1: What exactly is unreasonable hospitality?
The answer is perhaps best explained by the actions of the legendary chef Daniel Boulud.
“Daniel is so renowned in my industry he is known by his first name alone,” Will Guidara writes in his book Unreasonable Hospitality.
“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. Since then, his empire has since expanded to a lot of restaurants, in places as far-flung as London, Palm Beach, Dubai, and Singapore.”
Daniel is “unquestionably one of the most famous chefs in the world,” Will notes, “and yet he was prepared to come to upstate New York to cook a meal as part of a college class.”
When Will was a senior at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, he took his all-time favorite course: Guest Chefs, “a spring-semester class run by a professor named Giuseppe Pezzotti, who was an absolute legend at the school.
“As far as I was concerned, Guest Chefs was the coolest class at Cornell because we got the experience of running a real restaurant,” Will notes. “Every semester, a guest chef would come to do a dinner, staffed entirely by the students. One group of students would serve as the chef’s management team, another group would work as kitchen staff, while the third group ran the dining room.”
In Will’s senior year, the guest chef would be none other than Daniel Boulud. Later, I would learn this is entirely consistent with his character: Daniel is well-known for his generosity toward young people coming up in our industry.”
Will’s assignment was to serve as the marketing director for the meal.
“There wasn’t much marketing to do for a dinner with a chef as famous as Daniel; the dinner would sell out as soon as people heard he was coming,” he recalls.
“But I still wanted to do something cool. Knowing guests would want to watch him in action, I arranged for a chef’s table in the kitchen—the first ever in the history of Guest Chefs. It was odd to see a formal table set up in the middle of the ugly, industrial hotel-school kitchen, so I put a red velvet rope around it to make it swanky.”
2: The dinner was a smash success. Afterward, Daniel and most of the class headed to Rulloff’s, a dive bar near campus.
“As the night wore on and more (and more) friends showed up,” he writes, “it seemed natural to head back to my place, where we always had at least one keg stashed in the basement. But the crowd was getting snacky, and my kitchen cupboards—including the one whose door had been hanging from a single hinge since the day we moved in—were bare.
“Which is how I found myself,” Will recounts, “three sheets to the wind at one in the morning, talking my way back into the kitchen of the Statler Hotel with Daniel Boulud.”
“I am the chef from the event tonight,” Daniel explained in his French accent as they walked up to the front desk, “and I must get into the kitchen.”
“Once in, we rounded up pans, butter, eggs, truffles, and caviar and headed back to 130 College Avenue,” Will writes. “So there was Daniel Boulud in my busted kitchen, drinking Milwaukee’s Best from a red Solo cup and whipping up scrambled eggs with truffles for a bunch of wasted college kids.
“Did one of the most celebrated chefs in the world do a keg stand on my pool table? I’ll never tell. The party reluctantly broke up around three in the morning. We parted with hugs all around.”
3: But our story does not end here. Several months later, Will’s mother died after a long fight with cancer.
“The week after my mother died,” he notes, “I was supposed to fly to Spain for an internship, where I would be working as a prep cook in exchange for room and board at a hotel school owned by a former Cornell grad.
“But it didn’t feel right to jet off to Spain a week after my mother’s death. Mostly, I didn’t want to leave my dad alone.”
It was Will’s dad who encouraged him to keep the commitment. “What are you going to do, sit around here and be sad? Get on the plane,” he said. “If you change your mind, you can always turn around and come home.”
“So in the middle of this intense mourning period, I started scrambling to make plans to travel to Spain,” Will writes. “The only flight I could find last minute was out of New York’s JFK, so my dad offered to drive me down. That gave me an idea. With nothing to lose, I emailed Chef Boulud: ‘Is there any way I could bring my dad to the restaurant next Saturday?'”
“People wait months for reservations at Daniel, but the email I got back could not have been more gracious,” Will recalls.
“I would love to have you,” Daniel wrote. “You welcomed me into your home; now I will welcome you into mine.”
So Will and his dad headed for New York City. They were running late, so “we had to change into our suits at a gas station off I-95. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to expect, but even if we hadn’t been going to one of the best restaurants in the world, I would still have been anxious: This was the first time in my life I was bringing my dad to a restaurant, as opposed to him bringing me to one.
“At Daniel, the general manager greeted us at the door. ‘Chef Daniel is excited to have you with us tonight. Your table is right this way.’
“He brought us through the bar, the formal dining room, into the kitchen, and upstairs into the Skybox, a luxurious, glass-enclosed private dining room that looks down over the kitchen, where forty cooks—and Chef Boulud—work in a state-of-the-art facility. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime table, and I was too stunned to speak.
“But the ice was broken immediately as Daniel’s voice boomed over the intercom into the booth: ‘Willieeee!’
“The kitchen proceeded to send us a series of exquisite courses,” Will recounts, “which Daniel personally spieled over the intercom as each plate arrived. As we tasted the delicious food, drank the superb wines, and experienced the warmth of Daniel’s hospitality, I watched years of exhaustion and pain lift from my dad’s face.
“That night was the saddest I have ever been, or ever want to be, and the same was true for my dad. Yet, even in the midst of that sorrow, Chef Boulud and his staff were able to give the two of us what still feels like four of the best hours of my life.
“It’s astonishing to me that one of the most famous chefs in the world stayed until the wee hours to give us a tour, but the meal was so beautiful and so long that by the time Daniel was embracing us goodbye, my dad and I were the last people in the entire restaurant—not the last guests, but the last people, period.
“There was no check,” Will writes.
“I had already happily chosen a life in restaurants, but that night, I learned how important, how noble, working in service can be,” he recalls. “During a terribly dark time, Daniel and his staff offered my dad and me a ray of light in the form of a meal neither one of us will ever forget.
“Our suffering didn’t disappear by any means, but for a few hours, we were afforded real respite from it. That dinner provided an oasis of comfort and restoration, an island of delight and care in the sea of our grief.
“When one works in hospitality—and I believe that whatever we do for a living, we can choose to be in the hospitality business—we 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. Most important, we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.”
That’s unreasonable hospitality.
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Reflection: Am I looking for ways to go beyond what’s expected, offering moments of true care and connection—even when there’s nothing in it for me?
Action: Find one opportunity this week to create a surprising, heartfelt experience for someone—an act that lifts their spirits and reminds them they matter.
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