CHAPTER 14

RESTORING BALANCE

Ambition is an extraordinary thing, a nuclear reactor that provides unlimited amounts of energy. Getting accepted into Relais & Châteaux gave us a taste of success, and we wanted more . . . a lot more.

I wasn't alone; the entire leadership team was consumed by ambition. We were working all the time, driven by the force of all the unreasonable goals we'd set for ourselves and for the restaurant.

It was 2008. I was twenty-eight years old. I wasn't married; I didn't have any kids yet. Eleven Madison Park was everything to me.

We wanted EMP to be a four-star restaurant, not a very good three-star restaurant.

We were on fire.

And because of how badly we wanted to achieve that goal and the passion we were bringing to our pursuit of it every single day, the team was right there with us, throwing all of themselves into the work, too. The entire dining room team was so polished, so eager, it became almost a game to see what tiny service detail we could improve by making it more complicated. In the kitchen, Daniel and his team were adding ever more intricate components to the dishes. Prep lists were getting longer, techniques more complex. We were all doing whatever it took to push the experience to the next level.

Then, one night at eleven p.m., a cook who worked the morning shift ran through the doors in a panic. In her sleeplessness and stress and disorientation, she thought she was two hours late for her nine a.m. shift; in reality, she was ten hours early.

There had probably been other indications we were going too fast, but that one made us pull up and say whoa. In that moment it became clear: our ambition had gotten the better of us. The nuclear reactor was melting down.

We'd lost our balance, and we needed to get it back.

Much is written about how leaders need to have the vision to look ahead; in my opinion, not enough is written about how leaders also need to have the awareness to look down, to see what's really beneath their feet. Like Wile E. Coyote, we'd been so focused on catching the Road Runner, we'd run right off the cliff without realizing it. We'd been so focused on managing the guest experience, we'd forgotten to manage our culture.

Slow Down to Speed Up

Kevin Boehm, the CEO and cofounder of Chicago's Boka restaurant group, spoke movingly at the Welcome Conference about a difficult period he'd gone through at precisely the moment when everything in his life seemed to be going beautifully.

He told a captivated room how he'd spent his whole life raising his hand to say yes and how he'd mistakenly come to believe this was why he was depressed and anxious. What he came to realize, though, was this:

I can only be authentic and inspirational and restorative if I buy back the time to restore myself. . . . This is not a passive pursuit; it's active. The things I can control- mindfulness, diet, exercise, attitude, and whom I choose to spend my time with-those things take priority over all others. So when I do raise my hand, I'm armed with the mental fortitude to make sure that my ambition doesn't undermine the clarity that got me all these killer opportunities in the first place.

When I heard this, I felt a shock of recognition. The safety instructions the flight attendant delivers before takeoff are clear: 'Put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others.' But when you're in the hospitality industry, that instruction can feel counterintuitive. Aren't we supposed to put others first and attend to them before we attend to ourselves?

The answer is no. If you aren't tending to your own needs, you can't help those around you. Pride and ambition motivated us to push-to tweak, to optimize, to work harder, demanding more of ourselves and those around us each day. But you can't pour endlessly from your own pitcher without ever stopping to refill it.

We stopped changing the menu as frequently, so everyone had more time to catch up. We hired more people, so the existing staff wouldn't be spread too thin. We cut many of the flourishes we'd added to service. To give one small example, we'd been pouring many of the sauces and adding additional components to the dishes tableside. Because we had to bring those to the table on a separate tray, we needed twice as many food runners. But we didn't have twice as many food runners, so more often than not, it was a dining room manager following with that tray. To alleviate some pressure, we went back to saucing the dishes in the kitchen. Though marginally less theatrical, the change meant the managers could return to supporting the team on the floor.

So, with some deliberation-and even a little sadness-Daniel and I decided we needed to slow down.

It was a shame to lose those extras; many of our guests noticed their absence. But keeping them wasn't worth the cost, if doing too much meant the staff was falling apart. I reminded myself: If adding another element to the experience means you're going to do everything a little less well, walk it back. Do less, and do it well.

Everyone's oxygen is different, and we have to figure out for ourselves what we need to breathe. For me, relaxation means a night alone on the couch, eating Chinese takeout while bingewatching television too dumb to disclose. My wife's oxygen is a hike or a long run.

The cultural reboot was probably most apparent in the topics we tackled at pre-meal. For months, the focus had been on how we could excel and achieve. Now, it was time to bring that same creativity and innovation to setting up the staff to succeed in a more sustainable way.

Yours might be CrossFit, or yoga, or a long bike ride, or cooking, or painting, or going to see live music, or lying on a blanket in the park with your friends. Exercise, nature, being in community, and creative pursuits do seem to be common themes, but it's never going to be one-size-fits-all: you have to know what works for you.

This was what we worked on with the team. We encouraged them to find their oxygen and to take the time to breathe. Slowing down wasn't just about nurturing them in the moment. It was about building a more solid foundation for the future, so that when we did need to speed up again (and we would, very soon), our minds and hearts were in top shape.

The Deep Breathing Club

My good friend Andrew Tepper worked for years in a juvenile psychiatric hospital. When he started there, he was alarmed to see how many kids were regularly melting down or freaking out, threatening to hurt themselves and others. He was also disturbed by how many sedatives the staff was prescribing.

He used the silk screens to make a batch of really cool T-shirts with the letters DBC (Deep Breathing Club) in block letters across the front. If a kid got through three potential incidents by using deep breathing instead of screaming or getting violent, they'd earn a shirt. He was simultaneously reinforcing good behavior and making deep breathing cool.

He started teaching the kids calming breathing techniques to use when they were agitated. Though the techniques were incredibly effective, he struggled to get the kids to do them consistently. (A good idea is one thing; getting it to take root is another.) Then, one day a few months later, while rummaging through his parents' basement, he happened upon some silk screen equipment he'd held on to from high school.

Fast-forward five months, and half the kids in the hospital were wearing DBC shirts. The number of meltdowns, as well as the amount of sedatives prescribed, went down significantly.

You know when you're in the weeds, all the way at your wits' end, and you're so overwhelmed you can't even tell what would help? We were having our own version of a collective meltdown at EMP. Oxygen masks were one thing-a necessary big-picture solution. But we also needed a solution in the moment. Crisis moments like that happen often in restaurants and in most high-pressure environments. If you have any emotional intelligence at all, you know that saying 'Calm down' or 'Chill out' to a person who is freaking out is like squirting lighter fluid on a bonfire already on the verge of spreading out of control.

I invited Andrew to pre-meal to tell the team about DBC, the idea that a few deep breaths can be all it takes to get you through what feels like an impossible situation. (He brought T-shirts.) The concept became one of the most enduring elements of our culture. In moments of crisis, all we had to do was walk up to an overwhelmed colleague and say, 'DBC.' They'd stop and take a few deep breaths. What was really being communicated was, 'I see you and what you're going through. We're in this together, and we're going to get through it together, so what can I do right now to help?'

But still: there has to be a phrase, a rescue remedy that will bring the other person back to themselves long enough to ask for the help they need. Because much of the time, a simple intervention -like asking a manager to bring a table the silverware for their next course-is all it would take to give the panicked person some breathing room.

Touch the Lapel

Our manager meetings became less about improving the guest experience and more about how to make the restaurant more sustainable for all of us. Our pre-meal meetings followed suit, almost exclusively consumed with conversations about how to restore balance.

A seemingly small but extraordinarily significant idea came from a longtime captain, Kevin Browne.

Because the culture of collaboration was fully in place at Eleven Madison Park, it was only a matter of time before the team started getting involved. Tweaks were made to everything from side work to scheduling.

The baseball-inspired sign language we used to indicate a table's water preference had been so effective, we were always looking for new signs to make our lives easier and the experience better for our guests. Kevin came up with one that changed our culture: if you made eye contact with a colleague and touched your lapel, it meant 'I need help.'

After we introduced Kevin's signal, a server could make eye contact with their manager or one of their colleagues and touch their lapel, and the other person would come help as soon as they could.

Before this, asking for help in the middle of a busy service could be challenging. A server would often have to chase their manager across the enormous room; many times, just as they were about to catch up with them, the manager would stop at a table. That meant the server would then have to wait, while their task list continued to pile up. If they were busy enough to need help, spending so much time trying to get it made them even more overwhelmed. Many times, they'd give up and end up back at their station, in a worse position than before they'd tried to get help.

It was a small gesture, but the impact it had on the restaurant was not. DBC made it easy to offer help; Kevin gave us an easy way to ask for it.

Let's be honest: asking for help is hard, especially for the kind of people who were working at EMP by then-thoroughbreds, accustomed to being the best, who couldn't stand anyone thinking they couldn't handle their workload. In fact, it was often our best people who would get in the most trouble when service was challenging, because they were the ones least likely to ask for help.

I believe this sign came to be one of the most important of all of them-and the most long-lived, as I've seen it used in restaurants across the country, disseminated by our alums.

Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. It shows an understanding of your abilities and an awareness of what's happening around you. People who refuse to ask for help, who believe they can handle everything on their own, are deceiving themselves and doing a disservice to those around them. As Danny Meyer used to say, hospitality is a team sport. If you let your ego

get in the way of asking for what you need, you're going to let the whole team down, and the hospitality you're delivering is going to suffer.

Between slowing down, learning to take a few deep breaths, and finding easy ways to offer and ask for help, this recommitment to balance was crucial. I honestly believe none of the success that came later could have happened without the course correction we made in 2008.

The sign made it easier and more efficient to ask for help, and systemizing it stripped the stigma from it.

And then, almost as a reward for taking the time to invest in our foundation, the universe (well-Frank Bruni, actually) gave us a little gift.

We were ecstatic. Buried in this other, unrelated restaurant's review was a secret message to usI'm seeing what you've been up to since the last time I visited, and I know you keep getting better.

In December 2008, Bruni gave three stars to Corton in The New York Times. Corton was a restaurant Drew Nieporent had opened in Tribeca with the chef Paul Liebrandt. In his review, Bruni said, 'Corton is for the most part superb, and joins the constantly improving Eleven Madison Park as a restaurant hovering just below the very summit of fine dining in New York.'

Keep going!