1: In 2006, renowned New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer offered twenty-seven-year-old Will Guidara a career-changing opportunity.
Will was to become the General Manager of Eleven Madison Park (also known as EMP), a New York City fine-dining restaurant.
Will and Chef Daniel Humm were charged with reinventing the restaurant.
Eleven years later, the pair achieved the highest honor in dining when Eleven Madison Park. was named No. 1 in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
Before becoming General Manager at EMP, Will had never worked in a fine-dining restaurant.
Which he saw as a positive. Not a negative.
“Over the years,” he writes in his wonderful book Unreasonable Hospitality, “I came to see my four-star inexperience not as a weakness but as a superpower.”
Why did he see it that way?
“My inexperience enabled me to look critically at every step of service and to interrogate the only thing that mattered: The guests’ experience,” he reflects.
“Did a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, which was connecting with people?
“Or did it take us further from it?”
Tradition is fine, Will writes.
“Indeed, I believe much of our success at EMP,” he notes, “was rooted in our deep love of the history of restaurants and our respect for many of the classic rituals associated with fine dining, even as we were determined to refresh the model.
“But a rule borne out of tradition that doesn’t serve the guest—or, worse, one that stands in the way of a staff member being able to cultivate an authentic relationship with the person they are serving?
“That wasn’t going to work,” Will writes.
When he would ask, “Why do we do it this way?”
“Because that’s how it’s always been done,” was not an acceptable answer.
“In fact, I suspected blind faithfulness to those rules was why so many of those long-esteemed, established four-star restaurants had closed.”
Why?
Because “tastes change,” he observes. “My great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized almost anything on the walls at MoMA as art; two generations later, I loved it.
“In the same vein,” Will explains, “my friends and I didn’t want to eat at the kind of place where the waiter stood, statue-still, next to our table with his hands clasped behind his back (and yes, I’m using that ‘he’ deliberately).
“I wanted to celebrate at a restaurant where the people serving me felt comfortable enough to lean in and chat,” he shares. “Even if it meant putting their hands on the snowy white tablecloth in front of me.
“As it turned out,” Will notes, “hands on the table was the first of many fine-dining rules we would get ride of at Eleven Madison Park.”
2: Will’s objective was simple: “In restaurants—and in all customer-service professions—the goal is to connect with people.
“Hospitality,” he emphasizes, “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,” he notes, “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.”
One example?
EMP servers began serving soufflés “wrong.”
“I’ll spare you the technicalities,” Will writes, “but in the classical presentation, the server turns their body away from the guest, ending up with their elbow near the guest’s face.
“My way—the ‘wrong’ way,” he notes, “enabled the server to maintain eye contact and a conversation with the person they were serving, which was a clear priority in my eyes.
“Later, we’d have cooks run food to the tables in their whites—and they were encouraged to kneel on the ground when they spieled the dish, if they felt comfortable doing so.”
That simply wasn’t allowed at traditional fine-dining restaurants like Le Pavillon.
“My unorthodoxy drove the fine-dining crew nuts; how the hell were we supposed to get another star from The New York Times if we couldn’t even get the basics right?” he asks.
“But I wasn’t suggesting we could serve a soufflé any which way; I simply wanted it done in such a way that tradition didn’t interfere with hospitality.”
3: One small but important change involved the restaurant’s goodbye gift to patrons at the end of the meal.
“When I first got to Eleven Madison Park, our goodbye gift was a small bag of canelés,” Will writes.
“These dark pastries, flavored with rum and vanilla and baked in special copper molds coated with butter and beeswax,” he notes, “are notoriously difficult to make, so the gift was one last impressive flex as the guest was on their way out the door.
“To me, this seemed unnecessary,” Will observes. “In the best-case scenario, those pastries would be gobbled down in the cab on the way home; at worst, the little bag would end up going stale on the kitchen counter.
“The canelés,” he explains, “were too much about what we wanted to serve and not enough about what our guests might actually want. . .
“So we canceled the canelés and sent our guests home with a jar of granola instead.
“Because most people don’t eat obscure French pastries for breakfast,” he notes, “but everyone is psyched to sit down to a bowl of granola and yogurt.
“It was excellent coconut and pistachio granola, in a jar stamped with our four leaves. (The morning granola was often the last photo in a guest’s Instagram post about their meal.)
“But it was also an intentionally humble final touch, designed to make our guests feel that, even after all the sumptuous luxury, they had been welcomed into someone’s home.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where in my work or life could I see my lack of experience as an opportunity to question traditions and connect more deeply with those I serve?
Action: Identify one rule or ritual in my organization that exists mostly “because it’s always been done that way,” and experiment with a change to better meet the needs of those we serve.
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