CHAPTER 19

SCALING A CULTURE

Back in the day, the best restaurants in the world were in hotels. César Ritz ran the Hotel Splendide in Paris in the 1870s and introduced the robber barons of America to European luxury. In Monte Carlo, he met a French chef called Auguste Escoffier, and the rest is hospitality history-the two men's partnership ensured that, for the rest of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth, the world's great hotels would be known for their restaurants.

Early in 2010, Daniel and I were approached by Andrew Zobler, one of the partners in the hotel group that had developed and opened the Ace Hotel on Twenty-Ninth and Broadway. The Ace chain, with their affordable rooms, industrial and reclaimed aesthetic, and scene-heavy lobbies that doubled as workspaces had been runaway hits.

Unfortunately, over time, the concept of the luxurious hotel restaurant fell out of favor. The restaurant in a hotel had become a sad add-on, the kind of grim spot you'd choose only if you were too exhausted from travel and meetings to leave the building. And if a new hotel did happen to attract a good restaurant, management would use separate entrances and branding to ensure the two felt distinct.

Now Andrew wanted to talk to us about doing the food and beverage at a hotel with a new, higher-end concept: the rebirth of the Grand Hotel. It would be called the NoMad. Andrew had the crazy idea to make the restaurant an integral part of the hotel once again-to bring back the days of Escoffier and Ritz. Both Daniel and I fell in love with the idea immediately, and we knew Andrew was the right person to do it with. We loved the way his other projects combined art, design, and retail alongside the food and beverage programs. We also saw an opportunity to rejuvenate a New York neighborhood that could use a little love.

A hotel that didn't charge by the hour would play a major role in reinventing the neighborhood, and that was a powerful incentive for us. So was the management contract they were offering us: we wouldn't have to invest any money, which was good because we didn't have any.

The new site was mere blocks away from Eleven Madison Park, but the neighborhood was a throwback to the bad old days of the seventies: it was not unusual to witness a drug deal taking place in broad daylight. Broadway was lined with wholesale shops selling cheap trinkets, and the subway grates were covered by tarps with handles at the corner, so vendors could hide the knockoff bags they were selling when a cop drove by.

Then came the hard part-talking to Danny Meyer.

Nobody Knows What They're Doing Before They Do It

'We have huge aspirations for Eleven Madison Park, and they're within reach,' we told Danny. 'At the same time, we don't want to be employees forever. We'd love to be owners of our own thing at the NoMad and continue working for you at Eleven Madison Park.'

Danny asked to think about it for a while-and then he said no. 'I can't be partners with you at one restaurant and competitors with you at another just a few blocks away.' There was some back and forth, and then he came back with an alternative: 'How about you buy EMP from me?'

This was the last thing we'd expected to come out of that meeting. Still, almost without thinking, I said, 'We'd love to.'

I say this whenever someone shares their fears with me about taking a leap forward: Nobody knows what they're doing before they do it. When you're trying to level up, it's easy to psych yourself out by focusing on everything you don't know. But you've

I had no idea how we were going to pull it off. Looking back, I didn't even know what or how much I didn't know. But the biggest, scariest, most impossible-seeming accomplishments start with a simple commitment to do them.

got to have faith in your ability to figure it out. A black diamond is scary if you usually ski blues. But you'll never advance if you always turn around to find an easier trail; eventually, you have to put your poles in the snow and push. Growth happens outside of your comfort zone. Whether on your ass or on your skis, don't worry-you will get down the hill, and you'll learn a lot along the way. (This is also why promoting people before they are ready works so well.)

Danny's offer came with a wise caveat: 'You need to figure out if you can raise the money and buy the restaurant by February or March. No matter how hard we try to keep this under wraps, the secret will get out, and it'll be devastating for morale if the restaurant is in limbo for too long.'

He was right, but it left us less than three months to raise a huge amount of money. And I don't mind telling you the experience was positively harrowing.

I started sitting down in the dining room with regulars. I didn't want to sound gauche by asking them for money, so I'd say, 'Off the record, we've been given an opportunity to buy the restaurant. Do you know anyone who might want to invest?' Of course, I was hoping they'd be interested themselves, and a few of them were, so I spent a lot of time having drinks. But those were all dead ends-turns out, the kind of person who can afford to eat at an expensive restaurant can't necessarily afford to buy one.

Then Ernesto Cruz, a regular who worked upstairs in our building, said, 'I help people buy and sell companies all the time. I'd be happy to help you.' I thought: I don't need help; I need money. So I wasted another two or three weeks. Then one night after service, feeling desperate, I emailed Ernesto: 'If your offer still stands, I could use some help.'

Ernesto became my guardian angel. He put together a team of his colleagues who all worked pro bono to help usher me through the process. They showed me how to put together a deck, what modeling was, and how to demonstrate a return on investment. They set aside time so I could rehearse my pitch and give me feedback on my delivery. Then they came up with a list of potential investors, and I took my suit and my briefcase to Boston, to Chicago-even to Beverly Hills.

Ultimately, they introduced us to an investor named Noam Gottesman. We met him over lunch at Sushi Yasuda and got to know one another as individuals before talking about our ambitions for the restaurant. He must have seen something in us, because two weeks before the deadline was set to expire, we had the money. I'll forever be grateful for his vision and support.

Asking for money is hard; it's humiliating to try to convince people that you're good enough for them to invest in. But I believed in Eleven Madison Park.

At virtually the same time, we signed the deal to open the restaurant at the NoMad, which was set to open in March 2012. So, on November 11, 2011 (11/11/11), we announced to the staff that we had bought the restaurant. In a particularly dramatic turn of events, in that same week, Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook came out, and we became the first restaurant in history to be elevated from one to three Michelin stars in a single year.

Make It Nice

We called our new company Make It Nice, after Daniel's signature phrase, back when his English was less refined. It had quickly become shorthand within the restaurant for 'Pay a little extra attention to this'-whether 'this' was a table of friends, or a dish, or even a side-work project. By that point, expectations were so clear, a team member could say, 'Make it nice,' to one of their colleagues, and without any further explanation, they would.

It was the perfect name for our company, encompassing both

The symmetry of the words themselves appealed, reinforcing that this was a restaurant run by both sides of the wall. The kitchen 'makes' food; in the dining room, we were 'nice.' (We were so adamant about breaking down the walls that divided us that-as you may have noticed-we didn't even use the common terms 'back of house' and 'front of house.' Instead, we always referred to them as 'the kitchen' and 'the dining room.') Plus, 'make' and 'nice' had the same number of letters.

excellence and hospitality.

Creativity Is a Practice

The list of words we'd come up with because of a throwaway reference to Miles Davis in that early review of EMP had shaped the way we'd grown. So when we signed the deal to open the NoMad, we knew we wanted to find another musical influence to serve as our muse.

The Rolling Stones are sex and drugs and Mick Jagger's dangerous energy strutting across the stage, right? But when the Stones were coming up, they bought and memorized every album they could find by American blues artists. They learned everything they could about the music they loved before imposing their own take. So yes, the Stones were loose-but in an incredibly studied and intentional way. That was how they'd reinvented rhythm and blues.

If EMP was Miles Davis, then the NoMad would be the Rolling Stones.

The NoMad was positioned at the intersection of uptown and downtown. We wanted to create an urban playground that could straddle both worlds and deliver the best of each. The place would be lush and luxurious but also democratic and awesome and easy and connective and loud and vibrant and loose and alive. And we were going to be as intentional in designing it as the Stones had been when they were studying the blues.

For Daniel and me as businesspeople, and for us as a company, opening the NoMad was a huge leap forward, and came with all the

Once again, we were creating a place we'd want to go. Which meant an à la carte menu of technically perfect food and an exceptional, deep wine list, served by a young, high-energy staff in a fantastic New York space with a great playlist, played loud. If Eleven Madison Park was the place we'd choose to celebrate a special occasion (or when the dinner was the special occasion), the NoMad was where we'd go when it was time for an incredible night out.

challenges that haunt businesses during periods of growth and expansion. We got some stuff wrong, but we did a lot right-in large part because we went to great lengths to bring over the culture of hospitality we'd created at Eleven Madison Park.

The pressure was intense.

It's impossible to overestimate how important it was for our new company for us to get the NoMad right. Plenty of bands have one hit, but if your sophomore album is a flop, you're a one-hit wonder. We wanted to be the Beatles, Nirvana, the Rolling Stonesevergreen, not poor Gary Wright of 'Dream Weaver' fame. And in New York City, the paper of record plays an outsize role in determining which category you'll fall into, so nothing was more crucial than making sure the first review of the NoMad in The New York Times was a good one.

To help focus and filter our ideas, I created a fictional character -a hedonistic, fifty-three-year-old gourmand and music lover, living and breaking hearts in the South of France-so we could design the public spaces of the NoMad as if they were rooms in his private home. We then held focused meetings to brainstorm all the elements that would make the place unique. Invariably, in every new group, someone would say, 'I'm just not creative.' Which would lead to my pulling them aside later to explain: that's not how creativity works.

When we were designing the NoMad, the meetings we held were structured but also collaborative and exploratory. We were disciplined and intentional about creating a space where we could

To paraphrase the marketing guru Seth Godin, creativity is a practice. Even great creative minds like Sir Paul McCartney, Godin explains, have a system to help them be creative, to hone their ideas. In McCartney's case, time pressure, a regular schedule, and being comfortable with using a less-than-perfect word or musical phrase until he came up with a better one were all necessary for him to get to songs that are still beloved, fifty years later. Your practice may be different-and none of us is Paul McCartney-but it's time we dispel the myth that creativity must be spontaneous and is limited to geniuses. Creativity is an active process, not a passive one.

dream freely, which meant leaving every other concern at the door so we could give ourselves over to the process. In those rooms, it was safe to chase a seemingly silly idea that might just flower into a great one. There were no bad ideas (at least not at first), and no shame in presenting the earliest, half-formed kernel of one in the hopes that someone else might complete the thought-or use it as a springboard to something better. Even the Beatles were constantly contributing to one another's songs.

Maya Angelou famously said, 'You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.' The more space we gave ourselves to dream, and the more trust we gave one another, the better we got.

Once again, we were harnessing the collective brilliance of the team, playing off one another so effectively that in many cases, when I was later asked, 'Whose idea was that?' I honestly didn't know.

On the nights we spent hours debating how the now-famous chicken for two would be served, I was grateful that my experience at EMP had helped me to reframe my fanatical attention to detail as a superpower. (We presented the whole bird on a copper platter, carved the breast, and served a fricassee of the dark meat on another plate, family-style.)

It was clear to me right from the beginning that the library bar was going to be the beating heart of the hotel, so I oversaw every aspect of its design and execution. I drove a U-Haul to the massive Brimfield Antique Flea Market so I could handpick every chair before redoing them in the NoMad fabrics. And while it's common to purchase used books by the yard for a decorative library, there was no way we were going to fill our shelves with a generic jumble of old law textbooks and forgotten novels. In this, as with everything, we had to find our follow-through. So we asked our book curator to select books as if they were for our fictional

And since the NoMad would be open for breakfast, I spent an unreasonable amount of time searching for the perfect coffeepot. And every minute was worth it when I found the perfect one, a nod to the triangular Turkish cezve , made by Mauviel, the French copper cookware specialists.

character's library, which is how we ended up with sections on New York history, food and wine, music-and the occult. As Walt Disney said, people can feel perfection.

In the spirit of surprise and delight, we hid flasks of whiskey in hollowed volumes scattered throughout. If you found one of these real-life Easter eggs, it was yours to enjoy.

Jump-start the Culture

The majority of the opening management team at the NoMad came from Eleven Madison Park. That was deliberate. Because our plan had been to bring seasoned people to the new restaurant, we started staffing up at Eleven Madison Park a few months before.

As you grow, you can't lose the very thing that gave you the opportunity to grow. When you consider expanding, in any form, you have to first stop and identify what makes your culture unique and decide in advance to protect whatever that is.

I thought of those transplants from EMP as sourdough starter: not only would we have the benefit of their impeccable technical training, but they'd seed the new spot with our culture. They'd communicate, through words and their actions, everything that we stood for and believed in. Their passion and knowledge and all the values they'd accrued by watching the seasons pass from within the walls of Eleven Madison Park would infect everyone else we hired.

For us, that was our culture of Unreasonable Hospitality-going above and beyond, doing more, always giving our guests more than they expected. And a culture depends on the people who bring it to life every day; if we got that part right, the other pieces would fall into place.

The only major hire we made from outside the company was the general manager, Jeff Tascarella.

There were good reasons for us to make an exception in his case. Jeff had already been a general manager, and I wanted someone who'd been a boss before; he also had experience running a hotel restaurant, which I most certainly did not. Because the NoMad would be a little louder and looser than Eleven Madison Park, we needed someone with experience at a high-volume restaurant celebrated for its quality, and Jeff had run Scarpetta, a bustling, beloved, and excellent three-star restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Lastly, we wanted the NoMad to be cool-and Jeff was one of the coolest guys I knew.

We took training very seriously in the run-up to opening the NoMad. Our budget for education was outrageous, according to the conventional wisdom, but I was betting the enormous amounts of time and energy and money we were spending would turn out to be a good investment. I'm always surprised when people spend a fortune on a new project, then skimp on training the people charged with bringing that project to life-a perfect example of what it means to be 'penny-wise, pound-foolish.'

Jeff became a huge part of the NoMad's success. Still, it's a measure of how important I thought it was to foster our culture by promoting from within that this was one of the only times in my tenure at the company that we ever hired a general manager from outside.

By the time the doors opened, the hundred and fifty people on our dining room team had been alternating between classroom trainings and practical stages on the floor for weeks. They knew every wine by the glass, every dish, every service point. More important, they'd gotten a significant dose of our culture, and right from the source-either from me or from EMP's senior leadership.

Compiling those ideas into a book forced us to put words to what we stood for. The experience was so positive I now think every company, no matter the size, should spend a few weeks hashing out every one of their core values and committing them to paper.

Even EMP team members who hadn't come over to the NoMad had a hand in these trainings. Prior to the opening, we printed out hundreds of pages of notes from the pre-meal speeches I'd given over the past three years and asked the captains and managers at Eleven Madison Park to pick out concepts that had resonated the most with them-and the ones that had stuck , the ones that had made the most lasting impression, on them and on the team as a whole.

At the beginning, the Field Manual took the form of bound photocopies, but a couple of years later, we hired a designer and had a little red book printed, which would allow us to welcome our new employees with the same warmth and energy that we welcomed our guests.

Marry Up

It was review season again.

The review gauntlet was no less stressful than previous ones had been. It was impossible to forget that the stakes were brutally high, but we put everything we had into it and applied every lesson we'd learned along the way. Thankfully, the process was short; just a few weeks later, in June 2012, the NoMad got three stars from The New York Times .

The next six months passed in a blur until the night we saw Pete Wells, the New York Times food critic who had taken over from Frank Bruni, walk into the NoMad's dining room.

The review was titled 'A Stellar Band Rearranges Its Hits.' In it, Wells noted that we could have taken a more predictable and familiar route instead of the one we chose, which he said was 'something rather novel and wonderful.' As many great reviews as we'd gotten at Eleven Madison Park, I never openly wept reading one like I did that night.

The NoMad was different; we'd conceived it from the ground up. To make it happen, we'd taken a culture that we had evolved slowly and organically at EMP and imposed it on a completely new operation.

Those tears were a combination of joy, relief, and pride. Our progress at EMP had been gradual; we'd steered an existing restaurant into becoming another kind of restaurant, and the marginal gains we'd made had been so incremental they felt inevitable.

Obviously, a huge celebration with our team was in the cards that night. But Chef Magnus Nilsson of Sweden's Fäviken, a friend we'd made at that first, humiliating 50 Best, was doing a cookbook

event at a rooftop garden called the Brooklyn Grange. So we went out quickly, to welcome him to New York.

Though we'd never met, I'd had a crush on her for years. She was the pastry chef and owner of Milk Bar, celebrated around the world for Cereal Milk soft serve and Compost Cookies and her creative, nostalgic, irreverent approach to dessert. I knew she'd taken a postage-stamp-size storefront next to Momufuku Ssäm Bar and built it into one of the most beloved brands in the country; I also knew she was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. And that night, with the three-star New York Times review under my arm and a little swagger to spare as a result, I walked right up to her and introduced myself.

This detour is only worth mentioning because it was the first time I met Christina Tosi, who was arriving just as I was leaving.

We talked for only a minute-which was still long enough for me to get a glimpse of how generous, brilliant, and hilariously funny she was. She knew who I was, too, though after we were married, she admitted she'd been a little surprised to discover that the guy behind Eleven Madison Park was a normal person, not some stuck-up fancy-pants.

If it's not clear, the lesson here is this: Marry someone better than you. My partnership with Daniel made me a better restaurateur. My partnership with Christina has made me a better leader and better man.

Then I got into a cab and headed back to the hotel to toast my team. It was a good night.

Leaders Say Sorry

In spite of all the thoughtfulness we put into translating and preserving our culture, in those first months the NoMad was open I made one of the biggest mistakes of my career.

When we agreed to do the NoMad, I looked at my team at Eleven Madison Park and didn't see anyone ready to replace me as general manager. I had no desire to hire from outside; we believed too strongly in our culture of promoting from within. But since

there wasn't anyone ready to do the job, I decided I would still act as GM at Eleven Madison Park while simultaneously opening the NoMad.

If you've ever launched a new business, you know there aren't enough hours in the day. For months, I was at the NoMad pretty much every minute I was awake (and, since it was a hotel, quite a few non-waking ones, too).

Can you guess how this ends?

Eleven Madison Park was only a few blocks away, but the restaurant was easy to neglect because the team in place had been there a long time and were operating at the highest level. In fact, that year, we'd moved up to number twenty-four on the 50 Best list -proof that the restaurant was running beautifully and the emphasis we'd put on hospitality was succeeding with our guests. However, even the most flawless and collaborative organization needs a boss.

Thankfully, there were people close enough to me to tell me the truth. I had a number of conversations with senior staff, who told me there was ambiguity where there shouldn't have been any: 'Nobody's making decisions, and when someone does step up, they're accused of making a power grab. You have to name a GM, Will.'

Discussion and input are wonderful, but somebody needs to be on site to make decisions. If there's nobody to make the call, problems pile up: forward progress stalls completely, or random people step into the breach, take responsibility for a decision, and then face resentment from their peers-'Who died and made you president?' I'd left the restaurant in limbo, and morale was suffering.

But all I heard was: You need to work harder. You're not here and you need to be, so you better figure out a way to shoehorn an extra hour into the day so you can do your new job and this one, too. No matter how guilty I felt, I was able to rationalize it away. 'How bad could it be, when our guests were so happy?'

What I didn't understand was that a solid culture can stand up to some degree of abuse before the wear begins to show. Even if morale slips significantly, the guests won't feel it right away. Our

team had a lot of love for EMP, and they took enormous personal and professional pride in providing spectacular hospitality. They were compartmentalizing, and doing a good job of it. But with enough drips, even the hardest rock is subject to erosion over time.

The approach she took with me was effective precisely because she didn't tell me I was falling short. Instead, she held up a mirror, so I could see for myself where I'd gone wrong. And while Sheryl wasn't ordinarily an emotional person, she did get upset describing the damage I was doing to the restaurant by refusing to name a successor. I remember her asking, 'Do you honestly not believe that a single person on our team is up to the task? You tell us there's nothing more important than being able to trust one another-but how are we supposed to believe that, when you won't trust anyone but yourself to do this job?'

Finally, a longtime captain named Sheryl Heefner asked for a meeting with me. Sheryl was one of the best people on the team and one of my ride-or-dies-I trusted her implicitly.

There's nothing more devastating than a parent saying, 'I'm not mad; I'm disappointed.' That was what Sheryl was saying, and I heard it. And as much as her words stung, you better believe I thanked her for coming to me.

That meeting with Sheryl was one of those moments. We were at a totally pivotal moment as a company, and I was screwing it up. I'd spent years telling people not to make themselves irreplaceable because that meant we couldn't promote them, but I hadn't had the wherewithal to see when my own role needed to change.

My dad says, 'Keep your eyes peeled,' which means: listen, look, notice, learn; make sure you're not tumbling through life. Most important: Be aware when an item of real import is put in front of you.

Worse, I'd betrayed one of our company's most closely held values. After screaming from the mountaintops about the importance of trusting the team, when it came time for me to walk the walk, I took a seat.

I knew immediately what I had to do-it was what I should have done the moment we signed the deal to make the NoMad a reality. I called a meeting with Kirk Kelewae, who had taken ownership of

the beer program years before. He'd worked his way up from kitchen server to manager, and that day, I promoted him to GM.

'This is the first time I've grown a company,' I told them, 'and this isn't the last mistake I'm going to make. But this was a big one.' I had withheld the trust I'd been after them for years to show one another, and I'd damaged the culture we'd worked so hard to grow as a result. After I apologized, I announced that Kirk would be their new GM.

After my private meeting with Kirk, I called an all-staff meeting and apologized to everyone in the room.

There were people in the room who probably would have preferred I'd said their name, but a decision had been made, and that made all the difference. The tension that had been growing vanished like the air from a popped balloon.

I hadn't trusted anyone else to be the general manager of EMP because I didn't think anyone would do the job as well as I was doing it-and, in fairness, I was probably right. Kirk wasn't ready to be a general manager yet, just as I hadn't been ready to be a general manager when I was given the same job at MoMA. (Apparently, I wasn't ready to be an owner, either.) Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready. So long as they are hungry, they will work even harder to prove that you made the right decision.

There is such power when a leader can admit to their mistakes and apologize for them. The idea that you're not going to make any errors is criminally stupid-as is the idea that if you don't own up to an error, nobody will notice you've made one. As hard as it is to hold yourself accountable publicly, it strengthens the bond between you and your team, because if you're willing to stand up and criticize yourself, people will always be more willing to receive criticism from you. The experience was a beautiful example of the power of vulnerability and its importance in leadership.

Kirk grew into the job, just as he'd grown into running the beer program and every other position he'd held with us. And it was hugely meaningful for everyone else who worked there to see that the team was run by a guy who'd started out as a kitchen server. We'd said there were no limits, and we'd meant it. Now everyone

could see that it was true.

No Guest Left Behind

The NoMad was a hit, right out of the gate.

As EMP continued climbing up the 50 Best list, our menu had become more complex, more involved, and more intricate, and our presentations had become more theatrical. A meal with us was increasingly lengthy, extensive, over-the-top-a production. With these changes, it had become difficult for our regulars; how many times a week can someone have a four-hour-long meal?

Whatever the question was, the NoMad was the answer. We had breakfast regulars, lunch regulars, dinner regulars, late-night cocktail bar regulars-some days, those were the same people. It was exactly how we'd hoped people would use the different spaces we'd created. And the NoMad gave our company another gift, one that we hadn't foreseen.

But with the NoMad just down the way, we could take the next step at EMP without deserting those beloved regulars; the NoMad gave them somewhere to go more regularly. Many of the dishes on the NoMad's menu had once been EMP's greatest hits, and there would be lots of familiar faces there; the attention to service would be recognizable, if slightly less dressed-up. The hotel's flexibility and relative informality meant that you could both schedule a breakfast meeting there and close out a great night with one last drink. And EMP would always be there for them on those nights when only a total luxury blowout dinner would do.

Meanwhile, back at EMP, there was no longer anything holding us back . . . or so we thought.

Sometimes, you outgrow your regulars; that's inevitable for any evolving organization. But we didn't want to fire ours; we wanted to keep them as part of our family. If you call your team your family, you need to invest in them and give them opportunities to grow with you and your organization, and you should extend the same courtesy to your most valued customers. Instead of cannibalizing our brand, the NoMad extended it.