Restaurateur and Author
Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of New York City’s Eleven Madison Park. The 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? He has a new book that details the radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, hospitality. He shares a hot dog story that really draws a line in the sand in terms of ‘who am I and how far are we willing to go?’
The ‘hot dog’ premise morphed into surprising a family who had never seen snow with a magical sledding trip to Central Park. Not to mention a couple whose beach trip to the Hamptons was rained out and replaced by Guidara and his team with a private dining room filled with sand, beach chairs and mai-tais.
Total Food Service sought out Will Guidara to talk about his approach to the day-to-day essentials of how to talk to and empower his team. For him, it’s the magic that can happen when a busser starts thinking like an owner.
For those who don’t know you, can you share a little about your background?
I’m from Sleepy Hollow, New York and I grew up in the hospitality business. My mom was a flight attendant for American Airlines and my dad was the president of Restaurant Associates when I was growing up, so hospitality is in my blood. I went to the hotel school at Cornell and started working for Danny Meyer and then Restaurant Associates. I went back to Danny Meyer, before buying Eleven Madison Park, and started my company and that included the NoMad which I ended up selling in early 2020.
Can you share your career path after Cornell?
After Cornell, I went to Spain just for three or four months to basically chop vegetables in exchange for room and board at this hotel school in the north of Spain and learn to speak Spanish. Then, I went to work with Danny Meyer at Tabla, I went to Restaurant Associates to work at the MetLife building where I worked as the assistant purchaser for Naples and Cucina and Cafe Centro in the morning and then, the assistant controller for those same restaurants in the afternoon.
What impact did Danny Meyer have on your career?
The real lesson from Danny lies in how to create a culture within a company. With that comes providing hospitality to the people that work there, as well as the people that we serve, who are truly the foundation of everything I’ve accomplished. Danny was the first person that showed me that you can be just as creative in the dining room, as top chefs were being celebrated for being in the kitchen. They also taught me the power of language and articulating culture, he taught me that truly, in hospitality, investing in your people is the most scalable way to create a good experience for the guests.
Can you define this concept of Unreasonable Hospitality?
It begins with being in the present. It is about caring so much about the people you’re serving, or the thing that you’re doing. With that comes slowing down long enough to actually listen to the things customers and co-workers are saying and all the things they’re not saying. It is all about how you react to what you have heard.
Is that a realistic expectation of somebody who doesn’t own any of the
equity in the restaurant?
Hospitality is something that if you can get people to deliver it enough times, they quickly grow to understand how good it feels and had nothing to do with compensation. The equity, is the emotional exchange. I don’t think there are very many things as energizing, it seemed to look and complete joy on someone’s face, when they receive a gift, you’re comfortable for giving them. I think that becomes an addiction and if you can create a culture where people experience that, a handful of times I find that that is their equity. I like to call it emotional equity that derives happiness from making other people happy.
Think about how amazing it was, the few times in your life that you’ve been wowed, and think about how amazing that felt.
I disagree and think that for instance during the holidays people prefer to give gifts rather than receive them. I think, ultimately, everyone likes to give gifts because the gift you get, is a dopamine rush when you see how happy your creativity made someone else feel, you know what I mean?
How did Eleven Madison Park happen and the collaboration with Daniel Humm come to pass?
Well, we were both hired by Danny Meyer and then we were given the opportunity to buy the restaurant from him in 2011 and that’s how our company started.
Got it and so, if the restaurant was so successful, why would he sell it?
Well, it was on a journey towards becoming successful at the time. We went to him because we were given the opportunity to open the NoMad. Danny believed in us and what we were doing at Eleven Madison Park but didn’t want to be in a situation where we were owners in one restaurant and employees in another and decided that what was best for the restaurant was to give us the chance to buy it from him.
You mentioned the concept of a journey, do all restaurants have a journey?
I think a restaurant is a living breathing thing, so the journeys are all different. Our journey was one of endless reinvention and constant improvements that brought us from being a middling Brasserie to the number one restaurant in the world, but I think every restaurant has its own journey. A journey doesn’t necessarily imply that you’re going very far. I’m just saying, I think it’s always a journey, it’s a journey of whether you’re moving forward, standing still, moving backward, but I think every restaurant just by virtue of the fact that it’s filled with the constantly evolving group of living, breathing people, there’s this implicit, evolving narrative to it, you know?
As you look back on it, what made the restaurant such a success?
When you look at what it means to be the number one restaurant in the world it is patently absurd, to say that one restaurant is better than every other restaurant on the planet, right? I believe that what that Michelin award actually does acknowledge is the restaurant that’s having the greatest impact in the world at that moment in time.
When you look at El Bulli in Japan, they pioneered molecular gastronomy and changed the way people living all over the world cook, from that point forward. When you look at Noma in Copenhagen, they did the same thing as well with foraging. I believe our impact was not by changing how people cooked, in fact, I don’t think our impact was focusing on what needed to change, but rather focusing on the one thing that will never change, which is the human desire to feel taken care of. Chefs all over the world are celebrated for being unreasonable in pursuit of creating the food that they serve, we chose to be unreasonable in pursuit of our hospitality, how it made people feel, and the depth of the gestures that we would give to the people in our dining room.
Talk about some of those gestures. I mean, there are some pretty incredible stories, share some of that, and then let’s talk about how the book outlines how to build your own toolkit.
It all started with this hot dog, when I had my lightbulb moment when clearing my appetizers at Tabla for four foodies that were on vacation in New York and going to the airport after the meal to head back home and I overheard them talking, what an amazing trip, we’ve been to all the best restaurants Per Se, and now, Eleven Madison Park.
I could hear them say that the only thing they didn’t get to try was the famous New York City street hot dogs.
I went back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, ran outside to the corner hotdog cart, and bought a hot dog. I ran back inside to our chef with it. Then came the hard part to trust me. He eventually agreed to cut the hot dog up and add some sauerkraut and mustard. Right before their final savory course, which was a honey lavender glaze, Muscovy ducks that have been fried for two weeks, utilizing a technique that has taken years to perfect, we brought over the hot dog. I told them I wanted to make sure they don’t go home with any culinary regrets and this is a New York City hot dog. They freaked out and it was one of those moments where I recognized that there was an opportunity to approach all of this differently than it had been done before. I knew if we could create a culture where the team was present enough at the table to pick up on these cues, and then not take themselves too seriously that we could accomplish that goal. Often in customer service businesses, we let our self-imposed standards get in the way of us giving our customers the things they actually want, like a hot dog in a four-star restaurant, it’s sacrilegious, but look at how it made them feel. Our goal was to give people a sense of genuine belonging and make them feel seen. We needed everybody to understand that hospitality is not one size fits all. Free champagne and/or caviar to the table is simple but doesn’t create a personalized hospitality experience.
Wouldn’t serving champagne have followed the academic type of execution that you would have learned at Cornell?
If you want to impress someone, give them something fancy. The hot dog moment became our call to arms. We even added a position to the restaurant with the responsibility to help everyone on the team bring more ideas like that to life. We called it the dream maker and in the years that followed, we did endless gestures just like, whether it was turning our champagne cart into a Budweiser cart for a guest that said, they were more of a steak and potatoes kind of guy. There was a couple that came to console themselves after their beach vacation flight was canceled, so at the end of their meal, we turned our private dining room into their very own private beach, there was sand on the ground and folding chairs in a kiddie pool, filled with water, they can stick their feet into while they drown their sorrow over a cocktail.
One of my favorite stories was about a family of four from Spain. They were in the restaurant and the kid looked out the window with wonder because he had never seen snow and it had started snowing. Our dream maker found a store open on a Friday night and at the end of the night, we ended up bringing them to Central Park to go sledding.
The thing I always tell people when I start telling these stories is that Unreasonable Hospitality is not just for fancy restaurants. Yes, I get it, some of these experiences are extravagant. But remember it all started with a $2 hotdog. It doesn’t require a huge budget; it is just a way of thinking about your culture.
Is the goal of the new book to help restaurateurs find their inner ‘hot dog moment’?
That’s a part of it because the book is filled with my lessons of service and leadership through the lens of hospitality. I used the narrative of how we bought Eleven Madison Park to number one. So, it’s about that kind of thing like figuring out how to deliver unreasonable hospitality but you first need to build a foundation. It’s about creating a truly collaborative working environment where you are intentionally creating space for the entire team to come together and contribute to the direction. The second key is normalizing feedback within your organization so that people stop thinking of constructive criticism, as being critical and start thinking about it as being an investment in themselves. I talked about how service is black and white and hospitality is color and that if you deliver unreasonable hospitality, it is about shifting it to technicolor.
What is the starting point that you suggest for restaurateurs to start on their journey towards unreasonable hospitality?
The first step is to come to grips with what your goal is. Not someone else. Our goal was to be named the best restaurant in the world. Someone else’s goal can be to grow a single unit into a chain of 100. You have to have the confidence to say it out loud, what you ultimately want to achieve and then take the steps to implement a road map that points the entire organization in that direction.
I need to ask again; are these realistic expectations for an employee that doesn’t have equity?
This time you get two answers. Two ways. One, I think the best way to know how good it feels to give graciousness and hospitality is to first know what it’s like to receive it. I believe the DMV would be one of the most hospitable places on earth if there was a law passed, that forced everyone to be really nice that worked at the DMV. Steve Ells the founder of Chipotle spoke at my Welcome Conference years ago and we could have asked the same question of him, how do you get people to work in a fast food restaurant, to care about cooking the chicken the right way and chopping the vegetables the right way and his whole thesis is, the more responsibility you give people, the more responsible they become. I think, the more you show your team, how good it feels to receive hospitality, the more you empower your team, with responsibility, they become more responsible, they become more hospitable. I believe that everyone derives more energy and pleasure out of caring a little bit more than they do and if you lead with trust in them, you will get them to that next level.
What is the number one obstacle to implementing an unreasonable hospitality initiative?
Definitely the ability to step out of the day-to-day and look at your operation from that 30K in the sky perspective. I know you don’t want to hear it but the right step might be to close your restaurant for a few days. You might lose much-needed revenue for a few days, but if in those few days, you can figure out how to make your business more efficient, more creative, more empowering, more hospitable, and a better place to work, the dividends that that pay is over time will dwarf whatever money you lose in the short term.
How do you create and implement the hospitality toolkit that you suggest in the book?
What I mean when I say hospitality toolkit, is to create these gestures that I talked about. They may seem like moments of one-off hospitality. But in many cases, they do in fact repeat themselves. For instance, how often does a customer talk about being hungover tomorrow as they are leaving your restaurant? So why not create a backlog of 50 hangover kits that are ready to go? I can’t tell you how many times, guests would ask what other coffee shops, bakeries, or museums they should visit in NYC. Why not set up a printed list of recommendations as you recognize patterns of things that people are consistently interested in or curious about? There is minimal cost and it creates a gesture that screams: ‘We Care.’ We seem to have become obsessed with customer data and yet at the same time forgot how to listen.
What is a starting point for creating or upgrading a culture in 30 minutes a day?
It begins with the pre-service meal that most restaurants have before they open. It’s a great opportunity to go over the water, the wine, the glass, or what’s new on the insurance policy. Great restaurants understand that, that that is the most important 30 minutes of the day because when your team ceases to become a collection of individuals and starts to become a team. It’s how you use those 30 minutes. If it’s just communicating information that you could otherwise express through a memo or an email, then you’ve wasted that time talking about your why, what’s your purpose and what do you care about. It’s time to share inspiration for the team to share stories of your plan.
Why not recognize amazing hospitality from yesterday and encourage and inspire one another? Bring everyone together for 30 minutes and use it as an opportunity to propel your organization. I think it’s nothing short of extraordinary.
Where’d you get that from?
I had a boss named Randy Garutti who was the general manager at Tabla. He is now the CEO at Shake Shack. The way that he conducted pre-service dinner is something I tried to emulate from that point forward.
Does your proposed commitment to customer service have an ROI attached to it?
I mean, the number can differ based on organization. My belief is that, if you manage your money, like a crazy person 95% of the time, then you should spend the 5% quote foolishly and I put foolishly in quotes because I actually think it’s done with great intention. That’s when you create the kind of experiences for the people that you work with and those that you’ve served, that galvanizes your culture and your business in dramatic ways. Now, does it have an ROI and it’s easy to measure? No. But one of the biggest mistakes that people make is, they only manage the things that they can measure and in doing so, they’re missing out on the reality that, hospitality is about how you make people feel and that if you only invest in making people feel good when it’s easy to measure, you’ll never get a handle because it’s impossible to fully quantify emotions.
Nobody knows better than you, that everything simply doesn’t go right every day. What’s your approach to dealing with and embracing adversity?
My dad has told me since I was a little kid, that adversity is a terrible thing to waste. I don’t know but when something bad happens, it’s an opportunity to learn, it’s an opportunity to grow, it’s an opportunity to feel competitive, want to turn around and prove yourself. That said, I’m not like an annoyingly sunny and optimistic person, I think when things don’t go your way, you need to give yourself the time and space to feel the way, to grieve for the disappointment or the sadness and then you need to pick yourself up, learn from the experience and use it to make you better and learn from the last one.
To learn more about Will Guidara’s latest exploits, follow him on Instagram or pick up his new book
