4 Lessons From Will Guidara On 'Unreasonable Hospitality'

Eleven Madison Park is one of the best restaurants in the world. But it’s not just world-renowned for its food, which is indeed exquisite, or the space, which is beautiful. For anyone who has had the good fortune of dining there, what makes it truly special is the outstanding hospitality experience, which was instilled, cultivated, and perfected by restaurateur Will Guidara.

While Guidara no longer co-owns Eleven Madison Park, his extraordinary approach to hospitality lives on at the restaurant, and continues to inspire operators across the industry to focus on and elevate the guest experience. 

Guidara was a keynote speaker at this year’s Bar & Restaurant Expo in Las Vegas and wowed attendees with his thoughts on service, the guest journey, and what he calls “unreasonable hospitality.” Here are the most important takeaways from his talk, to help you find ways to make your business truly outstanding.

Too many people conflate service and hospitality as meaning the same thing. There are two different ideas. Service is a part of the product: it's getting the right thing to the right person, in the right time frame. Hospitality is the way you make those people feel when you're providing that service. It's the depth of connection you make with the people you're serving. It's the amount of loyalty you earn from them when you make them feel seen when you give them a sense of belonging. 

Unreasonable hospitality is applying the same creativity, the same in intention, the same passion that so many people apply to the product they're serving and reserving some of that passion and intention and directing it towards how you make people feel — those that you serve and the people that you work alongside. 

At the end of the day, every successful business person is trying to identify its competitive advantage. What is the thing about what you do that will prevent someone else from coming in and stealing your business? Yet far too many people, when they think about that, they only think about the quality of a product or the strength of their brand. But it does not just matter how good the product is. It does not just matter how strong the brand is. Because eventually someone else is going to come around and create a better product. They might be younger or more innovative or better capitalized. They might just be more talented than you are. At the end of the, the only competitive advantage that exists over the long term comes through hospitality. It comes through consistently and creatively and generously investing in relationships. Those take a long time to build, and if you build them in the right way, the loyalty you earn will take a very long time to erode. Unreasonable hospitality is just my way of articulating the idea that we should throw ourselves wholeheartedly at the pursuit of those relationships. 

Some of the best restaurants only focus on the most obvious touchpoints in the guest journey, which are the same ones their competitors are focusing on. Very few organizations actually understand what every touchpoint in the guest experience is because they've never taken long enough to genuinely understand the experience as a whole. The only way to brainstorm truly innovative ideas if you are in the business of serving other people is to bridge the gap between authority — the people at the top — and information — the people on the front line. That only happens when you truly empower your people on the front line. When we mapped out the entire guest journey at Eleven Madison Park, we identified about 130 little touchpoints. Once we isolated them, we started elevating as many of them as possible. 

A good example of this is when you drop the check. Every restaurant has this touchpoint in common, but I've almost never seen it approached with any creativity or intention. And I think that's because we have a flawed belief system that the transactional moments can't also be connective. Now we had an opportunity to take a pain point in the experience and make it a highlight. This is what we did: 

If a table of three was dining with us, and it was clear they were done but they hadn’t asked for the check yet, I would go to their table with a glass for each and an entire bottle of Cognac. And I would pour a splash of Cognac into each glass and say, “hey, thank you so much for joining us. This is some Cognac, it's with my compliments. In fact, I'm gonna leave the entire bottle on the table. Help yourselves to as much as you like.” Then I'd put the check down and say, “your check is right here whenever you're ready for it.” 

Small change, profound impact. It didn't cost us very much — rarely did anyone drink more than that splash of Cognac poured into their glasses — and yet at the moment, where we dropped off a big check, we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity, keeping the value proposition intact. 

If you’ve ever been to Five Guys for a cheeseburger, you might associate it with peanuts. Why peanuts? Because of all the fast food chains out there, and there's a ton of them, Five Guys is the only one that I know of that had the wherewithal to recognize that the time spent waiting for the burger is a touchpoint. Say what you will about what they do — they put out a box of peanuts, you rip them out of the shell, and eat them while you wait — but it doesn't matter, because they're doing something somewhere where no one else does anything. It almost gives them unfair competitive advantage. 

In the next month, identify one touchpoint that you've never even considered. Just make it a little bit more awesome and look at the impact it can have.

The most important minutes of the day in a restaurant are in the pre-meal or pre-service meeting. It’s the 30 minute meeting most restaurants have with their team every single night right before doors open for service. That meeting is wasted in most places because it’s spent talking about operational things that could clearly be communicated via an email. But that 30 minute meeting is the greatest opportunity a leader has to actually lead, to step up and inspire. 

Sometimes we focus so much on training, which is good. We need to teach the people who work for us what to do and if we're not inspiring them to want to do those things, then training falls flat. But those 30 minutes are the greatest opportunity that we have to share moments of inspiration, and to invite the people on our team to do so in return. I believe when pre-meal is done well, it's when the people we work with cease being a collection of individuals and rather come together as a trusting team. 

At Eleven Madison Park, pre-meal was far more important than any minutes we actually spent serving our customers, whether I would share a gesture of hospitality I received or whether I would be affirming something that someone on the team had done in an effort to encourage more people to do the same. 

If you don’t have some version of a pre-service meeting, I encourage you to find the time to bring one to life. And if you do, but it’s been a while since you've approached with a renewed sense of creativity or intention, I really encourage you to give it another look — I don't think there is anything we can do to spur an evolution of a culture more effectively than that. 

We shouldn’t limit our innovations only to those you can scale, that’s the best way to ensure you will not be innovative — do unscalable things all the time. But if you're doing something that’s unscalable and it’s really working, you need to ask yourself, can you scale it a little bit? The way we did that was through an exercise that I call pattern recognition of recurring moments. Everyone has these in the restaurant world. A four-top comes in as a three-top because someone is home sick; a table is 25 minutes late because of something that happened in their lives; someone goes out for a cigarette right before you're about to drop their entree; someone goes to the airport straight from the restaurant. These are all recurring moments, and if you can identify them in advance and decide what you want to do every single time that thing happens, you can start creating magic all the time. A lot of people got engaged in our restaurant. It was a fancy-occasion place, it would probably happen once a week. Most places will pour your free Champagne if you get engaged there, that's reasonable hospitality. But once you identify that as a recurring moment, then you can decide how to make that unreasonable. This is what we came up with:

Tiffany and Co. had their offices across the park and one day I went over there and started knocking on doors until I met the chief marketing officer and eventually convinced her to give us 1,000 of those iconic Tiffany blue boxes, each with two Champagne flutes in them. The next time someone got engaged with us, we poured free Champagne like we always would have, but they wouldn't notice that the glasses looked just a little bit different from everyone else's. When they were done, we would take the glasses away, wash them, dry them, and put them back in the box. And at the end of their meal, we would gift them the glasses they toasted their engagement to. That didn't cost us anything — it cost Tiffany quite a bit of money. But I've talked to people who dined with us and got engaged, and despite the fact that they were served some of the best food on the planet, they don't remember a single thing they ate, but they'll never forget how it made them feel when we brought them those glasses. 

My view on this stuff is only do what you can do well. And if that means, given the scale or the size of the budget available to you, that you can only do one thing, just make that one thing count. Sometimes it's the smallest gesture that could be the most profound, because if it's significant enough, you can give people a story to tell.