The Hospitality Solution in Your Business

This week we’re publishing two cases from Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality:

• Eleven Madison Park: Systematic Legend Creation
• Eleven Madison Park: The Hospitality Solution

These would be amongst the last cases we’re taking from Guidara’s book — previous cases have included one on running a fine dining restaurant through a recession, as well as learning the ropes of the food and beverage (F&B) industry. As I’ve argued previously — the F&B business is a good one to study because so many of us are familiar with eating out — which makes the elements of business expertise more obvious to spot.

This essay, though, is different. I want to walk you through snippets of two cases, both of which are built around the primary message that Guidara wants to get out with his book. The message is strongest in the last few sections of Unreasonable Hospitality — where Guidara steps back from his own personal history and becomes a teacher, at least in the context of the business lessons he believes are broadly applicable.

For the uninitiated: in 2001 Will Guidara took over Union Square Hospitality Group’s failing fine dining restaurant Eleven Madison Park (EMP) as the general manager. Over the course of the next 13 years, alongside his partner-in-crime chef Daniel Humm, Guidara turned it into one of the best restaurants in the world, earning all the awards and stars you might expect. He did this not just by serving good food (Humm’s domain), but by innovating on all touch points with the guest: from the reservation through to the check. This approach is the titular ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’ that the book discusses so much.

There are two big ideas that Guidara wants to spread, it seems. The first is that good hospitality doesn’t just exist in the context of service businesses like hotels and restaurants. No, hospitality is a mindset, and Guidara believes that any business that relies on repeat patronage from customers should think a little about hospitality.

The second idea is that if you want to imbue hospitality in your business, you shouldn’t just empower service professionals — you should also spend a little time thinking about how to systematise it.

These are ideas we’re going to look at today.

Systematising Legend Creation

In Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara talks about 'Legends' — experiences so remarkable people can’t help talking about it for years afterwards.

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)

I find it interesting that Guidara (like his old boss Danny Meyer before him) has this tendency towards systematisation. The tendency is doubly remarkable when you think about the shape of that systematisation: Guidara and Meyer are attempting to scale essentially non-replicable, somewhat unique guest experiences.

I’m not sure what this might look like in other companies. But the general form is thought provoking and it seems like it’s worth keeping at the back of one’s mind: here is a successful attempt to scale non-replicable experiences; this is what it can look like.

The Hospitality Solution

Guidara goes further, inventing something that he calls ‘the hospitality solution’ to a certain set of business problems:

The very end of the meal is always precarious from a hospitality perspective. First of all, it’s time to pay, and that’s never fun. The cold, hard reality of those numbers on a check can throw cold water on the magical vibe you’ve built over the course of the evening. 

And the timing is hard to get right. When some guests are ready to leave, they’re ready to leave. People get impatient (I get impatient!) if the process of getting the check, paying it, and getting out the door takes too long. But at the same time, you can never put the check down before the guest has asked for it, because that gives them the feeling you’re trying to rush them out. 

At EMP, we used hospitality to solve both potential problems. We didn’t wait for the guest to ask for the check. Instead, at the end of their meal, we’d bring the bill over and drop it off — along with an entire bottle of cognac. 

We’d pour everyone at the table a splash and leave the full bottle on the table: “Please, help yourself to as much as you like, with our compliments. And when you’re ready, your check is right here.”

People were delighted by this. The ability to pour for themselves felt even more luxurious and surprising to them after a three-hour meal where they hadn’t had to lift a finger, and that was the feeling I was trying to replicate: the moment, at the end of a dinner party, when a guest leans forward, grabs the mostly empty bottle of wine left on the table, and tops off everyone’s glass.

But more important, there’s no way a person who has just been given a full bottle of free booze can feel like they’re being rushed out. And yet, at the same time, the check was right there whenever they were ready for it. We no longer had to “drop the check” on one of our guests, and they would never have to ask for it again.

This is a hospitality solution: a problem that we solved not by sneakily chipping away at the service we were offering but by blowing it out in the opposite direction—by giving more, not less.

There is some solid business thinking behind this practice; EMP wasn’t just giving out free cognac just because they could. Guidara continues:

Too often, when we’re faced with a pernicious problem in our businesses, we fall back on the tried-and-true: push harder, be more efficient, cut back. Especially when the problems are nagging ones that erode the bottom line or those that persist because our organizations rely on humans and all their wonderful and fallible ways.

Imagine, though, that instead of resorting to one of these fallback positions, you asked yourself: 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? (emphasis added)

These are almost always harder to execute, and coming up with them will definitely call on your creative side. But they’re almost always a win. If a stumble at the end of a meal can undo all the goodwill a restaurant has earned in the three hours preceding it, then a gorgeous, gracious gesture at the end can have the opposite effect. (This is true in every service industry.)

And while dropping off a full bottle of expensive booze at every table seemed like an unreasonably extravagant gesture, it was actually cost-effective. After an elaborate multicourse dinner (and usually plenty of wine), few people were interesting in drinking more than a sip of that cognac. Yet the feeling of abundance was there. (emphasis added)

This sort of thinking permeates Guidara’s book, and you get the sense that one of the reasons he wrote it is to push readers to think about coming up with ‘hospitality solutions’ in their own contexts — no matter what the business. This comes easy for him, but not for most business operators.

To be clear, not all businesses benefit from ‘generosity and extraordinary service’ — it’s difficult to imagine a copper mine benefiting from Guidara’s ideas. But many do.

Commoncog can be said to be a newsletter business, for instance. It has customers — these are readers and members who consume the essays it publishes, and that peruse its case library. What features or services can we build that are ‘hospitality solutions’ — particularly at the point of purchase, or leading up to the point of renewal? What, for that matter, are the equivalents in your context?

Guidara also gives a number of examples, this time from less service-oriented businesses:

Guidara writes:

One of my close friends runs one of the big realty firms in New York and has asked me on a couple of occasions to talk to her team about hospitality. The first thing I ask the real estate agents is what gift they leave to welcome a new homeowner. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they tell me, “A bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge.”

Now, a bottle of bubbles is nothing to complain about. But there’s also nothing personal, nothing inspiring or memorable, about it—and there should be!

You’re selling someone a home or helping them to sell the one they’ve lived in. That’s one of the most intimate transactions there is. For the amount of time that an agent spends with people, listening to their hopes and dreams for the future (incidentally, much longer than I’ve ever spent with a table), and the size of the average commission, a real estate professional should absolutely be able to figure out a bespoke gift for everyone they work with.

So: if your buyer is into music, leave them their favorite album on vinyl—and, depending on the size of your commission, spring for a turntable as well. If a client dreamed out loud about doing yoga in that nook off the hallway with the sunlight streaming through, then buy a mat and roll it out there, so it’s the first thing to greet them when they walk into their new home.

A yoga mat doesn’t take any more time, energy, or resources to secure than a bottle of Prosecco, just a bit more thoughtfulness.

The trap that most businesspeople make is to conflate expense (or luxury) with hospitality. Guidara makes a distinction between the two: “luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.”

To wit:

Many good businesspeople make these gestures instinctively. A real estate agent I spoke to told me about a Legend she’d pulled, long before she knew the term. Since she knew the new owners were planning a gut renovation, she got permission to remove the doorjamb where her client, the seller, had marked her kids’ heights every year as they grew. To anyone else, it would have been a worthless piece of splintered wood, headed for the dumpster—but not to her client, who wept when she realized what it was. (Total cost: $0.)

The next step, of course, is to systematise this. Guidara systematised the creation of Legends at EMP; he didn’t want staff coming up with unique hospitality solutions for common classes of customer interactions. Similarly, for a realty business:

If you’re selling an apartment to a couple having a baby, get a pack of those protective plastic outlet covers and leave them in a drawer with a little note: “You’ve got big adventures coming up, so I took this off your to-do list.” And because so many people move when they find out they’re expecting, keep a case of those outlet covers in your office so you don’t have to scramble. For newcomers to the area you specialize in, put together a guidebook of all your favorite spots—the best stroll, the best rigorous hike, the best apple cider donut. Print a dozen at a time.

Another agent I spoke with mentioned she’d sold eight pied-à-terres to suburban empty nesters in a single year. Do those people want yet another basic bottle of sparkling wine, available at every corner liquor store? Or would they prefer a behind-the-scenes tour of the art restoration facilities at the Met? Or tickets to the Village Vanguard? Or a membership to an art house movie theater in Brooklyn?

And if you can’t or don’t want to go that far, then take a minute to focus on making your back-pocket gift more thoughtful. Leave a Chemex coffeepot, with a box of filters and a bag of locally roasted ground coffee — because that’s what most people really need on their first morning in a new house before they’ve found the moving box with the espresso machine in it. I guarantee they’ll think of you and your thoughtfulness every time they use it.

The next bit of resistance that Guidara gets is that “oh, these ideas work for service businesses like restaurants and real estate, but my business doesn’t have that many opportunities to delight customers.” 

Guidara, of course, doesn’t buy it. The general principle he uses is that there are inflection points — patterns — in every business, and you just have to look closely to notice them. These opportunities exist when you want to turn customers into repeat buyers; most businesses have stakeholders who can choose to return. Guidara’s core skill seems to be coming up with these little things to nudge the stakeholder — in most cases, the customer — just a little in the direction of loyalty.

There’s a bit more in the case, but I’ll close this piece here — mostly because I think the point Guidara makes stands on its own by now. The purpose of final third of Unreasonable Hospitality, it seems, is to provoke a little bit of thinking as you put down the book: how can you imbue hospitality in your own context, no matter how small your capability, how far removed from services your business is, or how sparse your budget looks.

I hope we’ve replicated a little of that for you here. For more, read Guidara’s book: it’s great.

Originally published 11 September 2024, last updated 12 September 2024.