Unreasonable Hospitality

“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.

“You’re being unreasonable.” That word “unreasonable” was meant to shut us down—to end the conversation, as it so often does. Instead, it started one, and became our call to arms. Because no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable.

The sommelier saves the day by taking their keys and rescuing the bottle, so the couple can relax and finish their celebratory meal. When they arrive home, they find the champagne safely tucked into their fridge, along with a tin of caviar, a box of chocolates, and an anniversary card from the restaurant.

Systemizing it turned it from an act of heroism into a matter of course, like checking your coat or offering a dessert menu. And the more normal it became for us to give this little gift, the more extraordinary it seemed to be for the people receiving it.

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

“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.

“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,

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.

Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want.

There were plenty of standards in place, but no real systems to communicate them. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of inconsistency.

When initiating change, I look for the best lever, whatever will allow me to transmit the most force with the least amount of energy.

Go too fast, and you’ll end up slowing the whole restaurant down.”

make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

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?

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. Knowing less is often an opportunity to do more.

It was a different kind of correct.

The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

If you try to be all things to all people, it’s proof that you don’t have a point of view—and if you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view.

Putting both hospitality and excellence on our list was a way of recognizing that success was going to come from approaching the problem of hospitality vs. excellence in the most difficult way possible: in order to succeed, we needed to be good at both.

Before marriage and the birth of my daughter, I ended most nights in my apartment with a glass of wine and an open notebook. Those journaling sessions—part diary, part mea culpa, part vision board, part to-do list—were where my most inspired ideas came from.

Tap in to Their Passions—Then Give Them the Keys

Passion was one of the core values we’d committed to pursuing during our strategic planning meeting.

With that, the ownership program at Eleven Madison Park was born.

“Success comes in cans; failure comes in can’ts.”

there’s another reason it’s easier not to do this: it might not work.

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

We had to show them, right off the bat, that we meant it when we said collaboration was welcome. Otherwise, even a real self-starter might hesitate before jumping in: I wonder whose toes I’d be stepping on if I were to fix that nightmare of a bulletin board.

Once people had gotten a feel for how good it felt to make a contribution, they would start actively looking for a way to do it again. And it was a way for us to communicate, on a person’s very first day: We hired you for a reason. We know you have something to contribute, and we don’t want to wait to see what it is.

It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly. That’s the very definition of excellence: getting as many details right as you can.

“Their perception is our reality.”

Which means: it doesn’t matter whether the steak is rare or medium rare. If the guest’s perception is that it’s undercooked, the only acceptable response is, “Let me fix it.” And true hospitality means going one step further and doing everything you can to make sure the situation doesn’t repeat itself—in this case, making an internal guest note in our reservations system that this person “orders steak medium rare, but prefers it cooked medium.”

If adding another element to the experience means you’re going to do everything a little less well, walk it back. Do less, and do it well.

Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. It shows an understanding of your abilities and an awareness of what’s happening around you. People who refuse to ask for help, who believe they can handle everything on their own, are deceiving themselves and doing a disservice to those around them.

“Perspective has an expiration date, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it.”

It wasn’t until I’d shown myself to be vulnerable that the people I was serving allowed me to see their vulnerability.

What is the hospitality solution? What if you forced yourself to be creative, to develop a solution that worked because of—not in spite of—your dedication to generosity and extraordinary service?

We called it the Welcome Conference, and it was an instant hit with restaurant people. Dining room professionals from all over the country attended lectures, networked over drinks, and went home reinvigorated. By the conference’s third year, though, when we looked out into the audience, we saw sommeliers and servers sitting next to people who didn’t work in restaurants at all: tech titans, small business owners, the CEOs of huge real estate companies. These people believed, as I do, that how they served their clients was as valuable as what they served.

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.

Every decision I made seemed to expose the natural tensions between improving the quality of the experience the guests were having and doing what was best for the business.

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.

When you get too caught up in showing your prowess—“Look at what we can do!”—you’re losing focus on the only thing that matters, which is what will make your customer happy.

choosing a worthy rival: another company that does one or more things better than you, whose strengths reveal your weaknesses and set you on a path of constant improvement.

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.

I had learned from my dad the importance of intentionality—knowing what it is you’re trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal. From Danny, I’d learned the importance of articulating that intention to our team.

When Leo was handling cocktails and Kirk was taking care of beer, our wine director, John Ragan, didn’t need to think about those beverages or about coffee or tea. Our already stellar wine program got better because John had more time and energy and capacity to devote to it, while all those other programs, so inherently mediocre at so many other fine-dining restaurants, became absolutely best in class.

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.

But if we were trying to encourage people to take a shot, we couldn’t penalize them if they didn’t succeed; we simply found another area where they could invest their time. It’s always been my belief that “It might not work” is a terrible reason not to try an idea, especially one that has the potential upside of making the people who work for you more engaged with your mission.

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

Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little, making sure that everything’s perfect—and they smile, too.

Just because a few regulars love an employee doesn’t mean they should be allowed to erode the foundation of everything you’re trying to build. As charismatic and charming as these people may be with the public, and as valuable as the relationships they have with guests may seem, the collateral damage the Felixes do to the culture of a business is too dire to be tolerated.

Restaurant-smart meant leading with trust—including allowing the people who worked for me to do what they felt was best for the guests. Corporate-smart meant running a tight ship. Which was right?

But the truth is, Danny’s way of doing things—the way he treated his employees and guests—was so baked into my consciousness that for the first few months I was acting on instinct alone.

Sitting down with people shows them you care about what they think and how they feel and makes it that much easier for them to trust that you have their best interests in mind.

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear.

Whether criticism or praise, it’s a leader’s job to give their team feedback all the time. But every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well than what they could do better, or they’re going to feel deflated and unmotivated. And if you can’t find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that’s a failure in leadership—either you’re not coaching the person sufficiently, or you’ve tried and it’s not working, which means they should no longer be on the team.

Communicating consistent standards, with lots of repetition, was important; a good manager makes sure everyone knows what they have to do, then makes sure they’ve done it—that’s the black-and-white part of being a leader. But a huge part of leadership is taking the time to tell your team why they’re doing what they’re doing, and I used pre-meal to get into that why.

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.

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

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. And if you’re a leader, you need to encourage everyone on your team to do the same.

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.

The other important takeaway from that class was that public speaking is a leadership skill. Being able to communicate your own excitement is a powerful way to engage the people who work for and with you, and to infect them with energy and a sense of purpose.

This can be a problem in “promote from within” cultures; with power comes increased responsibility, and relinquishing those responsibilities—especially if they’re new and hard-won—can feel like a demotion. So we reminded them: great leaders make leaders. You don’t want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one—the key to the front door. Once they’d turned over some of these responsibilities, they’d have more time to make their own contributions.

If your job was to place that dish in front of the guest, you were the last link in a long chain of people who had invested many hours of work in that dish. If, in that final inch, a zucchini flower tumbled because of your carelessness, you were letting a lot of people down—including the guest, who’d trusted you with a few hours of their life in the expectation that you would blow their minds.

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.

Managing staff boils down to two things: how you praise people, and how you criticize them. Praise, I might argue, is the more important of the two. But you cannot establish any standard of excellence without criticism, so a thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be a part of your culture, too.

If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they’ll never be fully known by the people around them.

In fact, as a leader, I’d rather get attention for creating the conditions that enabled Kirk to put together an award-winning beer program.

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.

Unfortunately, when you lose the viewpoint of the people you’re responsible for managing, you also tend to lose your empathy for them. We’d all be better leaders if we could tap back into what it felt like to be led. But it’s hard to reclaim that headspace, and journaling was a way to hedge against that loss.

There is, by the way, no better way for a leader to figure out why an idea isn’t working—or how it can work better—than to walk a mile in the shoes of the people you’ve charged with implementing that idea.

Putting both hospitality and excellence on our list was a way of recognizing that success was going to come from approaching the problem of hospitality vs. excellence in the most difficult way possible: in order to succeed, we needed to be good at both. This wasn’t an either/or—it was an and. Later, I would learn that the management guru Roger Martin calls this “integrative thinking.” In When More Is Not Better, he argues that leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals.

Because 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.

The Rule of 95/5 ensured that I wasn’t blowing the budget; I could afford these indulgences because I’d been so disciplined the rest of the year.

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 it.

These programs lagged because nobody was paying attention to them.

The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future.

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.

But you don’t reach the top by taking no for an answer, especially not the first time you get it. We needed to be willing to fail.

This is not a passive pursuit; it’s active. The things I can control— mindfulness, diet, exercise, attitude, and whom I choose to spend my time with—those things take priority over all others. So when I do raise my hand, I’m armed with the mental fortitude to make sure that my ambition doesn’t undermine the clarity that got me all these killer opportunities in the first place.

multiple conflicting goals force you to innovate.