You might expect food to be the primary focus of a restaurant. Eleven Madison Park (EMP), one of the best restaurants in the world, would prove you wrong. As with many top restaurants, EMP doesn’t just sell great food, they are in the business of unforgettable experiences.
First, a quick recap: EMP weathered a global recession through 2008, was named the Best Restaurant in the World in 2017, earned four stars from the New York Times, and three stars from the Michelin Guide. The pair who led EMP to success was the two man team of Daniel Humm, the chef, and Will Guidara, the General Manager for 13 years. Whilst Humm was responsible for EMP’s extraordinary food, Guidara was the one who dreamt up the restaurant’s approach to stellar hospitality.
Guidara saw potential in creating unforgettable experiences for his guests long before he started working at EMP. Guidara’s summer job in high school and college was bussing tables at chef Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant in Beverly Hills called Spago. One of Spago’s most valuable customers, a regular who lunched at the restaurant five days a week, was a rather … large man who experienced some discomfort while sitting in ordinary restaurant chairs. Guidara writes in his book, Unreasonable Hospitality:
“Barbara Lazaroff, Wolfgang Puck’s wife at the time and a tremendous creative force in the company, asked the regular’s wife to secretly photograph and measure his favorite chair at home. She then had a furniture maker replicate it and upholster the new chair in the house fabric.”
Even today, Guidara still gets ‘a kick out of imagining the look on the regular’s face the first time he saw his chair’. The chair, however, cost thousands of dollars, making it impossible for EMP to do the same for every guest. On one particular occasion, Guidara found a much cheaper way to create a similar, remarkable experience: a hot dog fresh off the streets of New York City. In his book, Guidara writes:
As I was clearing this particular table, I overheard the four guests crowing about the culinary adventures they’d had in New York: ‘We’ve been everywhere! Daniel, Per Se, Momofuku, now Eleven Madison Park. The only thing we didn’t eat was a street hot dog.’
In response, Guidara did the unthinkable. He “ran out to buy a hot dog from Abraham, who manned the Sabrett’s cart on our corner” and asked his head chef to plate it. The hot dog was cut into four pieces, garnished with ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, and relish, and served up to the guests. They erupted in delight.
The look on the guests' faces in response to this little gesture was everything that Guidara had been hoping for. But Guidara did not stop there. The question he grappled with was this: how do you systematise such experiences? Coming up with ad-hoc customer interventions was all well and good, but how do you scale the creation of such experiences? It was with this question in mind that Guidara created a new job at EMP: the Dreamweaver.
What does a Dreamweaver do? Well, Dreamweavers are folks who create ‘Legends’.
The following is an extract from Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality:
I told the story in pre-meal, and the term “Legend” became shorthand within the restaurant for these special touches—as in, “I did the best Legend for a table last night.” The name took on even greater significance as we realized what made these Legends so legendary. Namely, they gave people a story—a Legend—to tell. Why do people put so much time and effort into a marriage proposal? Because they know it’s a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. The best of those stories do two things: First, they put you right back in the moment, so that you’re not just recounting the experience, but reliving it. Second, the story itself tells you that while you were having the experience, you were seen and heard.
These days, people, especially younger people, are more interested in collecting experiences than in getting more stuff. But restaurant meals, like many service experiences, are ephemeral. You can take a copy of the menu home, and pictures of your plate, but you can’t relive that bite of foie gras.
That changes when you leave with a story that’s good enough to put you back in the moment, as if you were living it all over again. That’s why we took the Legends so seriously. If people were coming to us to add to their collection of experiences, then we saw these not as extra flourishes but as a responsibility: to give people a memory so good it enabled them to relive their experience with us. The true gift, then, wasn’t the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend. (emphasis added)
Guidara got to work assembling a team of Dreamweavers.
Christine McGrath was a Dreamweaver even before Guidara officially created the position. McGrath was employed as a host and reservationist for EMP, lending her calligraphy skills to the restaurant’s effort to make periodic Legends. As an increasing number of Legends used handwritten notes, McGrath’s contributions became invaluable, and when Guidara established the role of a Dreamweaver, she was the perfect fit.
Guidara met the second Dreamweaver, Emily Parkinson, out of pure chance. Parkinson was his server when he dined at Marta, Danny Meyer’s erstwhile pizza restaurant. From their interaction, he knew she was perfect for the role. Guidara writes:
But while most people take pictures of their food, Emily paints hers. Actually, she made preliminary pencil sketches of each course while she was at the restaurant; later, she finished the drawings with a watercolor wash.
Charmed, I asked her to send me some photos, and the next morning, her illustrations were in my inbox. (You can see them, too; Grub Street did a piece on Emily, featuring the paintings she made of her meal at EMP.) I’d barely opened the email before I’d picked up the phone to call my friend Terry Coughlin, the GM of Marta: ‘Tell me right away if this is a nonstarter, but I’m working on something pretty cool over here and I want to poach Emily to help me with it….’
Image Source: Emily Parkinson’s watercolour drawing of her meal at Eleven Madison Park and featured on Grub Street.
With a growing team of Dreamweavers, EMP’s Legends not only became more consistent, but also more ambitious. Dreamweavers had their own studio in the restaurant, equipped with a sewing machine, craft tools and a full stock of every other art supply you can imagine. However, this wasn’t the end of Guidara’s attempt to systemise the process of creating Legends. He devised ‘tool kits’ which made it even easier for Dreamweavers to work their magic. These tool kits were made for recurring Legends, so Dreamweavers could deploy them to create unique experiences more efficiently. Guidara describes some of these tool kits in his book, Unreasonable Hospitality:
Since people visiting from out of town often asked about our own favorite haunts in the city, we printed little maps, marked with some of our secret spots: the best pizza slice, the best bagel, the best place to get Sunday brunch, along with lesser-known New York City treasures like the Rubin Museum.
The tool kits also served as a way to be proactive about improvisational hospitality. Recounting an incident where the off-hand remark of a ‘captain’ (the staff member in charge of on-the-ground operations at the restaurants), Guidara writes:
... because the Dreamweavers were standing by, a captain might say, “I loved that impromptu snack box you put together for the woman who was catching the red-eye to Seattle. I would love to be able to give those out on a more frequent basis; could we make a bunch?” Then those airplane snack boxes were just there, waiting for a traveler to check bags because they’d be leaving straight from lunch to the airport. At the end of their meal, we’d hand them their coat, roll out their luggage—oh, and when you get hungry again on the plane, here’s a nicer nosh than a pack of stale pretzels.
Guidara proved that the making of Legends was not exclusive to high-end restaurants and their crew. Anyone who has heart, and a willingness to put in the work is capable of creating a Legend. Guidara writes:
The value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels. Maybe it was the thirtieth time we’d handed a traveling guest a snack box, but it was the first time for them—and their delight wasn’t dimmed in the slightest because they hadn’t been the only ones. (emphasis originally in the book)