CHAPTER 15

THE BEST OFFENSE IS OFFENSE

Tƒŧ Michelin Guide was created at the beginning of the twentieth century as an ingenious marketing ploy. The tire-selling brothers who originated it figured that encouraging people to drive around France to try different restaurants would increase tire sales, so they threw together a free guide of the restaurants in France.

Over the next century, Michelin, with its secretive team of anonymous inspectors, became the most revered and prestigious restaurant ranking in Europe.

Their star system reflected whether a restaurant was worth traveling for. One star meant a very good restaurant in its category, worth a stop. Two meant excellent cooking, deserving of a detour, while three stood for exceptional cuisine, important enough to merit a special journey.

In France, gaining an additional star can make a restaurant's fortunes, while being stripped of one can ruin it: the chef Bernard Loiseau took his own life when it was rumored that his restaurant, La Côte d'Or, was about to lose one of its three stars. (One of the most devastating parts of the story is that the restaurant didn't end up losing the star after all.) So while it may sound like hyperbole to an American, in France, a Michelin star can be a matter of life or death.

The Michelin Guide had begun reviewing New York restaurants in 2005. Eleven Madison Park hadn't been on the list then, or in 2006, to no one's surprise. There had been some grumblings in the blogs when we failed to make the list in 2007, but Daniel and I weren't bothered-Michelin is known for moving slowly, and we were still finding our feet.

But in 2008, the buzz was there. We had three stars from the Times, and we'd been accepted into Relais & Châteaux, a significant European honor we'd assumed would put us on Michelin's radar. The team was putting 110 percent into every table. So when the New York list was released, we crowded into the office to pore over the announcement.

We weren't even on the list.

Le Bernardin had three stars. Jean-Georges had three stars. Masa had three stars. Even the Spotted Pig, April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman's celebrity-filled gastropub, had a star.

The blow was even more devastating because a restaurant could only increase by one star every year. Not only would we have to wait another year to be included at all, but it would be three years before we could even hope for that coveted third star.

The daily pre-meal meeting meant there was no dodging the discomfort. I was standing in the center of that circle, surrounded by my disheartened friends and colleagues. They were waiting for explanations and comfort, but I had no wand to wave to take the devastation away. All I could do was express my own sadness and confusion, in the hope that sharing the hurt would allow us all to move forward. A leader's role isn't only to motivate and uplift; sometimes it's to earn the trust of your team by being human with them.

The team was crushed and confused by the snub, and I learned there is no more difficult moment to be the head of a business than when there has been a massive disappointment.

But I was annoyed by the snub, too, because I knew that we were already pretty freaking excellent and getting better every day. So, after we'd wallowed for a couple of days, I encouraged the team to get mad.

Unfortunately, the economy had other plans.

'We've always been at our best when we're the underdogs,' I told them at pre-meal, 'and here we are again. Think of this as fuel for the fire, and use it.' It was time to start playing offense.

Raindrops Make Oceans

In November 2008, the world was hit by a global recession, which the International Monetary Fund would later call 'the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression.'

We got through the holidays okay, but as soon as the New Year turned, business fell off precipitously. The headlines were dire, and cancellations rolled in. We'd started to gain a reputation as a splurge-worthy special-occasion meal, but for most people, it no longer felt prudent to spend so much on a single dinner. Better to dump that money into an emergency fund, a hedge against the worst.

To put it mildly: it was not a good time to be selling expensive food.

Couples who had gotten engaged at EMP and came back to celebrate with us every year found more frugal ways to celebrate their anniversaries. One couple brought a bottle of champagne to Madison Square Park and raised a glass to our huge windows from across the street-over an order of cheese fries from Shake Shack.

Most nights, we didn't have enough reservations to seat the whole dining room, so we closed off the area of the restaurant we called Uptown (an area separated from the tables on the lower level by a few steps) to make the empty room feel less cavernous. It was an improvement, and the row of banquettes made for a natural barrier, but you could still tell the restaurant was only half full.

Our private-party business ground to a halt. Wedding parties downsized, either by cutting the guest list or fleeing to more modest venues. And companies, whose lavish private events and cushy expense accounts are a fine-dining restaurant's bread and butter, had switched into austerity mode as well. With fewer deal closings, there were fewer closing celebrations, and if extravagant end-ofyear bonuses were still happening, people weren't toasting them in public; suddenly, the optics of a showy, over-the-top, splashed-out dinner felt all wrong.

We put on brave faces for our guests, but I spent my nights buried in the books. There was no getting around it: the restaurant's financial situation was desperate and getting worse every day. We had all the expenses associated with running a four-star restaurant without the demand that came with the honor-or the ability to

charge four-star prices. So we were hemorrhaging cash. In fact, the only reason we stayed in business was because Eleven Madison Park actually owned Shake Shack at that point in time.

By the time the recession hit, Shake Shack was more than profitable; it was starting to be-well, Shake Shack. The line that snaked around the park had become such a New York institution that Danny bought a webcam, the Shack Cam, so you could gauge the wait from your home or office before deciding whether it was worth coming over.

Shake Shack had started in 2004. It was originally a hot dog cart, part of an art installation in Madison Square Park. (When I first arrived at EMP, ShackBurgers were prepped in our private dining room; during lunch service, cooks would walk out the front door of the restaurant carrying giant sheet trays filled with uncooked burgers.) Everybody loved the hot dog stand, and it reopened the next summer, and the next. Eventually, it became Shake Shack, a permanent kiosk serving burgers and frozen custard, modeled after the classic Midwestern roadside shacks of Danny Meyer's youth.

The recession, if anything, gave that business a boost; as they always do in tough times, people flocked to affordable experiences that felt a little special. The upshot for us was that EMP wasn't sponsoring this cute little art project anymore. Instead, the profits from Shake Shack were sponsoring us.

I leaned heavily on my dad in those days, and we had some hard talks. He's a cutthroat survivalist, never precious about the niceties of restaurants in general, and fine dining in particular. But as always, he pulled me out of the forest so I could see the trees. 'Adversity,' he told me, 'is a terrible thing to waste.'

Danny was patient; he had faith in us. But you can't use the profits of one restaurant to pay for the losses of another for too long; that's just bad business. Every month, I'd walk into the P&L meeting to try to explain away our losses and offer some hope, with the sinking knowledge that if I couldn't turn the ship around, the great Eleven Madison Park experiment was going to come to a grinding halt.

In a global recession (or a global pandemic, for that matter),

many business owners panic. And for good reason! All your welllaid plans have gone out the window; all your careful projections no longer apply. Uncertainty is scary. But though it's easy to panic in the face of adversity, creativity is the better solution.

We started by cutting expenses. Easier said than done, because it was essential that none of those cuts adversely affect our guests.

Luckily, all the work we'd done to solidify our culture had set us up to be creative.

We started in the kitchen, though not with the food. It's harder to keep a half-full restaurant stocked than a full one, especially when almost all the components are made fresh; when you're busy, you have a better sense of the ingredients you're going to go through, and how quickly. But regardless of our financial situation, we had to have the full menu; if people had come for the signature duck, then we had to have it. So while Daniel and his team were working hard to aggressively manage food costs, every night we were still throwing out tons of food.

At every P&L meeting in those days, Danny's partner Paul BollesBeaven liked to remind us, 'Raindrops make oceans.' With that in mind, I chased after every penny. We were in the habit of using two linen cloths to cover the pass, the countertop where the cooks put plates of food that were ready to be picked up by the food runners. We always used two so we could strip off the top one midway through the evening and finish out the night with a clean cloth. This was a luxury that was easy to cut.

That waste was inevitable. We had to find other places to cut.

We saved thousands on cleaning chemicals by checking the dishwasher settings and making sure they weren't sucking out more soap than necessary. And the paper towels that we dipped in vinegar and water to clean any drips or fingerprints off the edge of a plate before it went out to the dining room were cut in half.

One night, I did the math. If a cook went through two or three toques over the course of a hard shift, and there were thirty cooks

Our cooks wore tall paper toques because they were beautiful and classic and a link to Daniel's European heritage. They were also disposable; the cooks could discard them when they got sweaty or stained.

in the kitchen working two shifts a day, that meant we were spending thousands of dollars a year on those toques-whereas a box of the thick, washable cotton skullcaps most restaurants gave their cooks cost a few hundred, and we'd get at least a year out of those.

It was harder to make cuts in the dining room without adversely affecting the guests. Running a fine-dining restaurant is expensive. Labor costs are high-every gleaming knife and immaculate glass has to be polished by hand. And it's never more expensive than when you're trying to get to the next level, because you basically need to overspend and undercharge in order to get there.

That cut was hard: we'd chosen the toques because we wanted the cooks to feel a sense of pride and a connection to their culinary history every time they put them on. But leadership during a crisis means recognizing it's more than the hats that give the cooks a sense of pride.

Still, we found as many cunning ways to cut costs as we could. We'd been proud to showcase twenty unique cheeses on our cheese cart-but we could make a beautiful cheese plate with only ten, and fewer options resulted in less waste. I watched the cart like a hawk, cutting the cheese myself some nights to make sure we used every presentable piece.

As I was coming up in my career, my dad encouraged me to keep a journal. The goal then had been to maintain perspective. When you're working as a server, that's the only view of the world you have. And while you may think you'll hang on to that point of view forever, the truth is that once you've been promoted to manager, you'll eventually find your priorities replaced by a new set. As my dad would say, 'Perspective has an expiration date, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it.'

More than anything, this is what changed: we became hyperattentive to every cost, closely monitoring every penny we spent and becoming more disciplined than we'd ever been before. Paul was right. All those cuts, all those raindrops, did start to add up. And the savings we saw from making them allowed us to fight another day.

Unfortunately, when you lose the viewpoint of the people you're

responsible for managing, you also tend to lose your empathy for them. We'd all be better leaders if we could tap back into what it felt like to be led. But it's hard to reclaim that headspace, and journaling was a way to hedge against that loss.

For as many cuts as we chose to make, there were just as many that we chose not to. Remember, we still had big goals; we were still playing offense. This meant that anything that affected the guest experience was basically off-limits, which meant there was a lot that was off-limits. There were only so many extras we could trim before we would be cutting into the bone, deteriorating our brand.

So as we were making all these small cuts, my dad encouraged me to start journaling again. He told me to write down every single cost-cutting measure we'd implemented, no matter how small. He believed we were going to come out the other side, and that as soon as we did, we would dump every frugal hack we'd come up with during the hard times. Keeping track of them would make it easier to hold on to the best of them, and this season of adversity would ultimately make us more profitable in the future.

Even with better dish racks and a padded dish cart, expensive Riedel glasses break; hand-thrown ceramic dishes chip and need to be replaced. At the end of a world-class meal, you couldn't ask a guest to sign the credit card slip with a Bic-but every one of the silver pens that ended up in a purse or a pocket went onto our P&L.

If we wanted to stay the course, cutting expenses wasn't going to be enough. We were going to have to build our top line as well.

Adversity Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

We were creative in how we saved money, and we got creative in how to make money, too. (This, incidentally, was a whole lot more fun.) No matter how you try to sugarcoat it, managing expenses is playing defense, and we had decided to play offense to get through the crisis.

Our lunches had always been expense-account-driven, and with those accounts drying up across the city, there were days you could

practically see tumbleweeds rolling through the room at high noon. But we looked at the empty dining room at lunch and saw an opportunity.

These inexpensive lunches meant a whole new demographic could suddenly afford us, which bore unexpected dividends. Our goal was to be the four-star restaurant for the next generation, and today's assistant might very well be tomorrow's CEO. The move gave us the opportunity to build and maintain relationships with people who were working their own way up through the ranks.

The average price of an entrée at lunch at EMP at the time was around thirty-five dollars. So we started offering a twenty-ninedollar two-course lunch. The check average at EMP had never been that low, not even when it was a brasserie, but if it helped fill those seats and return energy to the dining room, it was worth it.

We made sure guests were getting outrageous value for their twenty-nine bucks (if you're giving a gift, it should be awesome). And in the years that followed, I met countless people who'd been introduced to the restaurant for the first time through those reasonable lunches, some of whom had become our biggest fans.

When I was a waiter at Tribeca Grill, the rule about delivering dessert was 'low and slow'-when walking across the restaurant to deliver desserts to a table, walk more slowly than you ordinarily would as you pass the other tables along the way. And keep that applesauce cake at the guests' eye level, so that by the time you come around with dessert menus, everyone's already been thinking about it. (This is why sugary cereals are always stocked on the lower shelves at the supermarket-it puts them at eye level for kids.)

The recession also had a real adverse impact on check averages. People were just ordering less stuff, and the things they were ordering were less expensive. We obviously couldn't raise prices, so we needed to get creative about how to offset the decrease. This is where things got really fun.

At EMP, we introduced a dessert trolley-a cart stacked with delicious pies and cakes and tarts-that we could push right over to the table. Most of the time, when you offer people a dessert menu at lunch, they look at you like you're an alien. It's partly calories, but

mostly no one has time to go through the whole rigmarole of ordering a dessert, then waiting for it to be plated and brought out and eaten and cleared before they can get the check. Dessert tacks half an hour onto your meal, and at lunch, especially in New York, people are in a hurry to get back to work.

The twenty-nine-dollar lunches brought energy back to the restaurant, even if the margins weren't what we were accustomed to, and a full dining room gave the team the feeling that everything was going to be okay, even when I wasn't completely sure it would be.

Roll up to their table with a dessert cart, though, and they turn into wide-eyed little kids struggling to choose their treat-especially because they know they can have the one they point at, right away. The cart was beautiful and experiential, and people loved it. Dessert sales went up by 300 percent.

More important, the additional business meant we could give the team more hours. We'd spent the past few years hiring an amazing group of people; we couldn't afford to lose them if we wanted to stay the course. As much as they all loved the restaurant and our mission, they had bills to pay. I'm proud to say that we didn't lay off a single member of the team during that time.

Keep the Team Engaged at All Costs

All the cuts we made were having an impact, and all the creative ideas we had come up with to build revenue were as well. But no matter how you spin it, working in austere times is hard. We needed to fully flex our creative muscles-we needed to have some fun. It was time for some 95/5.

The year before, a friend had invited me to come down and see his band play at a Kentucky Derby party. The party itself was grubby-more East Village dive bar ironic than the gracious Southern garden party the occasion deserved-but I'd had a blast.

And I loved the idea. The Kentucky Derby! What other occasion has you drinking a signature cocktail in your Easter best? At what other event is it mandatory to wear a fantastic hat?

Enter the Kentucky Derby. This was a party we could knock out of the park. So, the next spring, we threw ourselves into hosting the most gorgeous, over-the-top Kentucky Derby bash of all time at Eleven Madison Park.

People love to dress up when they don't have to, and our guests did not disappoint. (We held an informal Best Dressed contest, with the lowest-tech applause-o-meter in history-my own ears.) All this to celebrate the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports, which we watched, breathlessly, on the massive movie screen we'd put up at the back of the restaurant, after a bugler in jodhpurs and a red jacket had sounded the call to post.

We decorated the room with horse-shaped topiaries, garlanded with roses as if they'd made it to the Winners Circle. The sumptuous buffet featured traditional Southern foods: Benedictine tea sandwiches, fried chicken and waffles, and the meaty braise called Kentucky Burgoo. We had a raw bar and a live band-high-octane American roots bluegrass, courtesy of the Crooners. And our bartenders kept the frosty mint juleps coming in their signature beaded pewter cups.

The party was a huge risk. Who throws a fancy party in the middle of a recession? But the risk paid off; we broke even. While we didn't make-or lose-money, it did invigorate the team. And we'd partnered with Maker's Mark, Nat Sherman cigars, and Esquire magazine, who promoted the event to their own vibrant communities, which broadened ours. A lot of homesick Southerners, horse people, hat lovers, and cigar aficionados were suddenly in love with EMP.

We were doing a great job; the experience we were giving our guests was awesome. And we were pinching every penny we could. We'd come up with great ideas to build the brand, and some of them had worked, but the greatest party in the world couldn't compensate for a global recession. Danny was rooting for us, but the bottom line was bleak, and time was running out.

The staff had as much fun at that party as the guests did, and I made a promise to myself: if the restaurant did survive, that sense of playfulness was a quality I never wanted to lose.

Then, one day at lunch, Frank Bruni walked in.

It Doesn't Have to Be Real to Work

Seeing Frank Bruni saunter in during an otherwise sleepy lunch service incited a rare combination of terror and excitement: obviously, he was there to see whether we deserved another look. We were all way too superstitious to say this out loud, but we couldn't ignore what was true: Bruni would only bother rereviewing us if he was going to give us four stars.

Then nothing happened.

To be honest, there was quiet chaos in the first moments after his arrival. Nobody burst into tears or broke into a run, but there was some panicked stage-whispering and deer-in-the-headlights moments of forgetting how to walk and talk. Pretty quickly, though, we were able to get past our nerves. And when he left, there were high fives all around: we were confident he'd had a great meal.

Crickets.

This is always stressful, but it's tolerable because the period is limited. Critics generally come in three times over a couple of weeks. Then you get the phone call saying that the paper is ready to take pictures, and-for better or worse-it's over.

Getting reviewed is nuts. In the weeks after the critic comes in, you're on alert. Everything shifts into high gear. Your whole life stops. The chef and the general manager and the wine director stop taking days off; you can't take the chance you won't be there when he comes back.

Except that our review process took months.

But when you're going for four stars, you're aiming for perfection, so we did everything in our power to make his experience perfect-even when he wasn't there. Because every night that Bruni wasn't in the restaurant, which was most of them that year, we designated one random table as the Critic of the Night and used those tables as a dress rehearsal.

Again, just as a mediocre team can't suddenly become great on the day of the Super Bowl, a mediocre restaurant can't become a great one the day the reviewer walks through the door. The restaurant you are is the restaurant they're reviewing, and I stand by that.

These make-believe critics ate at our best table. They were served by our best team and advised on their wine choices by our wine director. When it came time to reset the table for their next course, we didn't pull forks out of a drawer, no matter how meticulously those had been polished before service-no, there was a separate box of silverware set aside, every piece of which had been checked and buffed by a manager. Re-polished glasses sat on a separate tray, and every plate for that table was scrutinized for chips and smudges.

It wasn't real, and yet no detail was left to chance.

The kitchen fired doubles of every dish that the Critic of the Night's table ordered, just as they would when the real critic was in the house, so Daniel could send out whichever one had been everso-slightly more perfectly cooked. We assigned our two best food runners to take the food out-two, because you don't want a critic to see the same person over and over again and suspect that you're hand-selecting the people delivering the food to them (which, of course, we were).

I thought about this when I watched The Last Dance , a documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, the team he led to six NBA championships. Jordan's competitiveness was legendary; it was his fuel. If another player dared trash-talk him on the court, or to disrespect the Bulls in the media, watch out. But if nobody dared, then Jordan would fan the flames himself, inventing slights and interpreting accidental bumps as personal attacks. Any hint of disrespect, even fabricated, was enough to motivate him to rise to the occasion. He'd create stakes, even when there were none.

Were other people in the restaurant getting worse service than the fake critic? No-in fact, the difference between that table and the one right next to it would have been completely imperceptible, even if you knew what to look for; if anything, that level of focus helped us up our game with every other table. Because the Critic of the Night was for us . It allowed us to role-play so that every single move was rehearsed and polished to a gleam. It also meant that

Most nights, the critic in our restaurant wasn't real, just as the rivalry Michael Jordan created in his head wasn't real, but it doesn't have to be real to work . The ruse was successful.

when Bruni did come in, we'd be so practiced, not only would there not be any panic, but we would be ready for him regardless of what table he sat at and what team ended up serving him. The host would make eye contact and nod, and the cascade would begin: He's here, and here we go.

In fact, it would be nearly a year between that first lunch and the eventual review. Even with our confidence and all the practice, the wait was emotionally trying. I honestly think the only reason we were able to withstand a review process of that length, especially coupled with our financial desperation, was because of the cultural reboot we had done. In short, it was good that we'd figured out how to put our own oxygen masks on, because there wasn't a lot of relaxation that year.

Because it took him so long to come back, and because of this unreasonable routine we were running every night, I honestly believe it was in that year that we finally started operating on a four-star level. Not just for Frank Bruni, but for everybody else.

I eventually forced myself to take a day off to go see De La Guarda , a circus-like performance art piece and one of the hottest shows in New York City at the time. It is best known for the ending: after the last, beautiful scene, the music comes up loud, water falls from the ceiling, a confetti cannon goes off, and everyone dances. You leave the theater exhilarated, soaked, and covered in colored paper.

All that practice had paid off. The staff was impeccable and collected-at various points, some of them even looked like they were having fun. This was what we'd been training for. It was time to show him what we could do.

Wouldn't you know it: as soon as I turned my phone back on outside, it buzzed with a missed message: 'HE'S HERE!' I left my girlfriend on the corner, sprinted back to my apartment, jumped into the shower, threw on a suit, and was back at the restaurant within thirty-five minutes. I ran into the kitchen, checked in with Daniel, and immediately folded myself into service.

Every fifteen minutes, I'd sneak into a hidden nook next to the barista station with a direct sight line to his table so I could torture myself.

The mind games I played with myself were terrible. I obsessed over every tiny thing that happened, even though I intellectually understood that critics are also human beings and have normal interactions with their friends. I tried to remind myself: if he laughed, he was not cruelly mocking the food. A piece of foie gras left on the plate didn't mean he didn't like it, but that he had been out to dinner six times that week and didn't want to choke down an entire plate of duck liver. Or maybe it did mean he hated it, and everything else we were doing. It was exhausting.

We spent the rest of that year and the beginning of the next on pins and needles. He came and ate the fall menu and the winter menu. In the summer he came back-again, and again, and again. Then, finally, during the first week of August, we received the call from The New York Times to schedule the photographer to shoot the pictures that would accompany our review.

But Bruni seemed to have a good meal that time, too. So we went right back to waiting and practicing and hoping and watching the door.

At the Times , reviews post online the night before the printed paper is released. So on August 11, 2009, we went into service anxiously awaiting the news.

I rushed back into the office. Daniel and most of the team were already crowded around the computer, reading the review with giant smiles.

A group was in the office, refreshing the page over and over again, but I was too nervous to stay in there, so I went back out to the floor, figuring I might as well make myself useful. I was drizzling olive oil tableside over an appetizer of ricotta gnocchi with artichokes when a single diner, one of our regulars, pulled the review up on his phone. He leapt out of his chair, thrust his arm into the air, and yelled, 'Four stars!' The whole room erupted in cheers.

The headline read, 'A Daring Rise to the Top.' Bruni chronicled our rise from two, to three, and then to four stars, saying that he'd fallen in love 'gradually, not all at once.' He described watching 'an improved, excellent restaurant . . . make yet another unnecessary advance.' I couldn't help but see how eerily and

accurately those words captured not only the evolution of the guest experience, but the evolution of our culture as well.

'A magnitude of enchantment'! We had done it. We had four stars. And we'd earned them through our focus on excellence, but even more so because of our focus on hospitality . . . by being unapologetically us.

That review ended up being his second to last as the critic at The New York Times. In his farewell article, he talked about us one last time. In writing about the 'wonderful, wonderful meal' he'd had with us, he said, 'What I was eating at Eleven Madison Park and what I was feeling in that grand, glorious room added up to a magnitude of enchantment much greater than that at other threestar restaurants.'

Danny showed up not too much later, glowing with pride. I saw him before he even walked through the door and ran out to give him a big hug. The first thing he did was ask for my cell phone. He immediately called my dad, wanting to share the moment with him and congratulate him on the role he had played in making it happen. Watching my two mentors congratulate each other and celebrate that moment is something I won't forget.

We raged into the night. And the next day, when we opened for lunch service, there were Riedel champagne flutes tipped over on Madison Avenue, and a homeless guy in the park was wearing one of our four-star shirts.

The party we threw that night was bigger than any we had thrown before. I had reached out to our rep at Dom Pérignon and asked them to donate two cases in the event that the news was good; I had a DJ on call for the same reason. I'd also had T-shirts made: the four leaves of our logo, with four stars below them, and it gave me great pleasure to pass them out at the party. (Danny got mad at me about those T-shirts; for him, it was counting our chickens before they hatched, and bad luck. Looking back, I'm inclined to agree with him, but at the time, it felt right.)

The dining room, though, was immaculate, ready for our first four-star lunch.

Bottles of champagne and giant bouquets of flowers arrived every day for the next week. Each of the five other four-star

restaurants in New York sent a gift to welcome us to the club, and our regulars came to celebrate what their support had helped us achieve.

Even when we were down, we'd played offense, and it had worked. Not only had we made it through the recession alive, but we'd emerged stronger than before.