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

by Will Guidara

On its surface, this is a book about a talented entrepreneur who helped transform a middling brasserie in New York City into the best restaurant in the world. However, this book is much bigger and more important than that. It 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.

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

“Black and white” means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; “color” means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. 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.

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?

hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.

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

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones. Most important, we have an opportunity—a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

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. To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.

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.

“All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm.”

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

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.

You’re not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you’ve got to start by listening.

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

Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.

Receiving praise, especially in front of your peers, is addictive. You always want more.

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

the way you do one thing is the way you do everything,

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

Ultimately, this is one of a manager’s biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

Most of the time, excellent training makes you better at what you do.

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

“The bigger we get, the smaller we have to act.”

I wanted our team members to understand that hospitality elevates service not only for the person receiving it, but for the person delivering it.

It’s the difference between coming to work to do a job and coming to work to be a part of something bigger than yourself.

“Success comes in cans; failure comes in can’ts.”

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.

public speaking is a leadership skill.

The best way to introduce a new employee to your culture is to have them work side by side with someone who believes in it.

Excellence Is the Culmination of Thousands of Details Executed Perfectly

It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly.

The servers knew the menu backward and forward—where the components for each dish came from and how exactly they were prepared. This is an example of how being unreasonable in the pursuit of excellence made us more hospitable.

After the host brought you to the table, the captain would hand you menus and ask about your water preference. Moments later, and without any visible communication—often before the captain had even left the table—your server would be at the table, pouring your preferred water choice. It wasn’t magic; the captain had discreetly signaled your preference to one of their colleagues using a hand gesture (wiggled fingers for bubbles, a straight chop for still, and a twist of the fist for ice) behind their back.

These subtleties were hidden from the guests, but every single one of them contributed to the overall feeling of comfort and serenity that people enjoyed while they were dining with us.

The Way You Do One Thing Is the Way You Do Everything

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.

To which Disney responded, “People can feel perfection.”

“Their perception is our reality.”

it doesn’t matter whether the steak is rare or medium rare. If the guest’s perception is that it’s undercooked, the only acceptable response is, “Let me fix it.” And true hospitality means going one step further and doing everything you can to make sure the situation doesn’t repeat itself—in

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

It’s easy to be someone’s partner during the good times, but it’s most important during the hard ones,

It reminded me of our wise guest’s advice: drink your best bottle not on your best day but on your worst.

In my experience, people usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with.

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.

Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment

The people you work with will never be your actual family. That doesn’t mean that you can’t work harder to treat them like family, which may mean tweaking one of the great management sayings out there, which is “Hire slow and fire fast.”

If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they’ll never be fully known by the people around them.

“The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.”