CHAPTER 11

PUSHING TOWARD EXCELLENCE

'Will! I'm pretty sure I just sat Frank Bruni.'

If Bruni was in the restaurant, our review season had begun.

It was late 2006 when our breathless, wide-eyed maître d' caught up with me at the service station to tell me the food critic for The New York Times had just walked into the restaurant. The Times generally allows a few years to pass between reviews, and we weren't anywhere near due. But the hiring of an exciting new chef can sometimes trigger a re-review, and we'd been hoping that our hard work, not to mention the buzz it was creating, would inspire him to give us another look.

To say that our team had been laser-focused on what the Times would have to say about the changes we'd made at Eleven Madison Park is an understatement. 'Obsessed' is probably a better word.

In fairness, the stakes were high. Eleven Madison Park was, to put it bluntly, the kind of Danny Meyer restaurant that was meant to have three stars. Union Square Cafe had three stars. Gramercy Tavern had three stars. Tabla had three stars.

But EMP had gotten two stars from the Times when it opened, and again when it was re-reviewed in February 2005. That last, hohum two-star review had been the catalyst for Daniel's hiring, and for mine. So while the two of us may have been dreaming about four stars down the line, for the sake of our immediate job security -to say nothing of our sanity-we needed three.

It was go time.

Excellence Is the Culmination of Thousands of Details Executed Perfectly

Confession: I'm a perfectionist.

I'm unapologetic about this now, but I wasn't always; I've spent my whole life taking fire for my fastidiousness, and I've often felt embarrassed about it as a result. My college friends would sneak into my room to move objects on my dresser a couple of inches, then wait to see how long it took me to move them back. I'd catch on right away, of course, and try to casually nudge everything back into place without anyone noticing; the teasing I got, while affectionate, was merciless.

If my wife parks the car crooked, I'll repark it; if she leaves a book slightly askew on her nightstand, I'll adjust it so it lines up with the edge. Every time she makes the bed, I remake it. (Luckily, she has a good sense of humor about all this.) I can't help but see these imperfections, and it's nearly impossible to stop myself from fixing them. In order to feel at peace, I need things around me to be just right-unreasonably organized, and in their proper place.

It was only at Eleven Madison Park that I came to recognize my fanatical attention to detail as a superpower. And while it's not my only one, it was definitely the one that got a workout as we were gearing up for our first review.

Two responses are possible when you realize that perfection is unattainable: either give up altogether, or try to get as close as you possibly can. At EMP, we opted for the second. It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly. That's the very definition of excellence: getting as many details right as you can.

The restaurant business-any service business, in fact-is a hard one for a perfectionist, because they're human-powered organizations. And, no matter how hard they try, humans make mistakes.

Sir David Brailsford was a coach hired to revitalize British cycling. He did so by committing to what he called 'the aggregation of marginal gains,' or a small improvement in a lot of areas. In his words: 'The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.'

This resonates deeply with me and is a pretty accurate description of how we approached that review season. Perfection as an overall goal was overwhelming, not to mention unattainablewe knew that. But we were going to get as close as we could, and we were on it long before the maître d' told me Frank Bruni was sitting at table 32.

Here's the thing: it doesn't matter if you recognize the critic. No football team phones it in for twenty games, then steps it all the way up for the Super Bowl. Similarly, you can't be a mediocre restaurant three hundred and sixty-four days a year, then transform into a great one the day the critic happens to come in.

Every restaurant locker room and kitchen in New York City has a picture of The New York Times food critic taped to the wall. The role is supposed to be anonymous, but no matter how hard a new critic tries to scrub the internet of photos, an old book jacket or a publicity party picture always squeaks through. (These days it's often a blurry shot, surreptitiously snapped and circulated by another restaurant manager.)

Sure, if you recognize the critic before they're seated, you can take them to a table in your most skillful server's section; you can make sure the food you bring them is perfectly plated and the best expression of the dish. But while you can show a critic the best version of your restaurant, you cannot suddenly become something you're not-and they know that, too. The restaurant you are is the restaurant they're reviewing.

Which was why we had spent the months leading up to that moment trying to be a little bit more perfect, every night.

The Littlest Things Matter

We chased excellence in every element of what we did.

Everyone working in the dining room had crisply ironed uniforms, tidy hair, and neatly manicured hands. Each piece of silverware and every glass gleamed.

The team in the kitchen had trained so they could prepare Daniel's dishes with precision and consistency. Excellent communication between the dining room and the kitchen ensured that the timing was dialed in for every course, at every table.

Training extended far beyond menu and wine knowledge, to tweaking the most minute aspects of the environment. We couldn't start the evening with the lights too low because our windows were so huge, and the contrast of a too-dim room with the brightness outside was unpleasant. But because the sun goes down at a different time every day (not to mention that the light coming through those massive windows changed dramatically with the weather outside), lowering the light levels over the course of the night wasn't a task we could automate, or make a simple rule about, like 'Level 4 at seven p.m.'

The staff in charge of adjusting the lights had to be taught, and they had to stay attentive. Maybe more important, they had to understand the impact lighting had on the atmosphere of the room and on the whole experience. They had to buy into the importance of getting it exactly right.

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. Because when a server delivered a dish, they didn't have to scramble to remember what was in it; they were so assured in their knowledge, all their energy could go toward connecting with the guest.

Similarly, we spent hours selecting each song on our music playlists. But music that's too upbeat and loud in a nearly empty room will make you feel like the first guest at the world's most depressing party, so we trained the staff at the front door to gauge when it was time to move from the more mellow Empty Dining Room playlist to the slightly snappier Half-Full Dining Room (and so on), and to control the volume accordingly.

Lighting levels and playlists are details that every restaurant struggles with. But some problems we couldn't solve by being more excellent-we had to innovate.

For instance, it's well-known that at the very beginning of the meal, and at the very end, time seems to slow down. In those moments, the guest has a heightened sensitivity to any delay-we can all relate to feeling like we've been waiting hours for that first glass of water or for the check. So it's crucial to get somethinganything-in front of the guest as soon as you can.

We spent a lot of time in our manager meetings talking about how to make this more efficient. We ended up stealing a solution from baseball, where the catcher has to communicate with a pitcher sixty feet away: sign language.

A glass of water is a great solution, but EMP wasn't a diner on the corner; we couldn't pour water out of a stainless pitcher as soon as a guest was seated. The process we did have in place was too slow. The captain would ask the guest what kind of water they'd like-iced, bottled still, bottled sparkling-then they'd find the table's server to communicate the preference. The server would fetch the bottle and bring it back to the table, a practice made even more glacial because the room was so large.

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.

Another issue was that the room felt busy. It took a lot of people to execute hospitality at this level, but too many bodies moving swiftly around a room-even one as big as the dining room at EMP-can feel chaotic. In a bustling brasserie, servers zigzagging through the room lends an exciting energy; in a fine-dining setting, the commotion feels disruptive.

So we established traffic patterns for the staff like the ones on city streets, though they were imperceptible to our guests. Corners had invisible stop or yield signs. Most of the room was one-way only, and the traffic moved clockwise. In a two-way corridor, you hugged the wall to the right, as you would if you were driving.

As we used to say, the goal was ballet, not football. These invisible traffic rules allowed the staff to move in an orderly fashion around the room without dodging one another or relying on verbal cues like 'Excuse me' or 'Behind.'

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

We needed to be operating at a high level of precision all the time. To get the staff tuned into the correct frequency, we asked them to start thinking that way as soon as they walked in the door.

We trained the people setting the dining room to place every plate so that if a guest flipped it over to see who had made it, the Limoges stamp would be facing them, right side up.

That's ridiculous, right? Utterly unreasonable. Maybe one or two guests would flip that plate in a month. Most nights, nobody did. Even if they did, would they guess that the placement had been intentional? And some people probably turned over the plate in a way we didn't anticipate, so that that the manufacturer's stamp wasn't faceup at all.

That was okay-because whether someone flipped it or not, that perfectly placed plate had already done what it needed to do.

There's a story about Walt Disney challenging his Imagineers when they were creating the first animatronics for the Enchanted Tiki Room. The Imagineers were convinced they had produced the most lifelike, detailed animatronic bird possible, but Disney wasn't satisfied. Real birds breathed, he pointed out; the chest expanded and contracted. This bird wasn't breathing.

Frustrated, the Imagineers reminded him there would be hundreds of distracting elements in the Tiki Room, including waterfalls, lights, smoke, totem poles, and singing flowers-nobody was going to notice a single bird, whether it was breathing or not. To which Disney responded, 'People can feel perfection.'

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. By asking the person setting the dining room to place each plate with total concentration and focus, we were asking them to set the tone for how they'd do everything over the course of the service-how they'd greet our guests, walk through the dining room, communicate with their colleagues, pour the champagne to begin a meal and the cup of coffee to end it.

Maybe 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. But if I could institute a system that demanded that the entire team think carefully about even the most rudimentary of tasks, I was creating a world in which intention was the standard, and our guests could feel it.

We were focusing on those details for the benefit of the guest experience, but the impact they had on us was equally profound; we could feel it, too.

Setting the dining room with intention allowed us to control all the details we could control, making us less easily thrown off by everything we couldn't. On any given night, a million problems had the potential to mess up a service. All five of the reservations in our first seating could show up late, guaranteeing that we'd be late to seat the guests arriving for those same tables a few hours later. A guest might walk in irritable from a breakup or from a bad day at work. The espresso machine might stop working.

But there were many things we could control. We could ensure that the tablecloths would be spotless and immaculately ironed, the Riedel logo on the foot of each wineglass aligned with the table's edge, and that every piece of silverware had been placed the same distance from the edge of the table-the length of the top joint of the thumb.

Just as walking into a thoughtfully organized room can lower your blood pressure, maybe that perfect tabletop would be enough to remind a flustered server that, no matter how badly in the weeds they felt, the sky was not falling. Maybe seeing that unsullied field of white with glasses and silverware so carefully set by their colleagues would be enough to return them to the frame of mind

with which they'd begun the day, allowing them to take a deep breath, recenter themselves, and greet our guests calmly and with warmth: 'Welcome to Eleven Madison Park.'

Finish Strong: The One-Inch Rule

Say you take a plate from the kitchen and carry it out into the dining room carefully, so that it appears exactly as the chef plated it -the sauce perfect, the tiny pluche of chervil balanced just so. Then, in your rush to your next task, you jostle the plate as you drop it off at the table. Maybe the fish tips over slightly, or the garnish slips.

A lot of people would say that's not the end of the world, and maybe they're right. But I believe that mistake is bigger than a smudge of sauce where it shouldn't be on an otherwise pristine plate.

Every dish we served at Eleven Madison Park was the result of weeks, if not months, of recipe development and testing. The server who'd described it to the guest had painstakingly learned the description and worked hard to paint a picture for the guest, so the dish sounded irresistible. The cooks who'd made it had brought years of training and experience to the faultless preparation and plating of the protein, and the six other components on the plate represented even more hours of labor and care.

If your job was to place that dish in front of the guest, you were the last link in a long chain of people who had invested many hours of work in that dish. If, in that final inch, a zucchini flower tumbled because of your carelessness, you were letting a lot of people down-including the guest, who'd trusted you with a few hours of their life in the expectation that you would blow their minds.

When you lose focus in that last inch, the presentation is ruined.

Unfortunately, it's common for people to lose focus in that last inch, compromising all the work they and their teams have done to get where they are. This isn't specific to restaurants, though there are thousands of restaurant-specific examples I can think of-failing to take a minute to make sure that the final settings on your lighting and music are correct before you open, for instance, or neglecting to walk guests to the door at the end of their meal so you can deliver a personal goodbye.

For the team at EMP, the One-Inch Rule was both a literal instruction-to put the plates down gently-and a metaphorical one, a reminder to stay present and to follow through all the way to that last inch, no matter what you might be doing.

The concept of the One-Inch Rule went viral at EMP. I often heard the team refer to it when they talked in pre-meal about other service experiences they'd had. Most important, I heard them talking about it with one another.

I knew 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. And the One-Inch Rule was the lesson I was most likely to overhear a more senior employee passing along to someone who was starting out with us.

Being Right Is Irrelevant

It was a busy Tuesday dinner service when one of our guests ordered the beef with bone marrow and brioche, cooked medium rare. Shortly after his plate was delivered, he summoned the server back to the table. 'I ordered this medium rare,' he protested, 'and this is rare.'

Ugh.

I watched as the server corrected him. 'Actually, sir, that is medium rare, but if you'd prefer it medium, I'd be happy to take it back to the kitchen.'

The server was technically right, according to the doneness chart in a culinary school textbook. (A true medium rare is, for many people, quite a bit more rare than they're expecting.) And I knew he wasn't trying to be rude.

He was being defensive because he didn't want the guest to think we'd made a mistake. He was part of the team gunning for three stars, and with a not-so-secret eye on a fourth-and you don't get four stars by making mistakes.

But as far as hospitality goes, it didn't matter. Because pride wasn't what that server was communicating. What he was doing was telling the guest he was wrong: 'You, sir, don't know a true medium-rare when you see it.' Of course the guest felt shamed and rebuked; he had been, even if that was never the intention.

His instinct was to get the guest what he wanted, right away-that was the good part.

If you've corrected a guest because you don't want them to think you've made a mistake, you've made a much bigger mistake. If hospitality is about creating genuine connection, and if that connection happens only once the guest has let their guard down, shaming them makes it highly unlikely you'll ever be able to get that connection back again.

So here we were again, negotiating the delicate balance between excellence and hospitality.

In pursuing excellence, we were trying to do as many things right as we possibly could. At the same time, we had to let go of the concept of being right, because it meant going against the very essence of what we were trying to do, which was to make people feel great about eating and drinking in our restaurant.

It was then that a new mantra at EMP was born: 'Their perception is our reality.'

We needed to make sure we were serving our guests, not our egos; as Danny Meyer says, 'Being right is irrelevant.' So instead of explaining what a true medium-rare looks like, we needed to say, 'Absolutely, sir, I'm sorry,' before getting the guest a steak cooked exactly the way he wanted it cooked.

Which means: 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 this case, making an internal guest note in our reservations system that this person 'orders steak medium rare, but prefers it cooked medium.'

It's important for me to make clear that 'Their perception is our reality' did not apply in scenarios where a guest was being abusive or disrespectful. The customer isn't always right, and it's unhealthy

for everyone if you don't have clear and enforced boundaries for yourself and your staff as to what is unacceptable behavior. The line is bright: abuse should not and cannot be tolerated, period.

Still, this adjustment wasn't easy for everyone on the team. 'Sucking it up when I know I'm right feels demeaning,' a talented server told me, and I knew what she meant. But the credit we got from our guests for making them happy far outweighed any we lost from making a so-called mistake. It's only demeaning to suck it up if you take it personally. Saying sorry, I reminded the team, doesn't mean you're wrong.

Appreciate the Journey

In January 2007, a photographer from The New York Times called the restaurant to schedule a photo shoot for the pictures that would accompany the review of Eleven Madison Park, running later that week.

Thankfully, it was good news. Bruni asked: 'When did you last look at Eleven Madison Park? If the answer is more than a year ago, look again.'

Daniel and I were excited-and anxious, with good reason. Looking back now, I can see what a huge inflection point that review turned out to be, both in the history of the restaurant and in our careers.

All that focus on excellence had paid off. We'd achieved our first goal: three stars from The New York Times .

At our first pre-meal after the review, we poured everyone in the kitchen and dining room a little bit of champagne so we could celebrate what we'd all accomplished and how far we'd come.

And I told them to save up a little bit of the feeling they had that afternoon so they could tap back into it when the going got tough, because we had a long way to go. 'Have a great service. When you get off, go out and have an awesome time-you deserve it. Feel it all fully. Appreciate this moment. Then come back tomorrow and we'll get back to work.'

(When, true to his word, Danny sent Richard Coraine to ask me if I still wanted to move from EMP to Shake Shack, I told him I thought I'd stick around for a while.)