t is a book about how to treat people. How to listen. How to be curious. And how to learn to love the feeling of making others feel welcome. It is a book about how to make people feel like they belong

Most people think of hospitality as something they do. Will thinks about service as an act of service—about how his actions make people feel

The techniques that Spanish chef Ferran Adrià pioneered at El Bulli introduced molecular gastronomy to the world.

ené Redzepi championed foraged and wild-caught foods from the land and water surrounding his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, and a local food movement was born

We hadn’t done that yet. We’d worked our butts off to earn a spot on that list, but what, really, had we done that was groundbreaking? The more we talked, the more it became clear: nothing.

Our restaurant was excellent and made a lot of people happy. But it hadn’t yet changed the conversation

Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I smoothed out the napkin and added two more words: “Unreasonable Hospitality.

I now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we’re trying to build? Do they have integrity; are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself—and my team—happily spending a lot of time with?

But before I had the experience to let the conversation flow, one of my favorite questions to ask was, “What’s the difference between service and hospitality?”

Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that’s hospitality.

no one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable.

you need to be unreasonable to see a world that doesn’t yet exist

The answer is simple, if not easy: create a culture of hospitality. Which means addressing questions I’ve spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?

These people believed, as I do, that how they served their clients was as valuable as what they served

What I did know was that the Four Seasons was the fanciest and most beautiful place I’d ever been in my life.

“People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”

he could no longer speak or get up to give me a hug, but she could be there with a huge smile on her face when I got home from school. That smile was all I needed, and it taught me an invaluable lesson—what it’s like to feel truly welcomed

I didn’t have much in the way of resources, but I was going to make sure they had a great time

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in six years, my mother was able to speak intelligibly. “You graduated?” she asked me, and I told her I had. We talked easily and for a long time. I didn’t have to strain to understand her, and she didn’t have to struggle to speak.

I thought of my mom’s funeral immediately when he said that, because that was exactly what we did that night. The party was perfect; she would have loved it

As anyone who has lost someone important knows, the days immediately after a huge loss can get very dark. Visiting relatives go home, the casseroles stop coming, and the immediate family is left alone. The shock wears off, and grief sets in

People wait months for reservations at Daniel, but the email I got back could not have been more gracious: “I would love to have you. You welcomed me into your home; now I will welcome you into mine.

As we tasted the delicious food, drank the superb wines, and experienced the warmth of Daniel’s hospitality, I watched years of exhaustion and pain lift from my dad’s face.

I had already happily chosen a life in restaurants, but that night, I learned how important, how noble, working in service can be. During a terribly dark time, Daniel and his staff offered my dad and me a ray of light in the form of a meal neither one of us will ever forget.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business

we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

This might seem like a crazy thing to ask a thirteen-year-old kid, but my dad was incredibly intentional with his parenting, as with everything in his life.

. For my father, intentionality wasn’t a luxury or business philosophy; it was a requirement.

Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters.

Tabla, in a smaller, adjacent space, was the most exciting Indian restaurant in the country.

The cornerstone of the company’s culture was a philosophy Danny called Enlightened Hospitality, which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else, including the guests and the investors

“It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits. You can always take it down a notch later, but it’s harder to go the other way.

Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little, making sure that everything’s perfect—and they smile, too

They primed every one of us to seek out new ways to make our guests’ experiences a little more seamless, relaxing, and delightful. And so, the first time a guest mentioned she was going to have to get up, midmeal, to feed the meter a few blocks away, it was natural for us to offer to do that for her.

It was an act of hospitality that didn’t even take place within the walls of the restaurant! But this simple gift—worth fifty cents—blew people’s minds

Danny’s partner Richard Coraine would often tell us, “All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.” Randy was that person.

Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

“Athletic hospitality” meant always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making an already great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error).

I listened, as I always did, because my dad didn’t just give advice; he always took the time to explain why, a leadership skill I’ve always tried to emulate

ood and beverage costs average thirty cents out of every dollar a restaurant makes, and most of what lands in a walk-in won’t last more than a few days.

He’d saved the company an untold amount of money in twenty minutes, and without leaving his desk.

Our back-office efficiency meant that guy didn’t have to worry about the numbers and could go back to being a chef. We weren’t stealing his creativity; we were returning him to it.

whatever terrifying statistic you’ve heard about how many restaurants fail in the first year has a lot more to do with the people who open restaurants without understanding the business part of the business

I was working upstairs and downstairs, I had an almost preternatural sense for what the spreadsheets were telling me

I thought of him often, later in my career, when I was managing young people hungry for more responsibility or a bigger title. Hani hadn’t been doing me a disservice by making me wait; he had been forcing me to strengthen my foundation, a solid base I relied on for years afterward

I had learned from Hani that corporate-smart didn’t by definition stifle creativity. But that vase taught me that, left unchecked, it would.

in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

he didn’t mean it was only a manager’s job to take care of the hourly employees; it was everyone’s job to take care of everyone.

Every decision I made seemed to expose the natural tensions between improving the quality of the experience the guests were having and doing what was best for the business. Restaurant-smart meant leading with trust—including allowing the people who worked for me to do what they felt was best for the guests. Corporate-smart meant running a tight ship. Which was right?

This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5: Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.” It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.

My dad has always said: Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want.

Daniel and I had a vision for a fine-dining restaurant where we could have a good time without feeling like some grown-up was going to rap our knuckles for not sitting up straight. But we wanted to do it without sacrificing any of the exceptional amenities and glorious traditions of service that make a fine-dining meal so memorable and special

Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool. I’ve passed this advice on to those joining my own: no matter how talented you are, or how much you have to add, give yourself time to understand the organization before you try to impact it.

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.

The One Minute Manager to every person I promote. It’s an amazing resource, in particular on how to give feedback.

Your resentment festers, so by the time you eventually get around to addressing this unironed shirt issue with your employee, it feels personal—and emotional.

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear.

This is the ideal—but let’s be honest: every once in a while, you’re going to mess up. When you do, apologize.

When initiating change, I look for the best lever, whatever will allow me to transmit the most force with the least amount of energy. And there’s no better lever than a daily thirty-minute meeting with your team.

here would be no more ambiguity about what we expected the servers to know. All the menu and wine descriptions had to be carefully written out, edited, and spellchecked by the managers, who were expected to have their packets ready on time for the meeting so servers could take notes in the packet

Then I’d move into a quick riff on a topic that had inspired me. It could be an article I’d read about another company or a service experience I’d had somewhere else.

A tiny dose of generosity designed to—what? To surpass your expectations, to change your channel, maybe just to put a smile on your face as you were walking out the door.

In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another.

But we were already squandering momentum by trying to do too much too soon. We had to rebuild the engine before we could shift into fifth gear

manager’s biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

Over the years, though, I came to see my four-star inexperience not as a weakness but as a superpower. My inexperience enabled me to look critically at every step of service and to interrogate the only thing that mattered: the guests’ experience. Did a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, which was connecting with people? Or did it take us further from it?

You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.

I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time. Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect the tiny flame of their enthusiasm, that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out.

you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.

But the more we learned about Miles and the approach he took to his work, the more inspired we became about how we wanted to approach ours

I had learned from my dad the importance of intentionality— knowing what it is you’re trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal. From Danny, I’d learned the importance of articulating that intention to our team

Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others.

When companies expand, they often say, “The bigger we get, the smaller we have to act.” (This was a mantra at Shake Shack.) At EMP in the early days, we went the other way

Over time, our strategic planning meetings became brainstorming sessions, where we’d decide as a collective what we wanted to do in the year to come. But that first year, we posed only one question: What do we want to embody?

This inclusivity was important. At many of the companies we’d studied, strategic planning was reserved for upper management, but we included everybody on the team, from the assistant general manager and the chef de cuisine all the way to the dishwashers, prep cooks, and assistant servers, which is what we called our bussers

They broke into ten groups, scattered across the restaurant, each gathered around a notebook. I spent the day walking from group to group, noting as people got excited, argued, and laughed with one another. I dropped in but was careful not to contribute. This was their time

in order to succeed, we needed to be good at both. This wasn’t an either/or—it was an and. Later, I would learn that the management guru Roger Martin calls this “integrative thinking.” In When More Is Not Better, he argues that leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals

multiple conflicting goals force you to innovate.

hospitality and excellence. We would need to explore that contradiction and embrace it—integrating two opposing ideas and embodying both simultaneously

The moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality, you understand there’s nobility in it. We may not be saving people’s lives, but we do have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to—and I see that not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility, and a reason for pride.”

I genuinely believe that in restaurants we can give people a break from reality even just for a short time—and, as cheesy as it sounds, that we can make the world a better place. Because when you’re really, really nice to people, they’ll be really nice to others, who will in turn pay it forward.

it was easy for me to tell when someone was operating with passion and purpose. Many told me they sold houses; the great ones understood they were selling homes

Without exception, no matter what you do, you can make a difference in someone’s life. You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters. And if you’re a leader, you need to encourage everyone on your team to do the same

I was struck by the effortless way Thomas Keller seemed able to elevate a humble idea, like coffee and donuts, into an opulent surprise

Passion was one of the core values we’d committed to pursuing during our strategic planning meeting. And so the last thing I wrote in my journal after that epic dinner at Per Se was: “Jim should be in charge of our coffee program.”

Then, of course, there was Jim. In charge of coffee, he immediately switched our supplier to Intelligentsia, one of the best roasters at the time. He started making coffee tableside, giving our guests a choice between a classic Chemex pour-over or a vacuumpot siphon system, which combined the best attributes of the immersion and filter methods and had the added benefit of being thrilling to watch in action

Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, spoke eloquently at the Welcome Conference about the positive impact of giving his team more responsibility.

Our already stellar wine program got better because John had more time and energy and capacity to devote to it, while all those other programs, so inherently mediocre at so many other fine-dining restaurants, became absolutely best in class

And while many who stepped up happened to be knowledgeable about the area they’d chosen, they didn’t need to start out an expert. All we asked was that they be interested and curious and have the first inklings of a passion

Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready.

Those Happy Hours had an important side benefit. Normally, classes in a restaurant are led by the managers, not the staff, but as more and more members of the hourly team led classes, they acted more like leaders.

I learned one of the most important tenets of public speaking, which I follow to this day: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.

We saw an enormous difference in the team in the months after they started leading Happy Hours and Saturday pre-meals. I loved the way they talked to guests: after all, taking an order, helping a guest make a decision about wine, or spieling a course are all forms of public speaking.

So we used an act of mandatory collaboration to bring them into the fold. When a new reservationist was hired at Eleven Madison Park, we asked them right away to do one thing to make the reservationist’s office better

A lot of good comes from empowering the most junior staff.

We hired you for a reason. We know you have something to contribute, and we don’t want to wait to see what it is.

Great leaders make leaders. You don’t want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one—the key to the front door.

Excellence Is the Culmination of Thousands of Details Executed Perfectly

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and we found, over and over, that precision in the smallest of details translated to precision in bigger ones.

Frustrated, the Imagineers reminded him there would be hundreds of distracting elements in the Tiki Room, including waterfalls, lights, smoke, totem poles, and singing flowers—nobody was going to notice a single bird, whether it was breathing or not. To which Disney responded, “People can feel perfection.”

Just as walking into a thoughtfully organized room can lower your blood pressure, maybe that perfect tabletop would be enough to remind a flustered server that, no matter how badly in the weeds they felt, the sky was not falling.

If your job was to place that dish in front of the guest, you were the last link in a long chain of people who had invested many hours of work in that dish. If, in that final inch, a zucchini flower tumbled because of your carelessness, you were letting a lot of people down —including the guest, who’d trusted you with a few hours of their life in the expectation that you would blow their minds.

RELATIONSHIPS ARE SIMPLE. SIMPLE IS HARD.

Given everything we’d done to build a culture of collaboration, excellence, and leadership, we needed to learn how to embrace tension, too, or everything we’d built would be lost.

But you cannot establish any standard of excellence without criticism, so a thoughtful approach to how you correct people must be a part of your culture, too

The Five Love Languages, which delineates the five general ways people show and prefer to experience love. (They are: acts of service, gift-giving, physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation.

But sarcasm is always the wrong medium for a serious communication.

Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment.

Danny’s willingness to reevaluate that holiday policy was a reminder to me that no aspect of your business should be offlimits to reevaluation.

After that night, I started leveraging as much external affirmation for the team as I could

Not only did this ensure Kirk was getting the credit he so richly deserved, but it got everyone else on the team thinking, Wait a minute! I want that kind of recognition, too.

They were right, in a way; the more attention people got, the more job offers they got, too. But I prefer to make decisions based on hope, rather than fear.

As a leader, you have to use every single tool in your kit to build morale and keep it high.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent

Much is written about how leaders need to have the vision to look ahead; in my opinion, not enough is written about how leaders also need to have the awareness to look down, to see what’s really beneath their feet.

If adding another element to the experience means you’re going to do everything a little less well, walk it back. Do less, and do it well

The team was crushed and confused by the snub, and I learned there is no more difficult moment to be the head of a business than when there has been a massive disappointment.

Adversity,” he told me, “is a terrible thing to waste.”

In short, it was good that we’d figured out how to put our own oxygen masks on, because there wasn’t a lot of relaxation that year.

A magnitude of enchantment”! We had done it. We had four stars. And we’d earned them through our focus on excellence, but even more so because of our focus on hospitality . . . by being unapologetically us.

I knew I’d earned his trust when he finally told me to call him Gino. Informality is something you earn.

My strategy in situations like that is always to figure out who the highest performers are, study their approach, and try to emulate it.

I often describe “being present” as caring so much about what you’re doing that you stop caring about everything you need to do next.

We were no longer in the business of running an extraordinary restaurant; we were now in the business of human connection.

“I believe you can speak things into existence.” I know this for sure: if you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.

Full disclosure: there was still a podium. It was just around the corner from the entrance, so you wouldn’t see it when you walked in.

Removing the transactional feeling from the beginning of the meal had such a transformational impact on the experience that I wanted to take it a step further and remove it from the end of the meal as well.

Hospitality Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

It wasn’t until I’d shown myself to be vulnerable that the people I was serving allowed me to see their vulnerability. Is it an expression of vulnerability to say you don’t like an ingredient? I think it is—and the more open you demonstrate yourself to be, the more likely people are to be open with you

For us, Unreasonable Hospitality meant providing thoughtful, high-touch gestures for every one of our guests

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

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

I wanted to give as many of them as possible the gift of delight—the surprise that comes from being truly seen and heard.

But the hot dog was proof that we didn’t have to call in a furniture maker to blow someone’s mind. All we had to do was pay attention

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

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.

With the Legends, everyone in the dining room had an outlet, too—they weren’t just serving plates of other people’s creativity; they had the opportunity to infuse the experience with their own

The Dreamweaver idea may have originated with me, but it was the team who breathed life into it every day. The best part for me was scrolling through that private Instagram account and seeing idea after idea I’d had nothing to do with. I hadn’t conceived of the concepts; I hadn’t approved them. The team had come up with them independently and executed them so brilliantly that even I was inspired by them

Anyway, as a leader, you can’t rely solely on your spreadsheets. You have to trust your gut—and what you feel when you’re in the room with people, giving and receiving these gifts. Is there a traditional return on investment with a program like this?

It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness.

But, as oxymoronic as it may seem, you can also be proactive about improvisational hospitality. This is simple pattern recognition: identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort.

the value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels.

Opportunities for Hospitality Exist in Every Business

eople often confuse hospitality with luxury, but I could have given that table a bottle of vintage Krug and a kilo of caviar, and it wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.

it may not be logistically possible for everyone to receive an experience that requires improvisation and bespoke, in-the-moment creation. Building a tool kit is a way to scale those extraordinary experiences, so that as many people as possible can experience these small, special touches.

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.

And you should always—always—be on the lookout for the Legend

Gifts are a way to tell people you saw, heard, and recognized them—that you cared enough to listen, and to do something with what you heard. A gift transforms an interaction, taking it from transactional to relational; there is no better way than a gift to demonstrate that someone is more than a customer or a line item on a spreadsheet. And the right one can help you to extend your hospitality all the way into someone’s life.

Creativity is an active process, not a passive one.

As you grow, you can’t lose the very thing that gave you the opportunity to grow.

At the beginning, the Field Manual took the form of bound photocopies, but a couple of years later, we hired a designer and had a little red book printed, which would allow us to welcome our new employees with the same warmth and energy that we welcomed our guests

If you’ve ever launched a new business, you know there aren’t enough hours in the day. For months, I was at the NoMad pretty much every minute I was awake (and, since it was a hotel, quite a few non-waking ones, too)

There is such power when a leader can admit to their mistakes and apologize for them. The idea that you’re not going to make any errors is criminally stupid—as is the idea that if you don’t own up to an error, nobody will notice you’ve made one. As hard as it is to hold yourself accountable publicly, it strengthens the bond between you and your team, because if you’re willing to stand up and criticize yourself, people will always be more willing to receive criticism from you.

Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready. So long as they are hungry, they will work even harder to prove that you made the right decision.

: Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable.

Once again, the guy known for talking about how much he trusted his team had acted as if he didn’t trust them at all

Like excellence and hospitality, these two qualities— control and trust—are not friends

All I can do is stay aware, so my superpower doesn’t turn into my villain origin story. And when I do (inevitably) screw up, I need to fix the mistake quickly and with as little ego as possible

Unreasonable Hospitality was no longer something that mattered only to us; it was starting to matter in our industry.

After seven years of hard work, creativity, a maniacal attention to detail, and a truly unreasonable dedication to hospitality, Eleven Madison Park was named the best restaurant in the world

This next year is going to be one of the most challenging of your life. You’re going to be faced with countless difficult decisions. Every time you find yourself at a crossroads, I want you to ask yourself what ‘right’ looks like, then do that.”

field to luxury retail to real estate and beyond. All of them recognize the remarkable power of giving the people on their teams and their customers more than they expect, and every one of them has chosen to be unreasonable in that pursuit. All of them have made the decision to join the hospitality economy—and I hope you will, too