Three Principles of Radical Hospitality | Will Guidara

Restaurateur and author Will Guidara breaks down the three principles behind “unreasonable hospitality,” and how any entrepreneur can use them to turn ordinary moments into the reason people come back.

Topics Covered:

•       The night that pushed Will to rethink what “being the best” actually means

•       The three principles behind “unreasonable hospitality”

•       Why the best ideas should come from your frontline, not from the top

What makes someone remember your business a year later? Not the menu, not the décor, it’s usually one small, specific moment where they felt truly seen. In this ‘replay’ episode of The Entrepreneur’s Studio, Will Guidara, co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and author of the bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, unpacks the night that changed his entire approach to building a business people fall in love with.

Will believes that being “the best” was never really about the product. After his restaurant landed dead last on a list of the world’s top 50, he committed to a different kind of excellence: one built on relationships rather than rankings. That shift led to a single, almost accidental gesture; a two-dollar hot dog served between courses at a three-Michelin-star table that reshaped how he thought about hospitality altogether.

From that moment, Will distilled three principles that any team can apply: be fully present with the person in front of you, take the work seriously without taking yourself too seriously, and treat every gesture as one-size-fits-one rather than one-size-fits-all. He’s candid that the generic versions of these ideas, a free dessert or a templated thank-you, rarely move people. It’s the specificity that does.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, the actionable shift is structural: stop centralizing your best ideas in one role or one person. Will created a position called the Dreamweaver to help execute ideas, but he’s emphatic that the ideas themselves must come from the people closest to the customer, the servers or the hosts. Empower that layer of your team, he argues, and you turn employees from order-takers into product designers.

Takeaways:

•       Audit every touchpoint in your customer journey

•       Personalize, don’t "templatize"

•       Push decision-making down to the people who are closest to your customer

“Unreasonable hospitality is one size fits one. The greatest gestures are bespoke to the person receiving them.”

— Will Guidara

Listen to the full conversation with Will Guidara from Season 3 here. https://www.auris.io/resources/entrepreneurs-studio/podcast/s03-e01-will-guidara/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:22

What separates a good business from an unforgettable one? For Will Gadera, the answer didn't come from a business book or a team strategy session, but from a $2 hot dog. Will is the former co-owner of 11 Madison Park, the restaurant that in 2017 was ranked number one in the world. But the moment that changed everything for him happened years earlier on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon where he stepped away from his desk just to help clear some tables, and he overheard a conversation that redefined how he thought about hospitality forever. Today's episode is an excerpt from one of the most memorable conversations that we've had on the Entrepreneur Studio, our season three conversation with Will Gadera. In this segment, Will breaks down the three principles of radical hospitality. I'm Chris Allen, and whether you're running a restaurant, a retail shop, a service business, or any place that you're serving people, Will's story will level up the experience that you're creating. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

And this has become uh like a legend a little bit because uh I've I've told the story a bunch of times. But it was about a year and a half later, I was in the office doing emails during lunch service, and I got a call from the the Matre D saying, hey, we're we're getting we're getting killed out here. We need some more hands. And so I went out and just started clearing tables. By the way, as the owner of that restaurant, one of my favorite things to do was clear tables. Because I think it's just a beautiful sign to everyone on your team that it doesn't matter what position you hold, you are going to do the thing that you are asking them to do, and you're gonna do it better than everyone else, too. Right? Like I Danny used to say that show your fire. It doesn't matter what leadership role you're in, you better make sure that at varying times you're stepping in and reminding people how you got the job that you currently have.

unknown 2:28

Powerful.

SPEAKER_02 2:29

And I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four foodies. Um, there were Europeans in New York on vacation who were just there to eat at restaurants, and this was their last meal. They were literally heading to the airport right after their meal to go home. And while I was at the table, I overheard them talking, and they were going on and on about the amazing trip they had and talking about per se and La Bernadette and Danielle and Jean-Georges, all the great restaurants. And now they were at 11 Madison Park, and then one woman jumped in and said, Yeah, but you know what? We never had one of those hot dogs from a street cart. And it was like that moment in a cartoon where the light bulb goes off over the character's head, and you know they've had a good idea, right? And so as calmly as I could, I walked back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates, and then literally ran outside of the street corner where one of the hot dog carts lived, and I bought a hot dog, ran back inside. Then came the hard part, convincing my chef to serve it in our fancy restaurant. But I asked him to trust me. I told him it was important to me. That second line was a big one. We talked about this earlier. Yeah. If you are lucky enough, which I was at that time to work alongside an entire group of like-minded people who were passionate and wanting to be the best at something. I mean, my gosh, that's a blessing. Because I can all but guarantee every single person listening to this has had the experience at some point in their lives of caring more than their colleagues. And it is one of the most soul-sucking feelings. It's very lonely. And so once you get to a place where you're surrounded by really passionate people, you better not lose the perspective to where you stop uh appreciating that, where you start taking that for granted.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

That said, when it is the case, there's always going to be tension because if you work with passionate people who agree on wanting to be the best, you're going to constantly disagree on what it takes to become the best. And so we had a ton of tension in our restaurant all the time because we're all really passionate and competitive, and we all wanted to be the best. And we all came from different walks of life. And so we had different ways to navigate through the tension. Um, if you and I were ever arguing about something, either one of us could at any point just say, Time out, switch sides. And then I'd have to argue your position and you'd have to argue mine. What you very quickly realized is most people just want to be right in the moment I start arguing a position that just moments ago I was arguing against, now I want this position. Um if that didn't work, you could say, okay, time out again, third option. Which meant, hey, if neither one of us has been able to convince the other person, maybe we just don't have a good idea on the table yet. And maybe we need to work together to come up with something different from either of our perspectives that's actually better for the business. Or if that didn't work, someone could just say, This is important to me. And that meant, hey, this is more important to me than it is to you. And so I should, I should win this one. Which I do believe to be true. There is the underlying rule, though, that no one should ever be abusing the this is important to me, card. Takes trust. Anyway, so I said that. We cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, added a little swish of ketchup, a swish of mustard, and a perfect little scoop of sauerkraut and relish to each plate, and before their final savory course, which was a honey lavender-glazed muscle bee duck that had been dry aged for two weeks. I brought out what we in New York call a dirty water dog to the table. This simple little gesture changed everything about my approach to restaurants because they freaked out. I mean, I'd been serving food my entire life, millions and millions of dollars. Foie gras, wagu be, foie gras caviar. I'd never seen anyone react to anything I served them like they did to that $2 hot dog. You know, athletes go to the tapes and they've had a bad game to see what they did wrong. They don't often enough go to the tapes and they've had a good game to see what they did right to make sure they keep on doing that thing. That's how you take these little moments of organic brilliance that happen within a business and grab onto them and hold on to them and put systems behind them to make sure that they become a part of the fabric of your organization. It almost like breaks my heart to think about how many amazing things just kind of fluttered away because no one had the wherewithal to recognize that those were game-changing things that they should grab onto. So I went to the tapes on that hot dog. Like, what happened so that it could happen? And what did we need to start doing as an organization in our culture to make sure it would start happening all the time? The first, it required being present, which is like a way overused kind of woo-woo thing these days. But I think it's imperative in hospitality. For me, being present just means caring so much about the person you're with that you stop caring about everything else you need to do. With our phones, with to-do lists, with the ever-increasing number of distractions in our lives. I think we have a real hard time slowing down for long enough to actually listen to the people around us and doing so hear from them the things that will bring them the most joy. Had I been focused on efficiency in that moment, I would have, while I was clearing their plates, been looking around the dining room to figure out what table I needed to go to next and would have missed out on that opportunity. But instead, I was present and so I picked up on that line about the hot dog. Second, I required the notion that, hey, if you want to be the best in anything, you better take what you do seriously. And also, we all need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. Brands are very, very important, right? I'm sure there's an awesome marketing team in this company that spends a ton of time thinking about your brand. And justifiably so, that is your bumper sticker to the world. But far too often the brand starts telling you whether or not you're allowed to do certain things to make other people happy. And when that happens, the entire equation is out of whack. A hot dog in a four-star restaurant is sacrilegious, but look how it made them feel. And then third, I mean, this is kind of one of the very definitions of unreasonable hospitality. Hospitality is about making people feel seen. And if that's the case, the best way to do that is not to treat people like a commodity, but as unique individuals. I really believe I could have given that table a freaking bottle of vintage champagne and a Home Depot bucket full of caviar, it would not have had the same impact because it would not have been specific to them. Unreasonable hospitality is one size fits one. The greatest gestures are bespoke to the person receiving them. And so the hot dog, that became our new true north. And in those three things, we had a roadmap. And so obviously, change happens in a team huddle. So I got back into pre-meal and started talking to the team and saying, hey, go out there and start finding opportunities of your own, opportunities to bring these gestures to life. Be present, don't take yourselves too seriously. Find one size fits one opportunity. And let me acknowledge something there. I think and talk a lot about control versus creativity. Remember, this is a three Michelin star restaurant. I controlled a lot of what we did. Right? Glasses need to be placed such that the logo faced the guest. The silverware needed to be placed exactly, I don't even know what this is called. For those of you listening, I'm pointing at the end of my thumb, that distance from the edge of the table. Food served from this direction, cleared from this direction, tablecloths ironed, all this stuff, all these details that needed to be done consistently perfectly. And yet, I'm also telling my team in that moment, go come up with whatever idea you want. I'm gonna give you the permission and the resources to bring it to life. And so to that end, we added a position to the team, someone called the Dreamweaver, named after the iconic song by Gary Wright. And that person's only role was to help everyone else on the team bring their ideas to life. And with the addition of that position and this newfound permission and resource-based pursuit, we were on fire. I mean, we talked earlier about some of the stuff we did, but you know, a couple we did things that cost money. Um family of four from Spain was in the restaurant, parents and their children, the two kids we had these big windows overlooking the park. And it started snowing, and we realized that the kids had never seen real snow. Dreamweavers somehow found a store still open selling sleds, and when they left, there was an Uber SUV with the sleds in the back and take them to Central Park for the best nightcap of all, a few hours of play in the freshly fallen snow. Or we did things that were completely free. One time a couple um was dining with us and we learned they'd just gotten married at City Hall. They had a really big wedding planned, but the families fell out of love. There was some some drama or something. This was now their wedding night. The server, on her own, committed herself to over the few hours they were dining with us to figure out what their wedding song was going to be. And we slowed down their meals such that they were the last people in the restaurant. When they were done, we brought them up into the private dining room, which was empty that night, and our team was having a party, their wedding reception. And when they walked in on cue, we put on Lovely Day by Bill Withers, and we gave them the gift of their first dance. We just did thousands of these things, which created this environment of electricity because, yes, we were making the people dining with us feel real good. But in doing so, we were happier than we'd ever been at work because there is nothing more energizing than when you see the look on someone else's face once they receive a gift you're responsible for giving them. We all very quickly became addicted to that feeling.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Thank you for listening to the Entrepreneur Studio Podcast. Check the show notes for resources and links from today's episode, and follow us on Instagram at the entrepreneurs.studio. See you next time.