CHAPTER 17

LEARNING TO BE UNREASONABLE

I can still feel the wave of embarrassment and disappointment that washed over me when they announced that Eleven Madison Park had come in fiftieth-dead last-on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list for 2010. The twist in my gut is as vivid to me now as it was that night.

I spent the entire flight home from London trying to find the words I would use when I got back to the restaurant and met with the entire team; we knew they'd be devastated by how the awards had turned out for us. After a setback, it's a leader's job to take their team through their own emotional reckoning-from disappointment to motivation -and to chart the course ahead, because everyone has to be aligned on what you're going to do next.

Ultimately, it was with my dad's favorite quote that I opened the all-staff meeting Daniel and I led upon our return: 'What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?'

The restaurant was full; our four stars had made sure of that, and a week before, that had been enough. But Daniel and I had come home from London with a crumpled cocktail napkin and a new goal; we wanted to be the number one restaurant in the world.

'We didn't like hearing our names called in last place; we're going to use that humiliation to push ourselves,' we said. 'As amazing as the restaurants in the top ten are, we could be just as good, if not better. We want to be number one.'

It was a tremendous risk to articulate that dream out loud. When you set a goal for your team and fail to achieve it, you run the risk of damaging morale-and this was a particularly audacious benchmark, given that slipping a single spot would mean falling off the list entirely. But the engine behind that bold statement was another quote, this one by Jay-Z: 'I believe you can speak things into existence.' I know this for sure: if you don't have the courage to state a goal out loud, you'll never achieve it.

Unsurprisingly, they were on board. We wouldn't have to waste another minute deciding. Now, we just had to do.

At that meeting, we were inviting the team to decide to go for it with us. When you've surrounded yourself with talented people, there's nothing more powerful than a collective decision. If this electric group decided to accomplish this goal, then-no matter how far-fetched or difficult-we would.

Reasonable vs. Unreasonable

When I'd scribbled the words 'Unreasonable Hospitality' on that napkin, I hadn't the slightest idea how we'd put those words into practice. But you don't need to know exactly what an idea means to start pursuing it; often, all you need is a sense of what you're trying to achieve. Start pushing, try different things, and the idea will begin to define itself.

So, we started changing our approach to hospitality in radical ways. Mostly because those words I'd jotted down-Unreasonable Hospitality-gave birth to an idea that would be completely central to everything that came afterward, which was to provide the kind of welcome that would give our guests the feeling we were doing things differently.

Behavioral science expert Rory Sutherland says the opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea. That's why the idea of Unreasonable Hospitality was so compelling. The opposite of Unreasonable Hospitality isn't treating people poorly, it's reasonable hospitality-a perfectly fine way of doing business. But reasonable was not how we were going to become the number one restaurant in the world.

We had already upgraded the guest experience, and many of the luxurious details-the creamy linens, the thick leather cover on the wine list, the heft of the silver-were designed to communicate

excellence. But we were trying to create a different kind of four-star restaurant, where every detail of your comfort had been anticipated and attended to, one where you felt truly comfortable. And this was where I felt I could make my mark. The details that made us excellent were essential-a dedication to refinement, superior technique, and polish. But I wanted the details that defined our hospitality to be unreasonable.

A dish we were known for at the time was a filet of turbot, meticulously covered with paper-thin slices of zucchini arranged to overlap so they mimicked a fish's scales. The fish was then vacuumpacked with olive oil and herbs and cooked sous vide at precisely 54.2 degrees Celsius for eighteen minutes, then served on top of a saffron broth with a fried and stuffed zucchini blossom.

When we were sitting in the auditorium, waiting for the 50 Best awards to begin, I was aware that every person in the room-Daniel and me included-was engaged in an unreasonable pursuit of excellence. But for almost everyone, the focus of that unreasonable pursuit was what was on the plate. It was the same old story: the magic happened in the kitchen, and the dining room was in service of that magic.

Every single element of the dish represented weeks of research and development and testing; each part took hours of training to prepare and execute. And all for two bites-maybe three minutes of a guest's life!

That's not reasonable, but it's wonderful. I had already seen how impactful our focus on graciousness at EMP had been, so I wondered: What would happen if we took the same unreasonable approach to how we prepared that dish and applied it to hospitality?

Hospitality Isn't a Transaction

We often spoke about the bubble we were working to create around each table. If the food was timed correctly, the lights and music just right, and our service so complete and unobtrusive that we were always there when the guests wanted us to be, and never when they didn't, then the bubble would exist around every table. Guests wouldn't be distracted by one another; they would be fully engaged in the experience. Time would cease to exist.

But if the food took too long, or if someone dropped a tray of glassware, or if a computer was printing a few feet from their table, then the bubble would pop, and the spell would be broken. We'd worked hard to make our service flawless, so that the food was perfectly paced and nobody was dropping trays. But as long as that printer was in the dining room, the bubble was getting broken all night long-it was a constant reminder that guests were sitting in our business, not in our home.

I conducted an audit to remove anything that felt transactional from our dining room. We started by banishing the Micros terminals, the computers restaurants use to enter orders and print checks, from the dining room. That was a relatively easy one, though we did have to build a room adjacent to the kitchen, where we could keep them along with the silverware, glassware, and all the other supplies we used for service.

Ordinarily, you walk into a restaurant and approach the maître d' standing behind a podium, bathed in the ugly glare of an iPad screen. You say: 'Hey, I have a reservation tonight,' and give your name. They look down, stab around the screen a little bit. Then the maître d' turns to the host and says, 'You can take them to table 23.' Everything about that is transactional-the screen, the fact that you're being transported around the restaurant like cargo, the table number.

But I saw the biggest opportunity to test-drive Unreasonable Hospitality at our front door, where we welcomed our guests.

Maybe I'm being a little dramatic. Certainly, there are plenty of excellent restaurants that handle the exchange elegantly, with warmth and graciousness. But as long as the maître d' is standing behind a podium, a literal barrier between them and the person they are welcoming, the hospitality in that moment can never be more than reasonable. Contrast that with what happens when you go to a friend's house for dinner. They throw open the door, they look you directly in the eyes, and they welcome you by name.

I couldn't help but see an opportunity.

Before long, when guests walked through our doors, instead of having to approach someone who was looking at a screen, they'd be welcomed by name: 'Good evening, Ms. Sun-and welcome to Eleven Madison Park.' I never tired of seeing the reaction on people's faces when they experienced this for the first time.

There was some skepticism the first time I sat down with the guest relations team and told them we were going to get rid of the podium at EMP. But if you explain the why along with the what, you'll be surprised how many of these impossible ideas your team can bring to life.

Every night, the maître d' would take the list of reservations and Google the names on it, creating a cheat sheet with photos for each seating. If your photo had ever been put on the internet, we would find it-and if you still looked anything remotely like the person in that photo, you would be greeted by name. After the seven thirty reservations were seated, the maître d' would start studying the cheat sheet for the eight o'clock reservations.

None of this was rocket science, but it did require being willing to do whatever it took to bring it to life. What did feel like rocket science (to us, at least, based on how challenging it was to execute) was that the maître d' who greeted you was also the person who had confirmed your reservation two days earlier.

Full disclosure: there was still a podium. It was just around the corner from the entrance, so you wouldn't see it when you walked in. Behind that podium was the 'anchor,' another employee, who was in touch with the dining room and knew whether your table was ready or not. The anchor would communicate in sign language to the maître d', who was effortlessly chatting you up while waiting for instruction; if they signaled that your table was ready, a host would come over and bring you into the dining room. If it wasn't quite ready, the anchor would use a different signal, and the maître d' would usher you into the bar to have a drink while you waited.

At most restaurants, your table is confirmed by a reservationist in an office, gone by the time guests arrive. But we had our maître d's confirm the reservations so that they could start building a relationship before the guests even set foot in the restaurant. So the maître d' could say, 'Ms. Sun, my name is Justin; we spoke on the phone the other day. We're so excited to have you with us tonight.'

Obviously, eliminating the podium added steps of service. And besides the Googling and all the nonverbal communication, it took a strategist working the schedule to ensure that the maître d' who'd confirmed your reservation would always be working on the night you came in. For a lot of companies, these extra steps would have been a good reason not to add these flourishes, but I had an Avis car rental tagline from an old commercial stuck in my head: 'We try harder.'

Walking into a fine-dining restaurant like EMP can be intimidating. Being immediately greeted by someone you talked to on the phone a couple of days before made it much less so. And because the real point of those confirmation calls was to learn something about the guest in advance of their arrival and to ask if they were celebrating a special occasion, Justin could also say, 'Happy birthday, and thanks for celebrating it with us!'

I have no idea whether that ad was a genuine reflection of the company's culture or some genius on Madison Avenue's way to differentiate one nearly identical car rental service from another, but I thought about the phrase all the time. Isn't that what differentiates the good from the great? Being so committed to an idea that you're willing to try harder, to go to unreasonable lengths in order to bring it to life?

'I want to do a ticketless coat check,' I told JP Pullos, who was running our front-door team at the time.

Removing the transactional feeling from the beginning of the meal had such a transformational impact on the experience that I wanted to take it a step further and remove it from the end of the meal as well. If we were now welcoming people more warmly than ever, I wanted our farewell to be just as personal.

'Okay. How?'

JP did figure it out-and indeed, it was brilliant. He reorganized the regular coat-check room to sort the coats by table number and

'No idea! But you'll come up with something brilliant,' I told him. A leader doesn't have to know the details of every plan when they have faith in the people who work for them.

added an additional, smaller coat check-the 'on-deck' coat check -by the door.

No one was doing this then; very few restaurants do it now. Which is a shame, because it was one of my favorite moments of the night. You'd watch guests approaching the door start to hunt in their pockets or bags for their coat check tagswhere did I put that? Then they'd look up and recognize their own coat. It was amazing to pull off a magic trick right at the end, blowing the guests' minds one last time; I never got tired of seeing it.

During service, a host periodically passed through the dining room, taking note of where people were in their meals so they could plan where they were going to seat the next group of reservations. With our new system, when the host spotted a table paying their check, they'd send someone to transfer the coats from the big coatroom to the on-deck coatroom. By the time the table had finished paying and was heading to the front of the restaurant, we'd be standing by the front door with their coats.

Hospitality Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

It is impossible to get a reservation at Rao's.

After years of asking everyone I knew, I finally managed to wrangle myself an invitation. The meal was amazing (the meatballs are some of the best I have ever had). And while the dining experience was pretty removed from the one we were trying to provide, it made a big impression on me.

Rao's, which opened in 1896 and serves homestyle Italian American food in Harlem, is a New York institution. And when I say it's impossible to get a reservation there, I mean it: they don't take them. A select few people 'own' tables, and you can't eat there unless you're invited by someone who does.

There weren't any menus at Rao's; instead, a guy called Nicky the Vest pulled a barstool up to our table and told us our options. We didn't hear about the pastas until we'd picked our antipasti; we didn't hear about meat until we'd picked our pastas. It was a conversation-or felt like one, though you somehow always ended

up eating what Nicky thought you should eat.

After the evening's wine was out of my system, I realized we weren't ready for quite so radical a move. (Later, we would be.) But I was entranced by the idea that ordering your meal could take the form of a back-and-forth exchange between the restaurant and the guest. Danny Meyer says that hospitality is a dialogue, not a monologue. He meant it metaphorically, but I wanted to make the dialogue literal.

I loved it. It was like going to my grandma's house for dinner, and I left convinced we should get rid of our menus altogether.

For years, we'd offered both a prix fixe menu and a chef's tasting menu. The prix fixe gave the guest control; the tasting menu afforded surprise.

As you may have gathered by now, I like to be in control. That's especially true at dinner, because I'm a bit of a picky eater: I don't like fishy fish or organ meats. And as someone who loves food, I like to determine not only what I don't want to eat on a given night, but what I do.

I wanted a less binary option. There was charm in the unexpectedness and flow-the narrative-of a tasting menu, but it was also a directive, subjecting the diner to a monologue from the kitchen: 'This is what you're going to eat tonight.'

We came up with a new menu idea, which would encompass the best of both worlds. On a normal menu, all your options are listed in their entirety: the beef comes with potato puree and chanterelle mushrooms. You decide exactly what you want, and you get exactly what you order. With many tasting menus, on the other hand, there's no menu at all; you find out what you're going to be eating when the plate is put down in front of you.

We listed our dishes only by their principal ingredient; on a given night, say, your choice of entrée might be between beef, duck, lobster, or cauliflower. You controlled which of those you ordered but got to enjoy the surprise of how the ingredient was prepared and served when it was delivered.

The beauty of the former is control; the beauty of the latter is surprise. Our new menu captured both.

Daniel loved the new menu format because it gave him

flexibility-if a vendor surprised him with a few boxes of gorgeous sorrel or special summer beans, he could incorporate those without reprinting a hundred menus. I loved it because it necessitated a conversation. As Oliver Strand wrote in his aptly titled article in The New York Times about the menu change, 'At Eleven Madison Park, Fixing What Isn't Broke': 'The menu is almost an abstraction. Rather than seducing you with luscious descriptions, it's a reasonor provocation-to talk to your server about what you feel like eating.'

Wait, what? I have nothing but admiration for what chefs do, and I know some substitutions will destroy the integrity of a dish. But from a hospitality perspective, that blanket statement-no accommodations, no matter what-was shocking and went against everything I believed in. (It's worth noting that in the years since, Momofuku's owner, David Chang, has become more flexible and one of the most hospitable chefs I know.)

A few months after we launched the new menu, I had a meal at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, which encouraged me to push this idea of dialogue and choice even further. There was a small box in the lower right-hand corner of Ssäm Bar's menu that read: 'No substitutions or special requests. We do not serve vegetarianfriendly items.'

But that night, I couldn't keep my eyes off that box and ended up journaling about it over my nightly glass of red wine. How can a restaurant tell someone who doesn't want meat that they have to have it if they want to eat there? What we were doing with the new menu format was all well and good, as far as what the guest wanted -but were we doing enough to give the guest a voice about what they didn't want?

It took a bit of convincing to get Daniel and the kitchen staff on board with this one, as they would have to do most of the heavy

At the time we, like every other restaurant, would ask the guest at the beginning of the meal if they had any allergies. But not killing your guests is table stakes; surely we could do better? What if we also asked them if there were any ingredients they didn't like? Or if there was anything they just weren't in the mood to eat that night? Now that would be a proper dialogue.

lifting, coming up with endless variations on dishes they'd already perfected. If the chicken was served with asparagus and morels but the guest didn't like mushrooms, the kitchen would need to have an alternate but equally delicious preparation of the chicken prepped and on hand, just in case. It was the very definition of unreasonable. But Daniel could see how revolutionary the idea was, if we could bring it to life. (I also pulled the 'This is important to me' card.)

A couple of weeks after we'd started asking diners about their preferences, not one single table had told us about an ingredient they didn't like. I took a station to see if I could figure out why.

We decided to give it a shot. And it nearly didn't work at all.

There is, by the way, no better way for a leader to figure out why an idea isn't working-or how it can work better-than to walk a mile in the shoes of the people you've charged with implementing that idea. In general, this is good practice. If you're the CEO of a hotel chain, work the front desk at one of your hotels a couple of times a year; if you run an airline, take a shift at the ticket desk, or serve drinks and pretzels in economy. Not ceremonially, either-do the job. I bet you'll be surprised by what you learn; I always was.

At the time, Andrew Zimmern and Anthony Bourdain were all over TV, eating still-beating cobra hearts, fetal ducks from unhatched eggs, and soups made from silkworm larvae. Every highend menu featured ingredients-treviso! 'nduja! cardoon!-obscure enough that even a seasoned diner might need to Google them under the table.

My serving skills were a little rusty, and the people supporting me had to work harder than they would have if the team had been headed by a competent captain. But it took only a few tables before I knew what the problem was.

If you were someone who cared about food, which most of our guests were, the trend was to eat widely and indiscriminately. So it wasn't cool to admit that the texture of eggplant or caviar grossed you out or that you hated beets because your mom had served the slimy ones from the can. And if you weren't going to confess those things to your nearest and dearest, you certainly weren't going to

unburden yourself to the captain at a four-star restaurant.

Sure enough, once I'd come clean, the guy in seat two said, 'Actually, I'm not crazy about oysters,' and his wife said, 'Yeah, I hate celery.'

So the next time I asked the question, I made my own (true) confession: I told the guests how I feel about sea urchin. Sea urchin is rare and difficult to source. It is a delicacy many sophisticated eaters love: creamy and decadent, beloved by chefs. And the mere thought of it makes me want to puke.

It wasn't until I'd shown myself to be vulnerable that the people I was serving allowed me to see their vulnerability. Is it an expression of vulnerability to say you don't like an ingredient? I think it is-and the more open you demonstrate yourself to be, the more likely people are to be open with you.

In that moment, for me, the new menu format was a true success. We'd turned what had been a one-way conversation into a genuine exchange.

Treat Everyone Like a VIP

Personal training sessions with a celebrity trainer. A three-night stay at a lighthouse on the coast of Sweden. Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of services from a Park Avenue dermatologist. A lifetime supply of luxury face cream. A Tiffany crystal-studded cat collar. A year of complimentary Audi rentals. A ten-day walking tour of Japan.

For us, Unreasonable Hospitality meant providing thoughtful, high-touch gestures for every one of our guests.

We weren't the first people to be unreasonable in our approach to hospitality, but that kind of over-the-top service had always been limited to a select few: celebrities, politicians, the wealthy and elite. Think of the exorbitant gift bags Oscar nominees famously get every year. (See partial list above.)

Our first pass at leveling the playing field came in our reimagining of the kitchen tour. Many fine-dining restaurants have chef's tables, but it had always bugged me that only one table got to

experience a meal at that table every night; even at EMP, visits to the kitchen had always been reserved for the biggest VIPs. But if we believed holistically in the concept of Unreasonable Hospitality, we needed the most gracious elements of the experience to be available to everyone.

Because it was only a single course, we could offer that special experience to lots of people-everyone who showed interest in experiencing it. (This course was neutral-never a dessert-so it could happen at any point in the meal; the first one we did was a liquid nitrogen cocktail.) We even hired someone whose only job was to give those tours. Not everyone wanted to see the kitchen; some people had come to the restaurant to negotiate a deal, or to stare passionately into each other's eyes, or simply to eat-and the staff was tuned in enough to leave those folks alone. But for everyone else-whether you were Jay-Z and Beyoncé, or a couple who had saved up so you could experience a four-star restaurant for the first time, the experience was yours to have.

We created a nook in our kitchen with an expansive view of the thirty precision-trained cooks working with laser focus and in near silence in our enormous, immaculate kitchen, and put a chef's table in that nook. But our chef's table had no chairs; our guests stood while enjoying a single course.

What's the Hospitality Solution?

The very end of the meal is always precarious from a hospitality perspective. First of all, it's time to pay, and that's never fun. The cold, hard reality of those numbers on a check can throw cold water on the magical vibe you've built over the course of the evening.

At EMP, we used hospitality to solve both potential problems.

And the timing is hard to get right. When some guests are ready to leave, they're ready to leave. People get impatient ( get I impatient!) if the process of getting the check, paying it, and getting out the door takes too long. But at the same time, you can never put the check down before the guest has asked for it, because that gives them the feeling you're trying to rush them out.

We didn't wait for the guest to ask for the check. Instead, at the end of their meal, we'd bring the bill over and drop it off-along with an entire bottle of cognac.

People were delighted by this. The ability to pour for themselves felt even more luxurious and surprising to them after a three-hour meal where they hadn't had to lift a finger, and that was the feeling I was trying to replicate: the moment, at the end of a dinner party, when a guest leans forward, grabs the mostly empty bottle of wine left on the table, and tops off everyone's glass.

We'd pour everyone at the table a splash and leave the full bottle on the table: 'Please, help yourself to as much as you like, with our compliments. And when you're ready, your check is right here.'

But more important, there's no way a person who has just been given a full bottle of free booze can feel like they're being rushed out. And yet, at the same time, the check was right there whenever they were ready for it. We no longer had to 'drop the check' on one of our guests, and they would never have to ask for it again.

Too often, when we're faced with a pernicious problem in our businesses, we fall back on the tried-and-true: push harder, be more efficient, cut back. Especially when the problems are nagging ones that erode the bottom line or those that persist because our organizations rely on humans and all their wonderful and fallible ways.

This is a hospitality solution: a problem that we solved not by sneakily chipping away at the service we were offering but by blowing it out in the opposite direction-by giving more, not less.

Imagine, though, that instead of resorting to one of these fallback positions, you asked yourself: What is the hospitality solution? What if you forced yourself to be creative, to develop a solution that worked because of-not in spite of-your dedication to generosity and extraordinary service?

These are almost always harder to execute, and coming up with them will definitely call on your creative side. But they're almost always a win. If a stumble at the end of a meal can undo all the goodwill a restaurant has earned in the three hours preceding it, then a gorgeous, gracious gesture at the end can have the opposite effect. (This is true in every service industry.)

And while dropping off a full bottle of expensive booze at every table seemed like an unreasonably extravagant gesture, it was actually cost-effective. After an elaborate multicourse dinner (and usually plenty of wine), few people were interested in drinking more than a sip of that cognac. Yet the feeling of abundance was there.