The Pursuit of Hospitality: Will Guidara shares the secret sauce that goes into building a restaurant with great impact

New Yorker Will Guidara was trained in the dining rooms of Robert De Niro-owned Tribeca Grill, Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, and Daniel Meyer’s Tabla, before he joined Meyer’s struggling two-star brasserie Eleven Madison Park (EMP) as the general manager in 2006. Around the same time, celebrated Swiss chef Daniel Humm started working at EMP’s kitchen. 

Over the years, under the stewardship of Guidara and with Humm’s support, EMP has grown from strength to strength, gradually improving its rating and ranking. 

In 2009, EMP was awarded four stars by The New York Times. Diners celebrated the impeccable partnership between the kitchen and the dining table at the restaurant, with the owners often going the extra mile to make the customer experience at EMP memorable. 

Then in 2010, EMP was ranked 50 in the coveted ‘World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ list. 

“That knocked the wind right out of us,” writes Guidara, in his book Unreasonable Hospitality.  

The night EMP was awarded the ranking, Guidara retired to his hotel room and wrote on a cocktail napkin: “We will be number one in the world.”

“... I wanted to be number one, but the desire wasn’t just about the award; I wanted to be a part of the team that made that impact … Just before I drifted off to sleep, I smoothed out the napkin and added two more words: ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’,” reads an excerpt from the book. 

In 2011, the restaurateur, along with Humm, bought EMP from Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality. 

What followed was a remarkable transformation of EMP, as it went from one Michelin star to three stars in the 2012 Michelin guide. In 2017, it was ranked first among the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. 

The restaurant offered guests a seasonal tasting menu inspired from culture and history. But above all, it offered ‘unreasonable hospitality’.

Guidara’s latest book is based on and titled after the very same idea of unreasonable hospitality–i.e. the relentless efforts towards superior hospitality. The pursuit of hospitality is as important, if not more, as the pursuit of the product you are selling, believes Guidara. 

The book, which was launched in India in March, dives deep into the unprecedented transformation of EMP, the relationship between the kitchen and the dining room, and the over-the-top hospitality at the restaurant. 

The partnership between Guidara and Humm ended in 2019. Since then, Humm has been running EMP on his own, while Guidara is exploring other projects.  

YS Life spoke to Guidara to know more about his book, the relentless pursuit of hospitality, and what it takes to build the world’s #1 restaurant.

Edited excerpts from the interaction: 

YS Life [YSL] When did you start writing the book? And how long did it take for you to complete it? 

Will Guidara [WG]: I had been thinking about it for a few years but never felt I had the bandwidth to approach it. In the middle of 2020, it was clear that it was not a three-week interruption (during the COVID-19 lockdown). For the first time in years, I had the space and the time to really invest in bringing this idea to life; I jumped on it.

It took about a-year-and-a half to write it, from the moment I started until I finally submitted the final manuscript, although the ideas in it are the ones I’d been slowly developing for 10 to 15 years. So, it’s been a project that, passively, I’d been working on for a very long time. 

YSL: Why did it make sense to document everything you have learnt and implemented at work?

WG: Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why and the Infinite Game, is a very good friend, besides being my editor and publisher. He hosted a conference in Aspen where he asked me to speak. I spoke about hospitality. After I was done, he and his publisher came up to me and said I need to write that book. They were the first people to show that level of belief in me and my ideas and that they needed to be put together into a book. 

YSL: Did you also have unreasonable expectations from yourself as a writer, as you did as an restaurateur? 

WG: I did.

YSL: What are the similarities between being a writer and a restaurateur?

WG: You spend years on something before the world ever sees it, and it’s a very vulnerable thing when you finally introduce it. 

The difference, though, between a restaurant and a book is that—if there’s something that is not perfect in a restaurant, you can change it on the second day. In a book, what you submit is what it will be for the rest of its life. With that acknowledgement, I was especially unreasonable in trying to make sure that the book and every word in it was exactly what I wanted it to be. 

It was also important to me that a book on hospitality, which was filled with business, leadership, and service insights, was itself inherently hospitable. I wanted to make it a book that was not only educational but also enjoyable to read. Hopefully, I got that right. 

I also believe restaurants are not just about the food, they’re also about the experience. I tried to convey that idea in the book. It was about the lessons and also the enjoyable experiences learning those lessons. 

YSL: What does it take to build the world’s #1 restaurant? 

WG: It takes persistence, determination, and hard work.

Hospitality is a team sport. It doesn’t matter how good, hardworking, or persistent you are as the leader of the restaurant, you need to motivate an entire team around you to care just as much as you do and be willing to try as hard as you are willing to try. 

I don't believe there is such a thing as the ‘best restaurant in the world’. I believe that when you are in the top spot on that list, it is acknowledging that you are the restaurant having the greatest impact on the world of restaurants at that point in time. 

What it took for us to become number one was being just as unreasonable in the pursuit of hospitality as every other restaurant on that list was in pursuit of the food.

YSL: What is ‘unreasonable hospitality’? 

WG: It’s not reserving your best efforts simply in the pursuit of the product you’re selling but investing all of yourself into how you make everyone feel–the people you work with and those that you collectively serve. 

There’s no checklist. It’s prioritising people over product, or at the very least, putting them at the same level. 

YSL: How does unreasonable hospitality contribute to the long-term success of a business? 

WG: Every business is looking for its competitive advantage. The only long-term competitive advantage that exists comes through hospitality, through consistently and generously investing in relationships. Relationships take a long time to build. And if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you engender takes a long time to erode. 

YSL: What are the top three practices that made (and continue to make) hospitality ‘unreasonable’ at EMP? 

WG: The first was collaboration. 

The second was our Dreamweaver programme to give the team permission to come up with amazing experiences and over-the-top gestures for the guests. But if you don’t give them the resources, the idea will never take root. 

In hiring dreamweavers and allocating a budget, we had people and money available … We made it easy for the teams to deploy their philosophy. 

And three, just remembering that, in spite of the fact we’re a three Michelin star restaurant, we should not take ourselves too seriously. Some of the greatest gestures are silly, playful and fun. If you take yourself too seriously and let self-imposed standards get in the way of giving the people around you the things that will bring them the most joy, you’re really holding yourself back. 

YSL: Where did you pick this habit of taking care of the minutest details? (Guidara trained the staff setting the dining room to place the plate in such a way that if a guest flipped it over to see who had made it, the Limoges stamp would face them, right side up. The mark identifies the specific factory in Limoges, a city in France, which had produced that piece of porcelain.)  

WG: That's just a part of who I am. I just have OCD-like tendencies, and it’s those little things that I can’t not see. 

YSL: What about scalability? Do you think unreasonable hospitality can be scaled across outposts and geographies? 

WG: 100%. I think you can systemise hospitality if you do some simple pattern recognition. Look at the things that happen over and over again in your business. After identifying them, invest some creativity and intention into how you will respond the next time they happen. 

Then invest whatever resources are required to create any of the assets required for those reactions. You can start creating magic all the time, no matter what your business is.

There are things that happen often. If you’re at a hotel, someone arrives at the hotel before their room is ready. If you’re on a plane, someone barely misses their flight. If you are in retail, someone falls in love with a shirt, but you don’t have it in their size. 

More often than not, what happens next is left to whatever person happens to be working there at that moment. But, if at the top, you decide how you want to react every time that happens, you make sure that your reaction is the most hospitable it possibly can be. You can start doing this stuff at scale. 

YSL: You wrote in your book that “hospitality is a selfish pleasure”. Why do you say so? 

WG: I don’t think there are very many things more energising than when you get to see the look on someone’s face when they receive a gift. We’ve all had that feeling when you buy someone the right gift around the holidays and they love it. As much as they are happy receiving that gift, you feel that incredible sense of satisfaction having been the one to give it to them.

Hospitality is a selfish pleasure that becomes addictive. Once you feel the feeling of having brought someone joy, you want to feel it again and again. 

YSL: Besides EMP, what are your favourite restaurants to dine out at? And what makes them so special? 

WG: Canlis restaurant in Seattle, Washington is a fine-dining temple and offers the best hospitality in the USA. Rezdôra in New York has some of the best pasta in America. 

YSL: Could you share three important learnings for aspiring entrepreneurs and restaurateurs? 

WG: One, way too often we spend so much time trying to perfectly articulate an idea that we never start pursuing anything. If you over-analyse something, you are going to eventually convince yourself not to do it. 

Two, to quote my mentor Danny Meyer, the path to success is paved with mistakes well-handled. You will make mistakes. Things will not go well. You can see that as an imposition or an opportunity. With every mistake comes an opportunity to get better at what you are trying to achieve. 

Three, sometimes you just need to believe in yourself. That’s a hard one. Too often we wait for someone else to tell us that we are ready. And some people are lucky that they have someone who believes in them more than they believe in themselves. But others are not so lucky. If you wait for someone else to believe in you, for someone to tell you are ready, you might be waiting a very long time. 

YSL: What’s next on your plate? 

WG: I’m figuring that out as I go. I’m enjoying writing, speaking, advising, and working on television. And I’ll likely open another restaurant again, but not yet.