WASHINGTON–A restauranteur who oversaw a rise to being named the number-one restaurant in the world has some advice for credit unions, and it involves “unreasonable hospitality,” rethinking the smallest of things, and even a splash of cognac.

Will Guidara has had a distinguished career in the restaurant business. His 11 Madison Park restaurant in New York was the first to go from one Michelin star to three, and in 2006 it was named among the 50 best restaurants in the world. 

Along with chef Daniel Humm, Guidara co-owned the Make It Nice hospitality group, established in 2011, which owns and operates Eleven Madison Park, NoMad New York, NoMad Los Angeles, NoMad Las Vegas, NoMad Bar and Made Nice. He sold the company about two months before COVID hit, which he said was “awesome” timing.

He is a co-producer on the popular FX series “The Bear.”

‘Unreasonable Hospitality’

His credited the focus on “unreasonable hospitality”—which is the name of his book—for his successes, some of the secrets to which he shared with an “Ed Talk” that kicked off America’s Credit Unions’ GAC. 

“We doubled down on the pursuit of excellence,” he said. 

As he began his remarks, he also shared how he would begin his day—by interacting with restaurant staff.

“Sometimes, we can get so focused on getting a jump on the day that we skip that all too crucial step of just taking a few moments to acknowledge the people we work with,” he said. 

Making the List

Guidara shared his excitement around having been notified 11 Madison Park had been named to the 50 Best Restaurants in the World honors and didn’t try to play it down like it didn’t really matter.

“I don’t believe that anyone does anything of real consequence solely in pursuit of accolades, but let’s not kid ourselves, they’re healthy for ourselves and, more importantly, in our ability to lead a team around us that’s fired up.”

Restauranteurs travel to London for the award to see where they finished in the rankings, with Guidara saying he though it would be somewhere in the middle. It turned out, his restaurant was number 50 and a camera trained on him as the ranking was announced found a visibly perturbed Guidara. “It looked like I was just getting kicked in the groin. I like to think I did what any professional would do in a moment of profound disappointment–I left the party early. went back to the hotel and grabbed some whiskey and started going through the stages of grief, beginning first with anger.

It Can be Good to be Angry

“I’d like to pause on anger because listen I think we’re in the middle of a beautiful season in corporate America where more and more companies are more consistently focused on creating cultures that seek out silver linings that celebrate positivity and optimism,” Guidara continued. “I think that’s a beautiful thing, but sometimes I fear that it comes at the risk of us losing focus on how fueling an emotion like anger can be. One of my favorite quotes from my dad is, ‘Adversity is a terrible thing to waste.’ We cannot always control what life throws at us, but we can always control how we react to those moments. Honestly, I look back at that first year coming in last place with gratitude now because I don’t believe we would have gone on to do what we did.”
Guidara said that at that point in time the restaurant’s food was remarkable and the service was “about as close to technically perfect as possible, our dining room was still just beautiful, the product was excellent.”

‘Making People Happy’

Bur rather than resting on all that, Guidara said he began to think about what made the world’s best restaurants so special.

“They were all run by chefs and I’m not a chef; I’m a dining room guy,” he said. “I wanted to be the guy in the room making people happy and throwing the party. Each of these chefs were unreasonable in pursuit of the food they were serving and relentless pursuit of innovation. My dad gave me a paperweight when I was a kid that I still have it on my desk today. It says, ‘What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?’ I love that question.

“Far too many people are honestly scared to say their biggest goals out loud for fear that if they do and don’t achieve them, they have let themselves and those around them down,” he continued. “But if you don’t have the confidence, the conviction required to say your biggest dreams out loud, it is very unlikely that they will never come true. That night on a cocktail napkin I wrote ‘We will be #1.’ But a goal without a strategy is nothing more than a pipe dream.”

Being ‘Unreasonable’

Guidara said he decided he was going to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, “which is our human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging or just to feel welcomed. And so on that napkin I also wrote, ‘Unreasonable hospitality.’  I pretty quickly realized I had no freaking clue what that meant but I think that’s OK.  I think sometimes we can spend so much time trying to perfectly articulate a goal that we never start pursuing it. If you feel a connection to an idea, just start running towards it and it will reveal itself along the way.”

To get to number one, Guidara said he knew it would take years, but it began with rethinking the pre-meal, 30-minute meeting most restaurants have with their teams before opening the doors. He said most of those meetings are “wasted” opportunities focused on information that could have been shared in a different format. 

The ’Greatest Opportunity’

“In my view, this is the greatest opportunity a leader has to actually step up and believe in the people around them and that does not happen when you focus only on the what, but also on the how and the why,” he said. “When you keep your eyes open for moments of inspiration and find them, share them with your team and invite your team to do so in return. I believe when that meeting is done well it’s when the people cease being a collection of individuals and rather come together as a trusting team unlocking the collective creativity and capacity required to do anything of greatness.”

‘Give It Another Look’

He encouraged credit unions to create their own daily huddles.

“I implore you to give it another look,” Guidara said. “I do not believe there is anything a leader can do more powerful than that every day for weeks, because repetition matters…I said to the team, ‘We are going to be #1 through unreasonable hospitality. I had two jobs in that moment, which I believe are the exact same two jobs every great leader has every day. One is to tell the team where we were going. People crave leadership and they crave conviction in that leadership. Two, invite as many of them as possible to sit with me so we can collectively figure out how we’re going to get there, especially the younger generations who crave a sense of ownership.”

But What Does it Mean?
Guidara said his team spent months trying to figure out what ‘unreasonable hospitality’ meant and reviewing absolutely every touch point the customer had with the restaurant. It would eventually ID more than 130, including those seldom thought about.

“I’ve had the chance to work with some pretty amazing companies across pretty much every industry and very few organizations actually know what all their touch points are in the experience because they’ve never slowed down for long to genuinely understand the experience as a whole,” he said.

The Irony of Authority

The meetings involved everyone on staff, said Guidara from the dishwashers all the way up through to ownership.

“There’s a retired naval captain named David Marquez who famously said that in most organizations the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the frontline have all the information and none of the authority. To brainstorm truly innovative ideas you need to bridge the gap between authority and information and there are very few ways better to do that than just getting everyone in a room together.”

Rethinking One Experience

As an example, Guidara noted most businesses deemed the experience to be over the moment someone pays the bill. 

“At the end of the meal we dropped the check, of course. At millions of restaurants in the world at the end of every one of those meal, someone is bringing you a bill,” Guidara stated. “And yet in spite of the fact that every restaurant has that touch point in common I have never seen it approached with any creativity or any intention. That’s because we have a flawed belief system that the transactional moments can’t also be connected.”
But restaurants and diners that serve those little red and white pinwheel mints with their check actually see 18% higher tips, said Guidara, citing research. 

The Bill Balance

“People get very impatient the moment they ask for the check. If it takes us too long to give it to you, we’ve ruined the meal. At the same time, if I put it on your table before you’ve asked for it. you think I’m trying to do rush you out. (In restaurants like 11 Madison), it’s a big bill, and the moment you realize how much that will cost it’s a little bit harder to still love what you just had.”

For those reasons, he said his team set out to change that experience and make it “awesome.”

“A  big part of your job is just to make as many little things a little bit more awesome,” Guidara suggested.

A Splash of Cognac

To make getting the bill at 11 Madison more awesome, at the end of the meal glasses were brought for everyone along with a bottle of cognac, with a drink poured for the diners who were told to take their time and to drink the whole bottle if they wanted to. Then the check was put down. 

“No one can ever think we’re trying to rush them out.  I just gave them an entire bottle of free booze that didn’t cost us very much. Rarely did someone drink more than the splash of cognac we poured into their glasses and yet at the moment where we dropped off that big bill we matched it with a gesture of profound generosity keeping the value proposition intact.

Culture of Hospitality

“I don’t care what business you’re in, if you want to create a culture of hospitality you need to make sure that the experience feels even in the slightest difference like you’re inviting some of your house for dinner,” Guidara continued. “My favorite part when I have people over to mine is that moment at the end of the night where there’s just a few people left and someone grabs that last half empty of the wine and pours the remains into the glasses at the end of the evening. That’s when we had served their every need with unbelievable attentiveness and  we gave them the gift of serving one another by the way.”

Ultimately, its pursuit paid off when 11 Madison was named the best restaurant in the world.