Welcome Conference on giving his team more responsibility. Ells believed that, with proper training, his in-house employees could make better, fresher food. 
• He discovered that when he gave the teams responsibility, they became more responsible; elevated by his trust in them, they stepped up into the role. The team was empowered, the food tasted better, and customers felt better about the food they were eating because they could see living human beings chopping tomatoes and grilling chicken. It’s a win/win/win. 
• Link to his talk – https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxcbDnAIox1ZtI1ItOyXoYhDFE6FX0CjXU

Don’t Dismiss 

• 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.
• Someone may even come to you with an idea that’s just plain dumb. That’s an opportunity to teach—to listen, and then to explain in a respectful way why the idea is unlikely to work, so that the person leaves you both encouraged and educated. Remember: there’s often a brilliant idea right behind a bad one. 

Great leaders make leaders. You don’t want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one—the key to the front door. Once they’d turned over some of these responsibilities, they’d have more time to make their own contributions.

• I can’t overstate how much credit I give this more collaborative approach for our ultimate success: in my eyes, collaboration is the foundation upon which Unreasonable Hospitality was built. 
• Giving the team more responsibility than they expected had an amazing impact—the more responsibility we trusted them with, the more responsible they became. The more they taught, the more they understood the importance of everything we were asking them to learn. 

CHAPTER 11 

PUSHING TOWARD EXCELLENCE

Excellence Is the Culmination of Thousands of Details Executed Perfectly 

• 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. In his words: “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

The Littlest Things Matter 

We chased excellence in every element of what we did…

he Way You Do One Thing Is the Way You Do Everything 

• We needed to be operating at a high level of precision all the time. To get the staff tuned into the correct frequency, we asked them to start thinking that way as soon as they walked in the door. 
• We trained the people setting the dining room to place every plate so that if a guest flipped it over to see who had made it, the Limoges stamp would be facing them, right-side up. That’s ridiculous, right? Utterly unreasonable. Maybe one or two guests would flip that plate in a month. Most nights nobody did. Even if they did, would they guess that the placement had been intentional? And some people probably turned over the plate in a way we didn’t anticipate, so that that the manufacturer’s stamp wasn’t faceup at all. That was okay—because whether someone flipped it or not, that perfectly placed plate had already done what it needed to do.
• The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and we found, over and over, that precision in the smallest of details translated to precision in bigger ones. By asking the person setting the dining room to place each plate with total concentration and focus, we were asking them to set the tone for how they’d do everything over the course of the  service—how they’d greet our guests, walk through the dining room, communicate with their colleagues, pour the champagne to begin a meal and the cup of coffee to end it. 
• There’s a story about Walt Disney challenging his Imagineers when they were creating the first animatronics for the Enchanted Tiki Room. The Imagineers were convinced they had produced the most life-like, detailed animatronic bird possible, but Disney wasn’t satisfied. Real birds breathed, he pointed out; the chest expanded and contracted. This bird wasn’t breathing. Frustrated, the Imagineers reminded him there would be hundreds of distracting elements in the Tiki Room, including waterfalls, lights, smoke, totem poles, and singing flowers—nobody was going to notice a single bird, whether it was breathing or not. To which Disney responded, “People can feel perfection.” 
• 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.
• Setting the dining room with intention allowed us to control all the details we could control, making us less easily thrown off by everything we couldn’t. 

 

Let Go Of Being Right 

If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake. 

• In pursuing excellence, we were trying to do as many things right as we possibly could. At the same time, we had to let go of the concept of being right, because it meant going against the very essence of what we were trying to do, which was to make people feel great about eating and drinking in our restaurant. 
• We needed to make sure we were serving our guests, not our egos; as Danny Meyer famously said, “Being right is fucking irrelevant.” So instead of explaining what a true medium-rare looks like, we needed to say, “Absolutely, sir, I’m sorry,” before getting the guest a steak cooked exactly the way he wanted it cooked. 
• It was then that a new mantra at EMP was born: “Their perception is our reality.” 
  • Which means: it doesn’t matter whether the steak is rare or medium rare. If the guest’s perception is that it’s undercooked, the only acceptable response is, “Let me fix it.” And true hospitality means going one step further and doing everything you can to make sure the situation doesn’t repeat itself—in this case, making an internal guest note in our reservations system that this person “orders steak medium rare, but prefers it cooked medium.”

CHAPTER 12 

RELATIONSHIPS ARE SIMPLE. SIMPLE IS HARD.

• I’ve spent my career crusading against toxic workplace cultures. Certainly, if the last ten years has taught us anything, especially in the restaurant industry, it’s that company cultures based on abuse and harassment and manipulation are not only awful and unethical, but unstable and inefficient as well.
• And yet that doesn’t—in fact, it cannot—mean your culture should be 100 percent sweetness and light. Managing staff boils down to two things: how you praise people and how you criticize them.
•  Praise, I might argue, is the more important of the two. But you cannot establish any standard of excellence without NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION criticism, so a thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be a part of your culture, too.
• 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. 
• Similarly, there’s no one-size-fits-all rule for managing people. 
• Gary Chapman saved a lot of romantic relationships with his 1992 book, The Five Love Languages, which delineates the five general ways people show and prefer to experience love. (They are: acts of service, gift- giving, physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation.) 
• Chapman noted that people tend to go wrong by showing love the way they want to receive it. If your partner’s love language is acts of service, for instance, bringing them a cup of coffee prepared exactly how they like it is going to land better than surprising them with a kiss—even if that’s what you’ d most like. 

Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment. 

No aspect of your business should be off limits to reinvention 

 

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.

– Calvin Coolidge 

 

I can only be authentic and inspirational and restorative if I buy back the time to restore myself. This is not a passive pursuit; it’s active. The things I can control— mindfulness, diet, exercise, attitude, and whom I choose to spend my time with—those things take priority over all others. So when I do raise my hand, I’m armed with the mental fortitude to make sure that my ambition doesn’t undermine the clarity that got me all these killer opportunities in the first place. -Kevin Boehm

Do less and do it well. 

• A seemingly small but extraordinarily significant idea came from a longtime captain, Kevin Browne.The baseball-inspired sign language we used to indicate a table’s water preference had been so effective, we were always looking for new signs to make our lives easier and the experience better for our guests. Kevin came up with one that changed our culture: if you made eye contact with a colleague and touched your lapel, it meant “I need help.” 
• Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. It shows confidence in 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. 
• The sign made it easier and more efficient to ask for help, and systemizing it stripped the stigma from it. 

 

Adversity Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? 

• Behavioral science expert Rory Sutherland says the opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea. That’s why the idea of Unreasonable Hospitality was so compelling. The opposite of Unreasonable Hospitality isn’t treating people poorly, it’s reasonable hospitality—a perfectly fine way of doing business. But reasonable was not how we were going to become the number one restaurant in the world. 
• So, we started changing our approach to hospitality in radical ways. Mostly because those words I’d jotted down—Unreasonable Hospitality— gave birth to an idea that would be completely central to everything that came afterward, which was to provide the kind of welcome that would give our guests the feeling we were doing things differently. 

We got on that 50 Best list by pursuing excellence, the black and white, attending to every detail and getting as close to perfection as we could. But we got to number one by going technicolor- by offering hospitality so bespoke, so over the top, it can be described only as unreasonable.