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Second, Bryan wrote that the sensitive design made Union Square Cafe feel like “part of the neighborhood, not something imposed on it.”
For nearly twenty years, until the opening of The Modern on West Fifty-third Street, all my restaurants were within a ten-minute walk of one another and my apartment—and I made it my business to visit every one of them during lunch.
A friend once told me a story about an athletic display by Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. My friend, who is a very successful businessman—and, I should note, a Democrat—opened an office in Florida with about forty employees. On the day the company was incorporated, out of the blue, he received a personal phone call from Governor Bush (whom he had never met) thanking him for doing business in Florida.
I encourage each manager to take ten minutes a day to make three gestures that exceed expectations and take a special interest in our guests.
DESPITE HIGH-TECH ENHANCEMENTS, RESTAURANTS will always remain a hands-on, high-touch, people-oriented business. Nothing will ever replace shaking people’s hands, smiling, and looking them in the eye as a genuine means of welcoming them. And that is why hospitality—unlike widgets—is not something you can stamp out on an assembly line. But its powerful impact can be taught, and teaching it with hundreds of colleagues is the best way I’ve found to extend my reach.
My ultimate mission for any new restaurant is always to begin with a subject I love, zero in on what I enjoy most about it, and then envision a new context for it.
how we expressed hospitality to one another. (Who ever wrote the rule that the customer is always first?) And then, in descending order, our next core values would be to extend gracious hospitality to our guests, our community, our suppliers, and finally our investors.
We had made a fundamental mistake by trying to extend an original brand without having first established the core brand.
We submitted our proposal as operators in collaboration with the Madison Square Park Conservancy with the understanding that the kiosk itself would be built with funds raised through a philanthropic campaign (allowing us to own the business, and the conservancy and city to be our landlords) and that we would pay rent as a percentage of our sales to both the Madison Square Park Conservancy and the New York Department of Parks and Recreation.
The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.
Our staff performance reviews weigh both technical job performance (49 percent) and emotional job performance (51 percent)—how staff members perform their duties and how they relate to others on a personal level.
dazzling sparkle from within.
If a staff member is having personal trouble, and wakes up angry, nervous, depressed, or anxious, he or she needs to recognize and deal with the mood. It does not serve anyone’s purposes to project that mind-set into the work environment or onto one’s colleagues. We call that “skunking.” A skunk may spray a predator when it feels threatened, but everyone else within two miles has to smell the spray, and these others may assume that the skunk actually had it in for them. It’s not productive to work with a skunk, and it’s not enjoyable to be served by one either. In a business that depends on
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Our frontline managers arrange for trails in each job category. Most prospective employees go through four, five, or six trails, during meal periods and often trail with a different waiter or cook each time. For each trail after the first, there is a specific and increasingly advanced list of what needs to be learned and accomplished during that session. Trails begin with a physical orientation to the restaurant and culminate with “taking a station” while being closely monitored by the trainer. Trailers are paid for their shifts, whether they’re hired or not. In the dining room, our guests can
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hospitalitarians
“Thanks, but I just got a great offer from the Red Sox and I’m taking the job with them.” Is your immediate reaction “Shit, we blew it!” Or, “Whew, we’ve dodged a bullet!” Ask yourself. Sometimes I’ll go too far down the road in a hiring situation with someone who isn’t quite right for our team. I am still amazed at how often I have felt enormous relief when someone we’ve actively pursued ends up taking another job. This leaves me asking myself how I let the interviewing process get so far in the first place?
51 percent of any raise or bonus is set by how they’re faring at the emotional skills necessary to do their job well, and 49 percent is tied to technical performance.
In addition to instituting an athletic hiring strategy, it’s critical to be a champion at retaining top
staff members. A business owner can too easily squander the winning edge that comes from fielding a great team by not treating its members with respect and trust, teaching them new skills, and offering clear challenges.
The idea is to attain a balance: hiring people who are naturally upbeat and genuine but who are also high-level achievers capable of delivering excellence. We make it clear to our employees that we’re going to give them a great troupe of positive, hopeful colleagues to work with, with whom they can
feel mutual respect and trust, and with whom they will be asked to achieve lofty goals.
Participating in this competition struck me as an interesting way to build pride among my servers
I offered $50 to anyone who wrote an essay of at least 1,000 words—no matter how good or poor it was. I offered $100 to the writers of the five essays I felt were our strongest. And I’d pay $250 to the writer of the essay I thought was the best.
I was tormented because what had initially seemed like such an uplifting idea was backfiring.
I have continued to view people who work for me as volunteers.
“You could all be doing what you do anywhere else,” I say. “But you chose to be with us. You have volunteered to be on our team, and we owe it to you to provide you with much more than just a paycheck in return. We want you to feel certain you have made a wise choice in joining our company.”
THREE HALLMARKS OF EFFECTIVE leadership are to provide a clear vision for your business so that your employees know where you’re taking them; to hold people accountable for consistent standards of excellence; and to communicate a well-defined set of cultural priorities and nonnegotiable values.
It’s my job, and consequently the job of every other leader in my company, to teach everyone who works for us to distinguish center from off center and always to set things right.
The biggest mistake managers can make is neglecting to set high standards and hold others accountable. This denies employees the chance to learn and excel. Employees do not want to be told, “Let me make your life easier by enabling you not to learn and not to achieve anything new.”
flip the traditional organizational chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on. Ultimately, our cooks, servers, reservationists, coat checkers, and dishwashers are then in the best possible position to serve our guests.
It’s delusional to think that the day-to-day performance of your business is anything other than a reflection of how motivated (or unmotivated) your managers make your line employees feel. It was suddenly imperative for us to give priority to the development, education, and coaching of managers.
employees first, guests second, community third, suppliers fourth, and investors fifth,
Some restaurants, unfortunately, offer inexpensive fare and propose very limited menu options as a way to manage costs and do a bit better than break even on a three-course meal. We take the opposite approach. I am convinced that if you’re going to offer a gift, it’s important to give it graciously. We approach Restaurant Week by offering a generous number of choices for the appetizer, main course, and dessert, representing considerably more than $20 worth of food and quality. The point is to make people feel a sense of abundance and value.
In several of our restaurants, we go a step further. As the already-low check is dropped, each guest at the table is presented with a thank-you note as well as a gift certificate to welcome him or her back for lunch at another time. (In 2005, for example, we presented each guest with a “come back” lunch certificate for $20.05.) At this point, guests are thinking, “They’ve already offered an outstanding lunch for $20.05, and now they’re giving me a $20.05 gift certificate to return!” And return they do.
It often happens that bosses who rule through fear are actually very good at teaching skills. You never need to wonder what’s expected of you when you work for an ironfisted boss. When they drive people with excellent skills out the door, some of those talented people find a haven working for a company that welcomes them and encourages them to contribute and thrive. Happily, they often come to us.
command respect. Demanding respect creates tension that can make it very tough to lead, and very uncomfortable to follow. Strong technical skills are usually the reason most people get their first or second promotion. But the higher you climb the ladder of power, the less technical skills count and the more significant emotional skills become.
“Opening this new restaurant,” I said, “might be the worst mistake I’ve ever made.” Stanley set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, “So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”
We call that “writing a great last chapter.” Whatever mistake happened, happened. And the person on the receiving end will naturally want to tell anyone who’s interested all about it. That’s to be expected. While we can’t erase what happened, we do have the power to write one last episode so that at least the story ends the way we want.
THE FIVE A’S FOR EFFECTIVELY ADDRESSING MISTAKES
Always write a great last chapter. People love to share stories of adversity. Use this powerful force to your advantage by writing the closing statement the way you want it told. Use all your imagination and creativity in thinking about your response.
Contrary to my belief that you get more by giving more, they were concerned about how to get screwed less by protecting yourself more.
We also conduct a monthly dining-voucher program for all staff members with at least three months’ tenure that allows them to dine at any of our restaurants using a credit. The catch is that in exchange for the credit, employees must answer a detailed questionnaire about their dining experience.
Those people can come across either as agents or as gatekeepers. An agent makes things happen for others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We’re looking for agents, and our staff members are responsible for monitoring their own performance: In that transaction, did I present myself as an agent or a gatekeeper? In the world of hospitality, there’s rarely anything in between.
I hear noise the way a good chef tastes salt: too much is overbearing; too little can be stifling. Guests are equally uncomfortable whether they have to shout to be heard or are required to speak in self-concious, hushed tones in order not to have their conversation heard by other tables.
beyond cooking your food and doing the dishes, a restaurant must provide a public social environment that distinguishes it from the experience of eating at home.
I’m not pleased when tables are so close together that it’s impossible to have any kind of private conversation with your companions. That’s one of the most inhospitable things a restaurant can do to
To this day, between May and October our chefs and sous-chefs (from each of our restaurants as well as Hudson Yards Catering) buy between 80 percent and 90 percent of all of our fruit and vegetables at the greenmarket.
In their ability to nourish and nurture, and to provide a buoyant place for human beings to be with one another, and to smile, restaurants—as a healing agent—seemed more relevant than ever.
But anytime I hear or sense “trendy” (as opposed to “enduring”) as an important aspect of what’s going
on, my antennae go up. It all comes down to knowing what you stand for and putting your product in the proper context.
