Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, all the way from New York City, is Will Guidara, restaurateur, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park – which of course you will know rose to Number 1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – and author of the fabulous ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’, which I have read, his tales of service and leadership therein. As General Manager at Eleven Madison Park, Will and chef Daniel Humm, set out their vision to become a 4 star restaurant for the next generation in an environment they felt comfortable in. But consistent proclaim, it was a $2 dollar hotdog that changed Will’s life and gave birth the strategy that would guide them to 3 Michelin stars and the Number 1 spot. Unreasonable hospitality became their focus, turning ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences and giving people more than they could possibly expect. And we’ll hear that hotdog story that kickstarted it all very shortly. Believing their approach wasn’t limited to the hospitality industry, Will co-founded Thank You in 2019, a consultancy providing advice and training to be more creative and intentional in customer service and they’ve since worked with clients ranging from hotels and restaurants to financial institutions and healthcare providers as well with big hopes, as he says, of expansion.
I am very privileged sitting here in London talking to Will Guidara in New York. I’ve read the book. I’ve watched ‘The Bear’ and here he is, I’ve even seen the clip of Jimmy Fallon, ladies and gentleman – I’m kind of half kidding – it’s Will Guidara. You’re a bit of a popstar.
Will Guidara
I wouldn’t…
Elliot Moss
In your world. In your world you are.
Will Guidara
In the smallest world imaginable, perhaps.
Elliot Moss
Not true.
Will Guidara
Elliot, I’m really, I’m really happy to be here and I love that you just played Milestones because with each of our restaurants, we used musical inspirations as kind of the cultural cornerstones, people whose approach to their music we wanted to emulate in our approach to the restaurants and at Eleven Madison Park it was Miles Davis, up in NoMad it was The Rolling Stones, each for their own reasons, which we could get into. But we had to start an LLC just from a legal entity perspective, to control our interest in both of those two operations and it was Milestones LLC so, the fact you just inadvertently, randomly played that song just now, it’s pretty cool.
Elliot Moss
And I would love to say it was inadvertent but alas, no. Stuart, Stuart the producer has done his homework as usual and we kind of, we’d looked at the music thing and therefore, Miles did pop up. I do want to ask about music for a moment, I mean there’s a lot of things I want to cover and how you got into this crazy industry that you’re in but let’s just talk a moment about music and Miles Davis and why that was an important, a key influencer in the way that you constructed the experience in Eleven Madison Park, which for those people that don’t know, it was, is it still the Number 1 in the world or it was there for a while?
Will Guidara
No.
Elliot Moss
No. It was for a period of time, which is an extraordinary achievement. So, yeah, talk to me about Miles Davis for a moment.
Will Guidara
And Stuart, I apologise for questioning the level of intention you take to your work. Interestingly, okay, so I got to Eleven Madison Park in 2006, so it was a 2 start brasserie, we had these great ambitions to make it one of the best restaurants in New York, that was the extent of our ambition in the beginning and only a matter of months into my time there did we receive our first review and it came in the New York Observer, which is not a newspaper known for its restaurant reviews but I think anytime when you’re really trying to transform an organisation, you crave feedback from outside of your walls to give you some sense of whether everything you’re doing is working and so that review, we read word for word and it was actually a better review than we deserved at the time, I think we got 3.5 out 4 stars but at the very end the critic said, “I just wish the restaurant had a bit more Miles Davis in it” and it was one or those quotes where the first time you read it, you’re like, “what the…”, what does that even mean and you kind of move on but a couple of months later, I was in a season where I was craving language to articulate what we were trying to accomplish, something I learned from my former boss and mentor, Danny Meyer, he taught me many things but chief among the lessons was just the power of words, how being very intentional and choosing the words to define your core values and your non-negotiables are one of the most transformational ways to guide a group of people in the right direction. And at that point you said it in the introduction, our mission statement was to be the 4 star restaurant for the next generation but that only got us so far, I wanted more and so I started unpacking that line about Miles and reading everything I could about Miles Davis, not about him or his music but about the approach that he took to making the music and at the end we put together a team and read as much as we could came up with a list of the eleven words we found most commonly used to describe that approach. On the list were words like cool, vibrant, collaborative, endless reinvention, forward moving and that list and a giant picture of Miles Davis at a piano, smoking a cigarette, hang in our kitchen for the balance of my time there and it became our, our mission statement of sorts. Each of the words helping to guide an approach that we took. Cool, oh yeah, because if we wanted to be the 4 star restaurant for the next generation, it needed to be cooler than the others. Endless reinvention, we changed over and over and over again, not for the sake of change but because I don’t believe that restaurant could be great unless it was a genuine reflection of who we were and what we wanted to receive and I grew up in that restaurant and so as I changed, the restaurant needed to as well. And collaborative, well, everything we did was to create a culture of ownership, not only for the people we worked with but also for those we served and, yes, so Miles Davis gave us a lot of gifts.
Elliot Moss
And that’s a pretty good articulation of the Miles Davis approach.
Your, your relationship with hospitality is twofold as I can see it, one is obviously your dad and the business and you growing up as a kid and the other one is, as I’ve read about your mum and the welcome. I kept coming back to this welcoming woman, this incredible woman, in spite of all the things that she was suffering from, from a medical perspective. Just talk to me a little bit about the confluence of the professional and the personal as it relates to the welcome for Will Guidara.
Will Guidara
When I was four, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. They caught the tumour early enough that they were able to save her life effectively, but, and they removed the tumour but radiation treatment at the time was not nearly as refined as it is now and what that led to was over the course of five, six, seven years, the radiation damage ultimately rendered her into a quadriplegic. At that same time, my dad was in the restaurant business. I grew up in restaurants and watching him work restaurant hours, which anyone who doesn’t know that that means, it means a lot of hours. Watching him, in addition to that, take care of her and by that I mean, get her out of bed, put her in the wheelchair, shower her, dress her, feed her, go to work, come home, do the entire thing in reverse and in addition to those two things, still be an exceptional father to me. He was my hero growing up and it didn’t matter what he did for a living, that’s what I would have wanted to do. Just so it turned out that I fell in love with restaurants. I think restaurants were just beautiful, beautiful things. There are few places in life where you can walk into a room and see all of life’s experiences happening within the same four walls simultaneously, there is an energy, there’s a controlled chaos, there’s an artistry. I just love restaurants. But also watching him and the way he responded as he cared for her, well that made me fall in love with hospitality. I often say that hospitality is selfish pleasure and never once did I see my dad feel bad for himself. In fact, to the contrary, well, both of us in a heartbeat would have changed how things happened if we could. I saw him derive significant and genuine pleasure when he cared for her and we were a team, I had to take care of her too and I felt that same thing. And so it was very early in life that I decided to go into restaurants and it was around the same time, through caring for my mother that I knew that it was going to be my focus on caring for people in those restaurants that would define my career. Now, my mom, at the same time, in spite of the fact that she cannot walk or talk or really do much of anything, she could still smile and when I would get home from work, I mean mind you, she’s a mother who’s a quadriplegic and what that means is that I was the only thing in life that she had to look forward to. My dad often says that one of the secrets to happiness is always having something to look forward to. I was that for her. And when I walked into that house every day at the end of school or if she greeted me at the end of the street, she’d have her nurse push her in the wheelchair to the end of the street so she could see me riding my bike home. The way that her smile and the vibrancy of her eyes made me feel welcome, showed me what a powerful impact you can have on others even without saying a single word. And so I learned so much from the two of them in dramatically different ways but each of them have well, truly made me who I am.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my guest, it’s Will Guidara here on Jazz Shapers, and what a privilege it is too.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop the words ‘Jazz’ and ‘Shapers’, I know it’s complicated, into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Will Guidara, restaurateur, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, Number 1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list not that long ago and author of ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’, his tales of service and leadership. I’m always sceptical about the big story that people say, oh you’ve got to talk about the big story but in this case, this is so, if you don’t know the story, you need to hear, it. Talk to me about the hotdog and what that has, what that symbolises about the way that you approach the world of hospitality.
Will Guidara
So, we’re talking about words and being intentional in your choice of words and at a certain point in our trajectory, I articulated Unreasonable Hospitality that that would be our impact. That’s funny, sometimes you start pursuing something without a clear sense of what it is, which by the way, I think is a good thing, I think way too often people spend so much time trying to perfectly understand an idea that they never start pursuing it.
Elliot Moss
I totally agree with you and iteration is the king and the queen of how you get to cool things. What was it about Unreasonable Hospitality when you coined it that you liked and understood about it?
Will Guidara
Why, I knew I wanted to be Number 1 in the world and I recognised that okay, it’s crazy to say one restaurant is the best restaurant in the world. What earning the top spot on that list actually means is that you’re having the greatest impact on the world of restaurants and every time I’ve set out to accomplish an audacious goal, I like to study those that have accomplished it before me, take lessons from them and make them my own and have a go at it. And so I spent time thinking about those restaurants that had earned that Number 1 spot, places like El Bulli in Spain and Noma in Copenhagen, restaurants run by chefs who were unreasonable in pursuit of the food they were serving, their product. And relentless in pursuit of innovation, whether it was through the techniques they were using, the equipment that they were using, the ingredients they were sourcing and in that relentlessness, they moved the craft forward and inspired how restaurants around the world cooked. I decided I wanted to make my impact, not by being unreasonable in pursuit of product and relentless in pursuit of it needed to change but by being unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is our human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging or just a general, collective need to feel loved. And so I wrote those two words down, unreasonable hospitality. And spent the next couple of years with my team, trying to figure out what that really meant, how that manifested itself into our culture and then one day, I was in the dining room in a busier than normal lunch service, the team was getting crushed and so I ran out from the office into the dining room, started clearing plates to help them out and find myself clearing appetisers from a table of four foodies who were on vacation to New York and they were there only to eat at great restaurants, in fact, this was their last meal, they were going directly to the airport to head back home afterwards and while I was clearing their plates, I overheard them talking about their amazing meals, they’d been to Daniel, Per Se, Jean-Georges, Le Bernadin, some of the best restaurants in the city. But then one woman jumped in and said, “Yeah but you know we never had, we never had a hotdog from one of those street carts” and you know on the cartoon with the lightbulb when it goes off over the character’s head, you know they’ve had a good idea and so, I went back into the kitchen, dropped off the plates and then ran outside to the hotdog cart, bought a hotdog, ran back inside, then came the very hard part which was convincing my very fancy chef to serve it in our very fancy restaurant but I convinced him to trust me and we cut the hotdog up into four perfect pieces and added a little swish of ketchup and a swish of mustard and a perfect little quenelle, which is French for fancy scoop, of sauerkraut and relish to each plate and made them look super fancy and then before their final savoury course, which at the time was our signature honey, lavender glazed Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks, using a technique that had taken us years to perfect, I brought out what we in New York call a ‘dirty water dog’ to the table. And Elliot, there are not words to fully articulate the extent to which they freaked out. I mean, I had been serving food my entire career and by the way, the fancy stuff, lobster, Wagyu beef, foie gras, truffles, caviar, I’d never seen anyone react to anything I’d served them like they did to that hotdog. You know, athletes always go to the tapes when they’ve had a bad game. They do so to identify what mistakes they’ve made so that they don’t repeat them. What they don’t do often enough, what none of us do often enough is go to the tapes when we’ve had a good game, to see what we did well to make sure we keep on doing that thing until you put intention to intuition. And so I went to the tapes on the hotdog. What happened to make that happen and what could we all start doing to make sure it happened all the time? And there was three things. First, was being present, which is annoyingly overused these days but in hospitality, I think it’s essential. For me, it just means caring so much about the person you’re with that you stop caring about everything else you need to do which these days, with our phones there’s perpetual distractions and our ever growing to do list can be very challenging but if I hadn’t been present at the table, I never would have heard that line about the hotdog. Second, it required this idea that yeah, if you want to be great at anything, you’d better take what you do seriously and also, we all need to stop taking ourselves so seriously and way too often, we just, we let our brand tell us that we’re not allowed to do things that will make our key stakeholders happy. I mean a hotdog in a 4 start restaurant is most definitely off brand. By the way, you’re hearing New York City in the background for whoever’s out there, you’re welcome. But who cares if it’s off brand once you look at the way that it made them feel? And third, listen, I like to redefine the word ‘hospitality’ every year or so, I think if you believe in something, the better you are at articulating it, the better you become at compelling those around you to embrace it. One of my favourite definitions of hospitality is that it is about making people feel seen and if that’s the case, the best way to do it is not to treat them like a commodity, it’s not one size fits all, the best way to do it is to treat them like unique individuals in unreasonable hospitality, one size fits one. Finally, we had identified what it meant to be unreasonable. The hotdog was our true north into those three things, We had a road map and that hotdog really opened the doors for everything we did next.
Elliot Moss
Disappointing you didn’t get there in Day 1 but I suppose you got there in the end, Will. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper today, the brilliant Will Guidara describing how that process is okay, hang with it even if you don’t quite understand the brilliance that you’ve alighted on.
The hurly-burly of running the restaurant is one thing. The ability to step back and actually articulate what you do and what you want your team to do is another thing and now that you’re not, and that’s as far as I know, tell me if this is wrong, you’re not currently in the hurly-burly, what’s the mind space for Will? What is Will really enjoying? And does Will miss, do you miss that day-to-day application of the theory into the practice?
Will Guidara
You are correct, I am not in the hurly-burly right now. And for sure, I think it’s okay to miss something and not be ready to re-engage with it and that is the case with me now, I love restaurants and there are plenty of things I miss about running a restaurant and leading a team and I will do that again, although I’m enjoying this season in between seasons right now, where, where I get to actually impact a lot more people.
Elliot Moss
Talk to me a bit about that because obviously the hospitality mantra is really a mantra for any service business, whether it’s a law firm, whether it’s a bank, whether it's any kind of retail. Talk to me about the transferability of the unreasonable genetic model as it applies to humans in other businesses and how is that going for you?
Will Guidara
Well, that’s, that’s my whole point, I mean, listen the thesis of the book can be broken down into two sentences. One, it’s an encouragement to everyone out there to be a bit more creative and intentional in how you pursue relationships and it is me saying that I don’t care what you do for a living, you can make the choice to be in the hospitality industry simply by deciding to care as much about how you make people feel as you likely already care about whatever product you are selling those people. Eleven Madison Park ultimately became Number 1 not because of our food or the quality of our service. Yes, they were all exceptional and they needed to be because excellence is a prerequisite to the stuff I’m talking about but I believe that if you want to truly be best in class, excellence is just table sticks. We became Number 1 because we were as unreasonable in pursuit of how we made people feel as every other restaurant on that list was solely in pursuit of the food they were selling and I believe that whatever you do for a living, listen, you ultimately are in the business of serving people and we all have this beautiful opportunity, perhaps even responsibility to take that part of our jobs more seriously and over the past couple of years since this book came, you name an industry, I’ve spent time with them, whether it’s professional sports or law firms or real estate companies or insurance or lawn care companies or luxury retail, car companies, everything in between, people who believe as I do that hospitality not only feels frickin’ good to give and receive but is also one of the most exceptional competitive advantages any organisation can have.
Elliot Moss
We’ll have my final chat with my guest today, Will Guidara and we’ve got a once lost, recently released James Brown recording, it is of course fantastic and that’s all coming up in just a moment, do not go anywhere, he says politely.
Will Guidara is with me just for a few more minutes. I’ve kind of joked about the Jimmy Fallon thing and the appearance and the book that I’ve read that people have heard of. I’ve watched The Bear, which is about, if you haven’t watched it, it’s about a restaurant or about a brother who lost a brother with a cousin who are trying to make this restaurant fabulous and it leans into, as they say in the parlance, it leans into the unreasonable nature of the mantra of the book, there’s even a scene where the book is being, you will see Richie, the cousin, cousin, he’s called, not even ‘the cousin’, just cousin, Richie is reading the book, there are moments when your hotdog is I think a load of beers that are brought, it’s like a wheeled crate of beers, there’s that sense of it coming to life. What’s it like to have that, and I think in restaurateurs there is this sense you want to know that someone says at the end of the evening, “Will, that was an amazing evening, the food was wonderful, the atmosphere was brilliant”, you want the pat on the back and I don’t mean that in a superficial way, you want to be thanked, you want people to be grateful. What’s it like having kind of public, really much wider than the restaurant, this public sense of there’s this guy, he was the restaurant guy and now he’s talking kind of everywhere. Do you enjoy that or is there something else going on for you when you see it and you see your book on telly?
Will Guidara
I mean it’s surreal, for sure. The book was in The Bear as you said, it was quote on Billions, the Fallon stuff, Drew Barrymore, it’s kind of been everywhere and, and I didn’t necessarily expect that to happen. I wrote the book initially because I was in a transition in my career and I think sometimes one of the best ways to help you decide what you want to do next is to re-walk the road you’ve just been down, not to mention the fact that if you force yourself to articulate the things that you believe are important and how you do your job, it only makes you that much more better to do those things in the future. And then I released it and it did all these things. I mean, yeah, it feels, it feels great and yeah, there’s the initial rush of just feeling like it’s cook, right, but when you really love hospitality, the reason you love it is because you love impacting individuals, you love making people’s day a little bit better. In my old life, I was impacting the end-user, for sure hoping that if I was really kind to people that they would go out and pay that kindness forward and in some small way I could help make the world a nicer place. In my new world and being on The Bear and all these other things, just amplifies the message I’m hoping to impact people who have the capacity to impact so many more that if I can perhaps use some of the language I’ve accrued over the course of my career either through my own discovery or through having learned these things from some amazing mentors along the way. If I can use that to make people just a little bit better at pursuing graciousness upon others then the impact becomes material and I think we all have the ability to make impact in different ways and I’m finding such joy and fulfilment in the impact I’m having the ability to make now.
Elliot Moss
It’s been brilliant to talk to you, Will, thank you. I’m sure everyone wants to have impact and you are having it. You’re also lucky enough because it’s not, it’s a little superficial but it’s fun, you’re there advising the production team as they produce the next series of The Bear. I bet that’s fun.
Will Guidara
It’s been so fun.
Elliot Moss
Enjoy it.
Will Guidara
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
I bet it’s fun and then you can see it and I mean, they got it right last time so I’m hoping you make it even more right, otherwise…
Will Guidara
Don’t mess it up.
Elliot Moss
Don’t mess it up this time for us please. Listen, have a fabulous day in New York City. Just before I let you disappear into it though, what is your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Will Guidara
My song choice is Jon Batiste cover of What a Wonderful World. Jon Batiste is someone that long before he was on Colbert and winning all those Grammies, we used to do impromptu concerts with him in the dining room at Eleven Madison Park after we closed and this particular song is an important one because towards the end of my run at Eleven Madison Park, my business partner and I were, were no longer in love, it was time for us to stop working together and as we were going through the process of figuring out how to divide a company which was far bigger than Eleven Madison Park at that time, we had restaurants across America and in Europe, this process went on and on and on and suddenly, I started to feel like we were breaking apart the very thing we’d spent so many of our years of our lives building and I didn’t know what right looked like and one night we did an event at Eleven Madison Park to raise money for this charity that we were involved with and Neil Patrick Harris was the MC and Jon Batiste came and played the piano and my wife was out of town and so I went home, and this was right in the thick of it, and I poured myself I call ‘them shift glass size’ glasses of wine, big glass of wine, and put that song on repeat and I must have listened to that song for probably four hours. Sometimes a song, when you hear the right song in exactly the right moment, it can help you make some of the most important decisions of your life and that song helped me clarify what right actually did look like, that instead of being selfish and trying to hold onto pieces of a company, I knew that I more than anyone could build something new and maybe the best way to show love for the hundreds and hundreds of people that worked for me was to just let it go. And the next morning, I woke up and made a call and that’s exactly what I did. And so whether this song resonates with you in the way that it did me, who knows but for me, this song shows the power of a song.
Elliot Moss
Jon Batiste with his take on What a Wonderful World, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Will Guidara. He talked about the power of words, which I absolutely love. The eleven words he alighted on from trying to be more Miles Davis, in particular that sense of endless reinvention. He talked about the importance of being more creative and intentional about how you pursue relationships, a really, really simple way of articulating such an important thing. Care as much about you make people feel as the quality of product. How often do we overlook that. And finally, that sense of if you are in a transition, re-walk the road that you have just been down. Re-walk it so that you can work out what the next step should look like. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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