In his leadership book, Unreasonable Hospitality, famed restaurateur Will Guidara makes the case that any business can benefit from an above-and-beyond service mindset.
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
By Will Guidara. Optimism Press. 288 pages. $29.
In the opening scene of Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara describes his mortification during a glittery awards banquet in London in 2010. As co-owners of the storied Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park (EMP), he and chef Daniel Humm had just come in 50th place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. “We slumped over and stared at our feet,” he writes.
Many owners might celebrate if their restaurant was named the 50th best on earth. Not Guidara. That “loss” devastated him because it acknowledged something that deep down, he knew — that EMP served stellar food in an elegant space, but it wasn’t breaking new ground.
Back in his hotel room, Guidara had a flash of insight: the real innovation needed to happen front-of-house, by focusing intensely on making their customers feel “a sense of belonging.” He grabbed a cocktail napkin and jotted down two words: “Unreasonable Hospitality.”
The phrase describes service so radically beyond the norm that doubters dismissed it as “unreasonable,” and it became a kind of mantra for Guidara. The book is, in part, a memoir of how his obsessive focus on that guiding principle helped propel EMP to the top of that 50 Best list in 2017 and earn the restaurant three Michelin stars. But in a bookstore, this book would also land on the business/leadership and motivational/self-help shelves, which is probably why it came out with Optimism Press, a publishing imprint launched by business author Simon Sinek. Sinek, in a foreword to this book, writes that Guidara’s insights about extraordinary service “have as much relevance to real estate agents and insurance brokers” as to restaurateurs.
With that in mind, last year our company book club chose Unreasonable Hospitality as our first read. Each of us took turns leading Thursday-afternoon discussions about chapters in the book. For a half-hour every week, we met by Zoom to consider Guidara’s big ideas about how to create a company culture of extravagant hospitality. What would that level of service look like for us, as purveyors of online education and hosts of an annual conference? How could we make our customers and attendees feel that sense of belonging that Guidara describes? We marveled at Guidara’s attention to detail. In a section titled “The Littlest Things Matter,” he describes creating subtle hand signals to help wait staff get diners’ water glasses filled more quickly, and simple rules to choreograph traffic through the bustling dining room so it would flow like “ballet, not football.”
Some of Guidara’s innovations were flashier. The “Improvisational Hospitality” chapter opens with a story that has become so famous in fine dining circles, a version of it was featured on the FX show, “The Bear.” Guidara overheard some guests from Europe chatting excitedly about the iconic culinary experiences they’d had on their visit to New York — the only one they’d missed was a street hot dog. Guidara rushed to the corner vendor and sneaked a hot dog into the kitchen for Humm to divide four ways and plate with arty whorls of mustard and relish. The diners loved it. As they paid the check, each one told him that being served that hot dog during their final dinner in New York was “the highlight not only of the meal, but of their trip.”
The stories inspired us to find ways big and small to give each other, our industry peers, and our customers the best versions of ourselves — not only because it’s good business, we realized, but because it makes us look forward to coming to work.
Guidara and his team coined a term for over-the-top, creative acts of service like this one: Legends. And he carved out a staff position — the Dreamweaver — to create more “legendary” moments that EMP guests would remember for the rest of their lives. Our book club loved those anecdotes: a private dining room transformed into a beach for a couple whose vacation got postponed; a champagne cart converted to a beer cart for a company employee’s Budweiser-loving dad.
What makes these gifts unforgettable isn’t their lavishness, writes Guidara; it’s their thoughtfulness. Each one is bespoke, engineered for one specific person. But the EMP staff also wanted to systematize everyday acts of service, so they made tool kits to fulfill guests’ most frequent needs, such as snack boxes for diners headed straight to the airport and printed maps of the best lesser-known NYC eateries and museums.
Admittedly, some of these elaborate gestures require generous reserves of energy and cash. But the stories inspired us to find ways big and small to give each other, our industry peers, and our customers the best versions of ourselves — not only because it’s good business, we realized, but because it makes us look forward to coming to work. “Hospitality is a selfish pleasure,” writes Guidara. “It feels great to make other people feel good.” At Appraiser eLearning, we agree.