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

The summary

Fine dining has long celebrated chefs for being unreasonable about food. Will Guidara’s bet was that nobody had tried being just as unreasonable about how a meal makes you feel.

The bet came out of a humiliation. At the 2010 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards in London, Eleven Madison Park entered at number fifty — dead last, and called first, so Guidara and chef-partner Daniel Humm learned their faces were on a thirty-foot screen only after the room watched them slump. Over a bottle of bourbon on their hotel steps they reached the real problem: the restaurant was excellent and had changed nothing. On a cocktail napkin they wrote that they would be number one in the world, and before he slept Guidara added two words: unreasonable hospitality. In 2017 they got there.

Service is black and white; hospitality is color

Guidara used to ask job candidates the difference between service and hospitality. The best answer he ever got came from a woman he didn’t hire: “Service is black and white; hospitality is color.”

Black and white, in his gloss, is doing your job with competence and efficiency; color is making someone feel great about the job you did. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service; making a real connection with them is hospitality. Most businesses, on his account, invest hard in the first and leave the human behind, so focused on their products that they forget about people. Excellence in the black and white got Eleven Madison Park onto the list; going Technicolor, as he puts it, got them to number one. And he thinks it generalizes: on his numbers, more than three-quarters of US GDP comes from service industries, so you are already in the business of serving people.

The two-dollar hot dog

In early 2010, during a busy lunch, Guidara was clearing plates from four food obsessives heading to the airport. He overheard them totting up the trip — Per Se, Le Bernardin, Daniel, Momofuku, now Eleven Madison Park — until one said the only thing they never got to try was a New York City hot dog.

He dropped the plates in the kitchen, ran down the block to the hot dog cart, then had to talk his chef into serving a dirty water dog in a four-star dining room. The chef cut it into four pieces, each with a swish of ketchup and mustard, a quenelle of sauerkraut and one of relish. It went out just before the final savory course, a honey-lavender glazed duck dry-aged two weeks, introduced as insurance against going home with any culinary regrets.

Nothing he ever served got a better reaction, he says; each guest called it the highlight of the trip. He worked out three conditions behind it. Being present — caring about the person in front of you enough to stop caring about your to-do list, since a throwaway line is all you get. Taking the work seriously without taking yourself too seriously, because a hot dog in that room was sacrilege and worked anyway. And one size fits one: vintage champagne and a bucket of caviar wouldn’t have come close, he reckons, because they wouldn’t have been about them.

The 95/5 rule buys the permission

A good instinct is not yet a system. Hence his rule of 95/5: run the money like a fanatic 95 percent of the time so the last 5 percent can go out the door “foolishly” — his scare quotes, since he considers that 5 percent the most deliberate spending of all.

The 95 percent is unglamorous: overtime, turnover, disposables, payroll, every penny. The 5 percent pays for what no spreadsheet would sign off, and they hired for it — dream weavers, whose whole job was helping everyone else get their ideas made. A family from Spain whose children were watching their first-ever snow through the windows left to find a chauffeur-driven SUV waiting to take them to Central Park, because a dream weaver had found a store still selling sleds at eight on a Friday night.

The budget, he insists, is not the constraint. The hot dog cost two dollars.

One size fits one applies to your own team

None of this works from the outside in, he argues: frontline staff will not manufacture warmth they are not receiving. He built an organization where everyone started at the bottom and promotion came from within, so he hired almost nobody for experience — he wanted integrity, curiosity and appetite for work: connection over perfection.

Then he handed the experience over. His claim is that inviting the team to design what they deliver turns salespeople into product designers — he has never met anyone who won’t sell harder something they helped design. He leads on vulnerability for the same reason: nobody would admit to disliking an ingredient on the new tasting menu until he confessed that he hates sea urchin and doesn’t like oysters. Out came the celery and the beets.

He is candid about the cost. He calls himself a lifelong perfectionist — he remakes a bed his wife already made, reparks a car she left crooked — and grants that perfectionism makes trust hard, because people are inherently imperfect. His remedy is self-awareness, plus relationships close enough that someone tells you when it lapses. He and Humm had bought the restaurant from Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group in 2011; the partnership ended with Humm taking sole ownership — July 2019 on the World’s 50 Best record, the beginning of 2020 by Guidara’s own account.

The bottom line

Guidara’s case is that the thing every company files under personality — how people feel after dealing with you — is a discipline, with a budget line, a job description and a hiring standard behind it. The stories are what you’ll remember; the structure under them is what you’d copy. Read it if your team delivers competently and forgettably, or if the sentence we could never justify that is making more of your decisions than it deserves.