1: It was the early 2000s. Will Guidara, the General Manager of Eleven Madison Park (EMP), “was lucky enough to was lucky enough to live around the corner from Ninth Street Espresso, one of the first serious espresso bars in New York City,” Will writes in his terrific book Unreasonable Hospitality.
The store’s owner, Ken Nye, “was notoriously exacting,” Will notes. He would adjust the coarseness of the grind throughout the day in response to the humidity outside, and toss any shot he felt wasn’t up to snuff.”
One day, Ken’s nephew, Jim Betz, applied for a job at EMP.
Jim, too, was “an unrepentant coffee geek,” Will writes.
He “was also deeply committed to our restaurant,” Will writes. “He’d shown up for his interview with a huge, Williamsburg-hipster, lumberjack-style beard, which I told him he’d have to shave off if he wanted the job.
“He arrived the next day with a naked chin, for the first time in years,” he notes. “I don’t know if there’s a greater sign of commitment. . .
“Jim was much (much) more knowledgeable on the subject of coffee than I was,” Will recalls, “but I knew just enough to be fun for him to talk to, and the two of us would often find each other at family meal to chat about a new shop with high standards or some excellent beans we’d tried.”
Jim was younger than Will, but “I learned from him whenever we compared notes.”
At the time, fine dining restaurants did not focus on serving high-quality coffee.
As guests, we “went to those restaurants expecting incredible food and amazing wine,” Will writes.
“The ancillary programs, though—the cocktail to start your meal, the cup of tea or coffee at the end—were mediocre. And this remained true, even though there had been a complete revolution in those areas outside those hallowed halls,” he remembers.
“Why would a thousand-dollar meal end with generic, machine-filtered coffee, when I could stop and have a glorious, high-grade, single-origin shot pulled by a professional barista at a hole-in-the-wall like Ninth Street on my way in to work?
2: Exhibit one: Beer.
“It had been a long time, for instance, since beer had meant the pale, flavorless industrial lager that dominated the commercial market in the 1950s,” Will explains.
“Thousands of small, independent breweries all over the world were creating beers with complex flavors that could more than stand up to excellent food.
“So maybe,” he writes, “there’d been no such thing as a beer pairing at a four-star restaurant in the eighties—but by 2006, it should have been inconceivable to imagine a four-star restaurant for the next generation without one.”
Exhibit Two: Cocktails.
“If most people who cared about food knew that a proper Manhattan should be stirred, not shaken, why were so many places still making airport-lounge-quality drinks?” Will asks.
The reason? Nobody was paying attention to these aspects of the meal.
“Even today,” he notes, “in most fine-dining restaurants, the person running all the beverage programs is the wine director.
“That person is, by definition, fanatical about wine and has devoted their life to studying it,” Will notes. “A wine director didn’t have the time to become a real expert in these other beverages, while also curating a wine list for one of the city’s best restaurants. . .
“This was true even if your wine director was one of the best in the world—and I knew that because the wine director at EMP, John Ragan, was one of the best in the world.”
Perhaps there is a better way, Will wondered.
“My team,” he writes, “was crowded with young people who were wildly enthusiastic about various aspects of food and drink. A crew of them would take the train to Queens on their days off to visit outdoor beer gardens with sixty obscure microbrews on tap.
“Another routinely disappeared into a nondescript office building in Midtown to taste flights of first-flush gyokuro—green tea grown in the shade and prepared with water a full sixty degrees below boiling.
“And of course,” Will notes, “there was Jim, waxing encyclopedic about ethical coffee-growing regions and precision-pour kettles.”
3: The EMP team had identified four core values during their first-ever strategic planning session.
One of which was Passion.
One night, while journaling, Will wrote down: “Jim should be in charge of our coffee program.”
And with that insight, the ownership program at Eleven Madison Park began.
Kirk Kelewae was a recent Cornell grad who had joined Eleven Madison Park, inspired by what the restaurant was doing.
“He was clearly going places,” Will writes, “but, like every new hire, he started as a kitchen server, running plates of food from the kitchen to the dining room.”
Kirk was also passionate about beer. “I was sure he’d be the perfect steward of our program,” he recalls, “but when I first sat down with him, he was skittish—as most twenty-two years-olds would be—about the responsibility until I convinced him we’d be there for him, every step of the way.”
The first step was to introduce Kirk to all of the restaurant’s vendors, “knowing he would soon introduce us to new ones,” Will writes.
“I came to love watching beer distributors arrive in the dining room,” he remembers, “expecting to give the Eleven Madison Park wine director a taste of some sensational new brew, only to find themselves sitting across from a baby-faced food runner, only recently able to legally order a drink himself.”
Will gave Kirk a budget and taught him how to manage it.
Then he told him, “It’s yours now. Go make it awesome.”
Kirk “attacked every aspect of our beer service—from how we stored the bottles, to the glassware we used, to the technique we used to pour it,” Will notes. “He read every trade publication and hunted down the rarest and obscure beers.
“All this extra work was driven by his own passion, and his youthful eagerness enchanted producers, who’d find ways to sneak him a couple of highly allocated bottles they’d made only a few dozen of.”
One year after Kirk took charge of the beer program, Eleven Madison Park was named as one of the best beer programs in America by several different publications.
“Not only did our beer program improve exponentially, but Kirk’s fervor was contagious,” Will writes, “we all caught the beer bug because nobody wanted to let him down.
“He’d pour tastes and chase us down in the hallways,” he recalls: ‘Hey—you’ve got to taste this gruit!’ (Know what that is? Neither did I,” Will writes. “Thanks to Kirk, I can now tell you that it’s a medieval-style beer brewed using bitter botanicals instead of hops. Apparently, it’s a thing.)”
Another food runner, Sambath Seng, was charged with ownership of the restaurant’s tea program.
“She flew to Las Vegas to attend the World Tea Expo,” Will writes, “and introduced herself to distributors who were buying tea directly from gardens in India and China and Thailand and Taiwan and Korea and Japan.
“She taught us about teas that had been roasted, as well as others processed with steam. Because she cared deeply about water purity, precisely calibrated brewing times and temperature combinations, and how proper teaware should be warmed and handled, we cared too.”
Cocktails were next up.
“I got our bar team together and said, ‘I want to have a cocktail program as good as PDT.’
“PDT was a cocktail bar in the East Village, run by my friend Jim Meehan,” Will explains. “The initials stood for Please Don’t Tell, a reference to the tiny bar’s covert location, which you accessed, speakeasy-style, through a phone booth in Crif Dogs, a hole-in-the-wall hot dog joint. It was widely recognized as one of the best bars in the world.”
The initial response was not positive. “That’s ridiculous; it’s not possible,” one of the bar tenders exclaimed.
Why? Because “it could take a bartender at the high-end cocktail bars ten full minutes to make a drink,” Will writes. “That type of service would be difficult to mimic in a restaurant setting, with a hundred and forty seats to serve, not six.”
That said, “We can’t” is not an expression Will likes.
“I come by this honestly,” he shares. “In a particular season of my youth, I made the mistake of telling my dad about something I couldn’t do.
“The next morning, the house was covered in printed, fortune-cookie-size pieces of paper: ‘Success comes in cans, failure comes in can’ts.’
“I never said in front of him again.”
Will also had a sense about the person he was talking with.
“His name was Leo Robitschek. Maybe you’ve heard of him—he’s one of the foremost mixologists in the world now,” Will writes.
“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.”
Once, however, when Leo was given an ownership role?
Everything changed, Will notes, “as if he hadn’t wanted to commit to greatness until he was in charge.”
“At the helm, he went from being our most outspoken in-house critic to a true ambassador for the restaurant—and an absolute guru in the world of quality cocktails.”
And then there was Jim. “In charge of coffee, he immediately switched our supplier to Intelligentsia, one of the best roasters at the time.
“He started making coffee tableside,” Will recalls, “giving our guests a choice between a classic Chemex pour-over or a vacuum-pot siphon system, which combined the best attributes of the immersion and filter methods and had the added benefit of being thrilling to watch in action.
“Thanks to Jim,” he notes, “an after-dinner cup of coffee at EMP went from being a just-fine, bulk-ordered afterthought to a highly entertaining, exquisitely crafted, educational, and theatrical experience.
“Most important,” Will writes, “you ended up with a damn fine cup of coffee.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Do I default too quickly to trying to “fix” others’ problems instead of pausing to understand what they really need from me?
Action: Practice asking loved ones whether they want to be helped, heard, or hugged the next time they share a challenge with me.
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