Unreasonable Hospitality Quotes

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

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

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.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast—But Not Too Fast

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

great service cannot exist without great leadership.

Service Is Black and White; Hospitality Is Color

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness.

To bridge the gap between the two factions, improving communication was going to be key. At the same time, we needed systems, so everybody would know what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it. It was my hope that both fixes would make the team feel safer—and inspire them to come along on our mission. There was a lot to be done to make the restaurant better, but there would be no point to doing any of it if the people who worked there didn’t love coming to work.

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.

It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught.

First, though, the basics: “This is a 2005 chardonnay made by Au Bon Climat in California, aged in neutral French oak. It’s bright and mineral with

I promise I’ll try to be consistent, to do what’s fair and what’s right.” Then I did quote Christopher: “I’m also clear about what my job is, which is to do what’s best for the restaurant, not to do what’s best for any of you. More often than not, what’s best for the restaurant will include doing what’s best for you. But the only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.

When EMP was up and running, I felt confident that the entire team had my back—literally. Let’s say I was clearing a table and a guest started to engage me in conversation. It’s gross to stand there chatting with an armful of dirty dishes, yet I never wanted to squander an opportunity to connect with a guest. So I’d tuck the dishes behind my back, knowing that no matter how badly my wrists strained, in a second or two, one of my colleagues would notice and be on their way to grab them from me.

He said: “I am so excited to be here; I believe in and love this restaurant with all my heart. I’m also clear about what my job is, which is to do what’s best for the restaurant, not to do what’s best for any of you. More often than not, what’s best for the restaurant will include doing what’s best for you. But the only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.

Sure, if you recognize the critic before they’re seated, you can take them to a table in your most skillful server’s section; you can make sure the food you bring them is perfectly plated and the best expression of the dish. But while you can show a critic the best version of your restaurant, you cannot suddenly become something you’re not—and

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

Athletic hospitality” meant always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making an already great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error).

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?

In high school, the cool kids tend to be the underachievers. Cool kids don’t study; they don’t care what the teachers think of them. At that age, it’s slicker to hold back, to keep your cards close to your chest so it never looks like you’re trying too hard. Except that when you grow up a little, you realize the people getting the most out of their lives are the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves, the ones who allow themselves to be passionate and open and vulnerable, and who approach everything they love at full-throttle, with curiosity and delight and unguarded enthusiasm.

Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

Over the next month or two, I worked with the team to create a list of the words that came up over and over again when critics and other musicians talked about Miles: Cool Endless Reinvention Inspired Forward Moving Fresh Collaborative Spontaneous Vibrant Adventurous Light Innovative

We printed a large sign with those words underneath our logo and hung it in our kitchen. That sign became a touchstone, a guiding light, a way to hold ourselves accountable

In When More Is Not Better, he argues that leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals. Southwest Airlines, for instance, set out to be both the lowest-cost airline in America and number one in both customer and employee satisfaction. Those goals would seem to be in opposition, and perhaps they are. But much of the time, they’ve succeeded at all three. Certainly, the efforts they’ve made toward those contradictory goals have done wonders for their bottom line: for the last half century, Southwest has been the most profitable airline in the country.

Without exception, no matter what you do, you can make a difference in someone’s life. You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters.

CREATING A CULTURE OF COLLABORATION

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?

We got on that 50 Best list by pursuing excellence, the black and white, attending to every detail and getting as close to perfection as we could. But we got to number one by going Technicolor—by offering hospitality so bespoke, so over the top, it can be described only as unreasonable.

Done right, a pre-meal meeting fills the gas tank of the people who work for you right before you ask them to go out and fill the tanks of the people they’re serving.

I finished with my own words: “We’re going to make the kind of place we want to eat at; we’re going to create the four-star restaurant for the next generation. That’s where we’re going. Will you come?

Over the years, though, I came to see my four-star inexperience not as a weakness but as a superpower. My inexperience enabled me to look critically at every step of service and to interrogate the only thing that mattered: the guests’ experience. Did a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, which was connecting with people? Or did it take us further from it?

It Might Not Work” Is a Terrible Reason Not to Try