Unreasonable Hospitality Quotes

Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.

hire those who were curious about what they didn’t know and generous with what they did.

Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.

Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters.

Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable

Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast—But Not Too Fast

The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. I still give The One Minute Manager to every person I promote. It’s an amazing resource, in particular on how to give feedback. My biggest takeaways were: Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

It’s only demeaning to suck it up if you take it personally. Saying sorry, I reminded the team, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

When you ask, “Why do we do it this way?” and the only answer is “Because that’s how it’s always been done,” that rule deserves another look.

As our focus on Unreasonable Hospitality grew, we were always looking for a way to “plus one” the experience—to give people a little more than they expected—by staying alert to recurring situations.

In my experience, people usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. Even if neither of them managed to change the other’s mind, at the very least they’d have shown each other respect by taking the time to listen.

What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged—or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you’ve been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn’t the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.

My favorite was “Make the charitable assumption,” a reminder to assume the best of people, even when (or perhaps especially when) they weren’t behaving particularly well.

You’re not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you’ve got to start by listening.

identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort.

The customer isn’t always right, and it’s unhealthy for everyone if you don’t have clear and enforced boundaries for yourself and your staff as to what is unacceptable behavior.

Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool. I’ve passed this advice on to those joining my own: no matter how talented you are, or how much you have to add, give yourself time to understand the organization before you try to impact

People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” This quote, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the great American writer Maya Angelou, may be the wisest statement about hospitality ever made.

while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don’t think for a second that it doesn’t matter. In fact, it matters more.

let you in on a little secret, one that the truly great professionals in my business know: hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

no aspect of your business should be off-limits to reevaluation.

more than three-quarters of our GDP comes from service industries.

Danny’s partner Richard Coraine would often tell us, “All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.” Randy was that person.

A leader’s role isn’t only to motivate and uplift; sometimes it’s to earn the trust of your team by being human with them.

It was then that a new mantra at EMP was born: “Their perception is our reality.

in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.

One of Richard Coraine’s most often repeated sayings was “One size fits one.” He was referring to the hospitality experience: some guests love it when you hang out at the table and schmooze, while others want you to take their order and disappear. It’s your job to read the guest and to serve them how they want to be served.

Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters. To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

We were as thoughtful about criticism as we were about praise. I invited people on the team to come to me if they thought we could be doing something better, and to do so well before their frustrations reached a boiling point.

Most people think of hospitality as something they do. Will thinks about service as an act of service—about how his actions make people feel. And he recognized that if he wanted his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he had to obsess about how he made his employees feel. The two cannot be separated: great service cannot exist without great leadership. Will not only

Gary Chapman saved a lot of romantic relationships with his 1992 book, The Five Love Languages, which delineates the five general ways people show and prefer to experience love. (They are: acts of service, gift-giving, physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation.)

Eleven Madison to people more often than I did its four-star betters (then), because it came close to their intensity of coddling without a tariff quite as high, a code of conduct quite as rigid, a set of airs quite as intimidating. It found a hugely appealing compromise in this regard.

great service cannot exist without great leadership.

Service Is Black and White; Hospitality Is Color

My dad has always said: Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want. So he asked me straight-out: “What’s your dream job?

Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

whether a company has made the choice to put their team and their customers at the center of every decision will be what separates the great ones from the pack.

People Will Never Forget How You Made Them Feel

hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

MAKING MAGIC IN A WORLD THAT COULD USE MORE OF IT

And make those corrections in private.

we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

when you start focusing on extending the charitable assumption to the people around you, you find yourself giving it to yourself a bit more as well.

Don’t take credit for other people’s work.

This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.

Nobody knows what they’re doing before they do it.

At our manager meetings, we talked about how to avoid moments like this. Many of these confrontations could be avoided with early, clear, and drama-free corrections—like pulling that guy with the wrinkled shirt aside on day one to say: “Hey! Good to see you this morning. That shirt’s looking a little rough; why don’t you head upstairs and give it a once-over with the iron before we sit down for family meal?

Service is black and white; hospitality is color.” “Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them.

When you create a hospitality-first culture, everything about your business improves—whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing your profitability

dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called “Seattle’s fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.” His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis’s Instagram account for 2020.)

Former navy captain David Marquet says that in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?

She could no longer speak or get up to give me a hug, but she could be there with a huge smile on her face when I got home from school. That smile was all I needed, and it taught me an invaluable lesson—what it’s like to feel truly welcomed.

As anyone who has lost someone important knows, the days immediately after a huge loss can get very dark. Visiting relatives go home, the casseroles stop coming, and the immediate family is left alone. The shock wears off, and grief sets in.

And he recognized that if he wanted his frontline teams to obsess about how they made their customers feel, he had to obsess about how he made his employees feel. The two cannot be separated: great service cannot exist without great leadership.

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.

A couple of months later, Ben drank again during a shift, and I fired him, as I’d said I would. (I’m happy to report it served as a wake-up call; he’s in recovery now and has made a notable career for himself in hospitality.) But I have no regrets about giving him a second chance.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Mostly, the team needed to be brought along. They needed to feel seen and appreciated. They needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained. They needed discipline to be consistent. They needed to feel like vital and important parts of an exciting sea change, not obstacles to making it happen.

That’s one small example, of a thousand that might happen over the course of an evening, of how a trusting team operates. And it’s why hiring is such a sobering responsibility. Because when you’re hiring, you’re hiring not only the people who are going to represent and support you, but the people who are going to represent and support the team already working for you. Morale is fickle, and even one individual can have an outsize and asymmetrical impact on the team, in either direction. Bring in someone who’s optimistic and enthusiastic and really cares, and they can inspire those around them to care more and do better. Hire someone lazy, and it means your best team members will be punished for their excellence, picking up the slack so the overall quality doesn’t drop. At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience. It’s also why you’ve got to hire slow. It’s so dreadful to be shorthanded that managers tend to rush in and find a body to fill the void. I know what it’s like to think, We need someone so desperately—how bad could this person be?

People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” This quote, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the great American writer Maya Angelou, may be the wisest statement about hospitality ever made. Because thirty years later, I still haven’t forgotten how

Over the top? You bet. Not only did we want our people to come in for dinner; we wanted them to have a better experience than anyone else in the room. It was a way to say thank you for all that the team gave us—their creativity, good humor, and hard work. But it was also to show them the same graciousness they delivered every day.

one of my favorite questions to ask was, “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?” The best answer I ever got came from a woman I ended up not hiring. She said, “Service is black and white; hospitality is color.” “Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them.

Danny encouraged us to extend the charitable assumption to our guests as well. When someone is being difficult, it’s human nature to decide they no longer deserve your best service. But another approach is to think, “Maybe the person is being dismissive because their spouse asked for a divorce or because a loved one is ill. Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone else in the room.

It was deeply humiliating. And there was nothing I was less excited for than to stand up and confess that my bad decisions had gotten us this savage review. In moments like this, in an effort to not look bad in front of their team, leaders tend to brush mistakes under the rug, foolishly hoping that everyone will forget they’ve happened. Instead, I once again stood up in pre-meal to take responsibility and apologize.

We all want to be liked, and when you give someone a note about what they could be doing differently and better, you run the risk of losing their goodwill. That’s why I say there is no better way to show someone you care than by being willing to offer them a correction; it’s the purest expression of putting someone else’s needs above your own, which is what hospitality is all about. Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment.

term gains. If you insist on a manager having previous managerial experience, you’ll never be able to promote a promising server into the role. By definition, then, it’s impossible to promote from within if you wait until an employee has all the experience they need. Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready. Take a chance, and that person will almost always work extra hard to prove you right.

When I was younger, I took a lot of pride in coming up with interview questions. I now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we’re trying to build? Do they have integrity; are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself—and my team—happily spending a lot of time with?

What’s the difference between service and hospitality?” The best answer I ever got came from a woman I ended up not hiring. She said, “Service is black and white; hospitality is color.” “Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.

But if you want to stay, then take tomorrow off, come back the day after, and apologize to everybody you were working with last night. Tell them what you did, why you realize it’s a mistake, and why you’re sorry. Promise you’ll never do it again—and know that if you do, I’m going to fire you on the spot.” It wasn’t easy for Ben to have those conversations with his colleagues. He was a tough captain to work for because his standards were high; if you were in his station, he held you accountable. But there is tremendous power in vulnerability. Because

During the course of these chats, Raymond asked again about Mummy—why I hadn’t told her I’d been unwell, why she never visited me, or I her, until finally I gave in and provided him with a potted biography. He already knew about the fire, of course, and that I’d been brought up in care afterward. That, I told him, was because it wasn’t possible for me to live with Mummy afterward, not where she was. It was, I’d hoped, enough to keep him quiet, but no. “Where is she, then? Hospital, nursing home?” he guessed. I shook my head. “It’s a bad place, for bad people,” I said. He thought for a moment. “Not prison?” He looked shocked. I held his gaze but said nothing. After another short pause he asked, not unreasonably, what crime she had committed. “I can’t remember,” I said. He stared at me, then snorted. “Bullshit,” he said. “Come on, Eleanor. You can tell me. It won’t change anything between us, I promise. It’s not like you did it, whatever it was.” I felt a hot flush streak right up the front of my body and then down my back, a sensation I can only liken to being given a sedative prior to a general anesthetic. My pulse was pounding. “It’s true,” I said. “I honestly don’t know. I think I must have been told at the time, but I can’t remember. I was only ten. Everyone was really careful never to mention it around me . . .

In March, at HHS’s request, several large pharmaceutical companies—Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi, and others—donated their inventory, a total of 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and 2 million of chloroquine, to the Strategic National Stockpile, managed by BARDA, an agency under the DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.56 BARDA’s Director, Dr. Rick Bright, later claimed the chloroquine drugs were deadly, and he needed to protect the American public from them.57 Bright colluded with FDA to restrict use of the donated pills to hospitalized patients. FDA publicized the authorization using language that led most physicians to believe that prescribing the drug for any purpose was off-limits. But at the beginning of June, based on clinical trials that intentionally gave unreasonably high doses to hospitalized patients and failed to start the drug until too late, FDA took the unprecedented step of revoking HCQ’s emergency authorization,58 rendering that enormous stockpile of valuable pills off limits to Americans while conveniently indemnifying the pharmaceutical companies for their inventory losses by allowing them a tax break for the donations. After widespread use of the drug for 65 years, without warning, FDA somehow felt the need to send out an alert on June 15, 2020 that HCQ is dangerous, and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals.59 In a bit of twisted logic, Federal officials continued to encourage doctors to use the suddenly-dangerous drug without restriction for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme and malaria. Just not for COVID. With the encouragement of Dr. Fauci and other HHS officials, many states simultaneously imposed restrictions on HCQ’s use.

The restaurant you are is the restaurant they’re reviewing.

To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

Most important, we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend. This was affirmed for me one afternoon when I watched Glenn Lowry, the head of the museum, buy gelato for a group of visiting curators. Every single one of them spent a second or two admiring the spoons. I’d like to think some museumgoers went back to the cart for seconds, just because they loved that spoon. The Rule of 95/5 would turn out to be one of my central operating principles at Eleven Madison Park. Wine

Ultimately, this is one of a manager’s biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

Sometimes, the only way to proceed in pursuit of a good partnership is to decide that whoever cares more about the issue can have their way. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about how many desserts we served—when you’re intense and detail-oriented, everything matters. But it was more important to Daniel than it was to me.

I focused on the one thing that wouldn’t. Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

We were looking for the kind of person who runs after a stranger on the street to return a dropped scarf, who stops by with a plate of cookies to welcome a new family to the neighborhood, or who offers to help carry a stranger’s heavy stroller up the subway stairs. The kind of truly hospitable person, in other words, who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.

There was no check. I had already happily chosen a life in restaurants, but that night, I learned how important, how noble, working in service can be. 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.

The cornerstone of the company’s culture was a philosophy Danny called Enlightened Hospitality, which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else, including the guests and the investors. This didn’t mean the customer suffered; in fact, the opposite. Danny’s big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth, and they would take great care of the customers—which is exactly what they did.

Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

You okay if I get out of here a little early?” he’d ask, tossing me the keys to the front door. As a twenty-two-year-old, I was thrilled to be left in charge. If the boss was gone, then I was the boss—which is why I worked harder when Randy was gone than when he was there. More important, I never forgot how much his trust meant to me, which is why developing a sense of ownership in the people who worked for me would become a priority for me as soon as I was the one tossing the keys.

It was on that call that he introduced me to the concept of restaurant-smart vs. corporate-smart. He described the distinction between the two. In the simplest terms: Where do the highest-paid people in the company work? In the restaurants themselves, or in the corporate offices? That says a lot about how the company is run. In restaurant-smart companies, members of the team have more autonomy and creative latitude. Because they tend to feel a greater sense of ownership, they give more of themselves to the job. They can often offer better hospitality because they’re nimble; there aren’t a lot of rules and systems getting in the way of human connection. But those restaurants tend not to have a lot of corporate support or oversight—the systems that make great businesses. Corporate-smart companies, on the other hand, have all the back-end systems and controls in areas like accounting, purchasing, and human resources that are needed to make them great businesses, and they’re often more profitable as a result. But systems are, by definition, controls—and the more control you take away from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be, and guests can feel that. Restaurant-smart companies can be great businesses, and corporate-smart companies can deliver great hospitality. But their priorities are different, in ways that fundamentally affect the guests’ experience.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you 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.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you 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.

My real first job, at fourteen, was at the Baskin-Robbins in Tarrytown. I left many ruined cakes in my wake; it’s harder to pipe “Happy Birthday” onto an ice cream cake than you think.

Be the swan” reminded us that all the guest should see was a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface—not the webbed feet, churning furiously below, driving the glide.

My favorite was “Make the charitable assumption,” a reminder to assume the best of people, even when (or perhaps especially when) they weren’t behaving particularly well. So, instead of immediately expressing disappointment with an employee who has shown up late and launching into a lecture on how they’ve let down the team, ask first, “You’re late; is everything okay?

I inherited from him an understanding of the importance of this concept—as you’ll see, “intention” is a word I use a lot. Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters. To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

daily thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team.

Yet another report: lobster prices had skyrocketed. A quick call to Ken to confirm: yup—demand had outpaced supply, and prices had gone through the roof. A call to the chef: Were we undercharging for the dish? Definitely, given what we were paying for the ingredient, but he couldn’t raise the price high enough to get costs in line without sticker-shocking our guests. So the path forward was clear: the dish, popular as it was, had to come off the menu, at least until lobster prices dropped.

hiring, you’re hiring not only the people who are

We didn’t like hearing our names called in last place; we’re going to use that humiliation to push ourselves,” we said. “As amazing as the restaurants in the top ten are, we could be just as good, if not better. We want to be number one.” It was a tremendous risk to articulate that dream out loud. When you set a goal for your team and fail to achieve it, you run the risk of damaging morale—and this was a particularly audacious benchmark, given that slipping a single spot would mean falling off the list entirely. But the engine behind that bold statement was another quote, this one by Jay-Z: “I believe you can speak things into existence.” I know this for sure: if you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.

No need for psychiatric contortions; no shock waves; no need to conjure up deep-seated anxieties and conflicts. It is combat exhaustion—instead of something ominous and mysterious. It is, quite simply, just having had too much. Of course, in more technical terms, combat exhaustion can be thought of as an abnormal reaction to the stress of combat, its manifestation being unique to the person who develops it, channeled into a specific form by the person’s own individual personality and background experience. But it is only one of many abnormal reactions. A soldier who has had too much might choose to surrender or convulsively go forward. He might panic and get killed; he could get himself wounded or wound himself; he might even go to the chaplain or decide on the relative safety of a stockade. He might—if he’s so disposed—develop psychosomatic complaints, get angry, or, in some cases, become totally unreasonable. He can become neurotic, begin to shake, refuse to move, or go completely hysterical. He might even become grossly psychotic—hold imaginary rifles, hear voices, or see his grandmother in every chopper that flies by. “You will be treating these men, and the treatment is simple. For most it will just be rest. In more severe cases, those soldiers whose functioning is beginning to be impaired, who can’t rest, you will medically put to sleep. They are given enough thorazine to put them out and left alone for a day or two. They too, though, like the troopers who are merely resting, stay near the aid station. The more disturbed patients, those troopers who for the moment may be truly disoriented, who have completely stopped functioning, who for any number of reasons appear to need more than a short rest, are sent to an evacuation hospital. But they are never lost to their units. Their group identity is never tampered with, and they know they will be going back. And they do go back. And they are accepted by their units. Believe me, the casual, yet efficient way it is all handled, the official emphasis on health rather than disease, and the lack of mumbo-jumbo have taken the stigma out of having had too much. To the men, it is just something that happens; and more important, it is something they realize can happen to anyone. It is handled that way and it is presented that way. “Gentlemen, it works.

But when Will Guidara set out to make Eleven Madison Park the best restaurant in the world, he had a crazy idea about how to do it: “What would happen if we approached hospitality with the same passion, attention to detail, and rigor that we bring to our food?