Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

by Will Guidara

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

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

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.

For most of this country’s history, America functioned as a manufacturing economy; now, we’re a service economy, and dramatically so—more than three-quarters of our GDP comes from service industries.

“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.”

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

cool kids tend to be the underachievers. Cool kids don’t study;

When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don’t have to hide your passions—you

you don’t have to dim your light to succeed.

I started listening to more Miles Davis, both inside the restaurant and out. Once I was more familiar with his music, I read everything I could find about Miles and about his creative process—specifically what other musicians said about the approach he took to making music and how that process resulted in the enormous impact he had on the form.

If we were serious about every detail, then everyone’s perspective and vantage point would be valuable.

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on a person’s very first day: 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.

people don’t notice every single individual detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful. In any great business, most of the details you closely attend to are ones that only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will notice.

walking into a thoughtfully organized room can lower your blood pressure,

a culture of excellence was taking root when, as people grew and moved up through the ranks, they took on the mission of transmitting that culture to newcomers.

Saying sorry, I reminded the team, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

people usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with.

Managers, especially

When you set a goal for your team and fail to achieve it, you run the risk of damaging morale—and

We often spoke about the bubble we were working to create around each table.

A leader doesn’t have to know the details of every plan when they have faith in the people who work for them.

Rao’s, which opened in 1896 and serves homestyle Italian American food in Harlem, is a New York institution.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar,

There is, by the way, no better way for a leader to figure out why an idea isn’t working—or how it can work better—than to walk a mile in the shoes of the people you’ve charged with implementing that idea.

It wasn’t until I’d shown myself to be vulnerable that the people I was serving allowed me to see their vulnerability.

If a stumble at the end of a meal can undo all the goodwill a restaurant has earned in the three hours preceding it, then a gorgeous, gracious gesture at the end can have the opposite effect.

old-school fine-dining restaurants didn’t permit staff to dine in at their restaurants at all.

The only thing a rule like this does is tell the people who work so tirelessly for you that’s all they are: the help.

You have to trust your gut—and what you feel when you’re in the room with people,

Discernment

Brainstorm materials it would be useful to have on hand, organize those materials on-site so that staff can readily access them, and empower the people who work for you to use them. Do that, and you’ve systemized improvisational hospitality.

There are inflection points—patterns—in every business.

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.

César Ritz ran the Hotel Splendide in Paris in the 1870s and introduced the robber barons of America to European luxury. In Monte Carlo, he met a French chef called Auguste Escoffier,

When you’re trying to level up, it’s easy to psych yourself out by focusing on everything you don’t know.