CHAPTER 2

MAKING MAGIC IN A WORLD THAT COULD USE MORE OF IT

For my twelfth birthday, my dad took me to the Four Seasons for dinner.

I didn't know that James Beard and Julia Child had consulted on the menu, or that President John F. Kennedy had celebrated his birthday there an hour before Marilyn Monroe serenaded him with 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President.' Or that celebrities, titans of industry, and heads of state could judge whether their star had fallen in the city's ever-shifting power rankings by how close their table was to the Carrara marble pool at the center of the room.

At the time, I had no idea the Four Seasons was the first truly American fine-dining restaurant. Or that the elegant, mid-century modern interior was so iconic, it would eventually be designated a landmark by the City of New York.

What I did know was that the Four Seasons was the fanciest and most beautiful place I'd ever been in my life.

'People will forget what you do; they'll forget what you said. But they'll never forget how you made them feel.' This quote, often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to the great American writer Maya Angelou, may be the wisest statement about hospitality ever made. Because thirty years later, I still haven't forgotten how the Four Seasons made me feel.

I was glad I'd insisted my dad buy me a classic Brooks Brothers navy blazer with brass buttons for the occasion; this was a place you dressed up for. I remember watching, wide-eyed and openmouthed, as a uniformed server expertly carved my duck on a gleaming cart pushed right up next to our table. When I dropped my napkin on the floor, he replaced it with a totally new one and called me 'sir.'

That night, I learned a restaurant could create magic, and I was hooked. By the time we left, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

The restaurant cast a spell I was all too happy to be enchanted by. It put the world on pause, so that everything else fell away; the only thing that existed for me, for those two and a half hours, was what was in that room.

People Will Never Forget How You Made Them Feel

Both of my parents worked in hospitality.

My dad's distinctive Boston accent stuck out in Arizona, and one day, someone on his team said, 'Hey, Frank: there's a woman on the plane who speaks the same language as you.' He was talking about my mother, who also spoke with a thick Boston accent. She was a stewardess, which is what they used to call flight attendants in the bad old days, when they were weighed every week and weren't allowed to keep working after they got married.

They met in 1968, when my dad was working in Phoenix for Sky Chefs, American Airlines' catering arm. This was back when people dressed up to get on an airplane and the food they were served in the air was delicious.

The two Bostonians connected. My dad recognized my mom right away; as it turned out, the two of them had gone to grade school together, where he'd nursed an enormous fourth-grade crush on her. She had no recollection of him whatsoever. He'd lost her when she'd disappeared in middle school; her mother had passed away, and she'd moved to Westchester, just north of New York City, to live with relatives.

Suddenly, there she was again.

The two of them fell madly in love. (This was temporarily complicated by my dad's three years of army service in Vietnam, and the fact that both of them were engaged to other people when they met.) They were married in 1973.

My dad left American Airlines and moved around the restaurant business before taking a job as a regional vice president for Ground Round, an old-school, casual-dining chain known for passing out whole peanuts and encouraging patrons to throw the shells on the ground. They moved to Sleepy Hollow, New York. My mother kept her job, traveling all over the world (times had changed, and American had suspended the rules about married flight attendants). After I was born, my cousin Liz moved in to help take care of me while my parents were away for work.

My parents had a good life. They were happy at home, and they shared a ferocious work ethic, as well as an intense sense of pride in their careers. My mom finished college by putting herself through night school, and she even earned her pilot's license, though she was never a very good driver, which makes me wonder who thought it was a good idea for her to fly a plane.

Then, one day when she was working in first class, my mother dropped a cup of coffee. Over the course of my career working in restaurants, I've dropped lots of things. But my mother maintained such a high standard of excellence that the incident stood out-even more so when, a few weeks later, she dropped another one.

A few months, and a hundred appointments and tests later, my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. The disease had spread, so her doctors couldn't neatly remove the tumor; they'd need to use radiation to kill whatever parts of it they couldn't take out. That's when they went to see the first doctor.

She had her first surgery when I was four years old. Afterward, she was in pretty good shape, except her face drooped on the left side, and she couldn't use her left arm or her left leg (which did not, incidentally, improve her driving). But radiation then was less precise than it is now, and when the radiation sickness kicked in, her condition began to decline.

She didn't let her steadily deteriorating health stop her from being a mom. She drove me to tennis practice a couple of times a week for as long as she could. When it got too difficult for her to get in and out of the front seat, she would drop me off and wait in the car for an hour and a half, patient while the New York winter raged around her.

One night, she fell coming down the stairs. My dad was working restaurant hours, as he did for most of his professional life; when he got home around eleven, he found my mom and me sleeping on the bottom step. I was too little to help her up, but not too little to fetch us pillows and a blanket so we could make a comfy nest.

She was like that. She loved me recklessly.

Eventually, my mom became a full quadriplegic. After that, she lost the ability to communicate. But she kept going; she kept living .

Eventually, home health aides came in to help with her care. Every single day, my mom would ask the aide on duty to push her wheelchair to the end of the road to wait for me. She could no longer speak or get up to give me a hug, but she could be there with a huge smile on her face when I got home from school. That smile was all I needed, and it taught me an invaluable lesson-what it's like to feel truly welcomed.

My dad wanted me to be as independent as possible given the circumstances, so he sold our house and moved us three blocks away from my school. That way, I wouldn't have to rely on other people to drive me around, and friends would naturally end up at my house. In junior high, I started playing drums. I played in punk bands, and ska bands, and funk bands-and we rehearsed in my room, which was right above the kitchen, where my mother hung out during the day. Listening to a crew of high school boys stumbling through the iconic opening chords of Nirvana's 'Come as You Are' a thousand times would be a waking nightmare for most people. My mom loved it.

The Power of a Genuine Welcome

By the time I was a senior in college, my parents were living in Boston. My mom relied on a pretty complicated medical setup by then, so travel required specialized equipment and a medical van. I was playing in a sixteen-piece funk band called the Bill Guidara Quartet, and my mom hadn't seen me play music in years, so my dad had the idea he'd bring her to Ithaca to see me perform. The trip would also serve as a trial run for their upcoming trip to my graduation.

Her smile lit up the dark room.

Smoking was still allowed in bars then, which wasn't going to work with my mom's medical equipment. So I talked the powers that be into letting us do a show at Willard Straight Hall, the student union community center at Cornell. It wasn't the show we usually did, but it was an incredible experience: I got to play Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition' to my mom, sitting in her wheelchair in the crowd.

The next term, my last one at Cornell, I took what turned out to be my favorite class: Guest Chefs, a spring-semester class run by a professor named Giuseppe Pezzotti, who was an absolute legend at the school.

As far as I was concerned, Guest Chefs was the coolest class at Cornell because we got the experience of running a real restaurant. Every semester, a guest chef would come to do a dinner, staffed entirely by the students. One group of students would serve as the chef's management team, another group would work as kitchen staff, while the third group ran the dining room.

As Cornell has evolved, it's become less about food and beverage programs at restaurants and hotels and more about real estate and consulting. But there was still a tiny group who were more interested in what it means to be a classic, old-school maître d' than in spreadsheets, and Giuseppe Pezzotti was our king. (To give you an idea: it was in his class I learned how to peel a grape with a fork and a knife.)

I was fortunate enough to be part of the management team for the great Daniel Boulud. Daniel is so renowned in my industry he is known by his first name alone; it is also the name of his Michelinstarred restaurant in New York, which he opened in 1993 after years as the acclaimed chef at Le Cirque. Since then, his empire has since expanded to a lot of restaurants, in places as far-flung as London, Palm Beach, Dubai, and Singapore.

He is unquestionably one of the most famous chefs in the world -and yet he was prepared to come to upstate New York to cook a meal as part of a college class. Later, I would learn this is entirely consistent with his character: Daniel is well-known for his generosity toward young people coming up in our industry.

We auctioned off the chef's table and raised a few thousand dollars for the charity Taste of the Nation. I was happy to attend their annual dinner a few weeks later to hand over a big cardboard check from Cornell, but I was most excited about playing host to the chef and his team. I didn't have much in the way of resources, but I was going to make sure they had a great time.

I was assigned to be the marketing director for the dinner. There wasn't much marketing to do for a dinner with a chef as famous as Daniel; the dinner would sell out as soon as people heard he was coming. But I still wanted to do something cool. Knowing guests would want to watch him in action, I arranged for a chef's table in the kitchen-the first ever in the history of Guest Chefs. It was odd to see a formal table set up in the middle of the ugly, industrial hotel-school kitchen, so I put a red velvet rope around it to make it swanky.

Daniel's advance team was scheduled to arrive on a Thursday. The two sous chefs were Johnny Iuzzini and Cornelius Gallagher. Johnny went on to a successful television career and to win multiple James Beard Awards as head of pastry for Jean-Georges Vongerichten's restaurants; Neil would earn three stars from The New York Times as the chef of Oceana, a temple to impeccable seafood in midtown Manhattan. At the time, though, the two of them were just kids, and I was a nerdy senior at hotel school trying to impress them. So when it was time to go pick them up from the airport, I borrowed an Audi A5 from the girl I sat next to. It was the nicest car in our class.

The burgers did not disappoint, and the beers we had alongside didn't hurt, either. Afterward, my distinguished guests wondered if I happened to know where they could score some weed.

There aren't any fancy restaurants in Ithaca. If you want to show people a good time, you take them to the Pines-Glenwood Pines on Cayuga Lake. The Pines is known for its view and huge cheeseburgers served on French bread. Think jalapeño poppers, stained-glass Yuengling lamps hanging over the coin-operated pool table, a game on the TV behind the knotty pine bar.

As a matter of fact, I did. The group ended up back at my house -130 College Avenue, your quintessential college party house, complete with a janky pool table in the dining room and a pair of mildewing couches on the porch, where the party continued until the wee hours.

The dinner went brilliantly. Afterward, everyone-Daniel, Neil, Johnny, and most of our class-ended up, as was the custom, at Rulloff's, a dive bar near campus. As the night wore on and more (and more) friends showed up, it seemed natural to head back to my place, where we always had at least one keg stashed in the basement. But the crowd was getting snacky, and my kitchen cupboards-including the one whose door had been hanging from a single hinge since the day we moved in-were bare.

The next morning, I staggered off to class, while Neil and Johnny reported to the kitchen of the student-run Statler Hotel on campus to prep for the Guest Chefs dinner. I didn't see them again until the evening, after Chef Boulud had arrived. I was incredibly nervous to meet him, but Daniel was charming right off the bat, and Johnny and Neil were obviously happy to see me again.

Which is how I found myself, three sheets to the wind at one in the morning, talking my way back into the kitchen of the Statler Hotel with Daniel Boulud.

So there was Daniel Boulud in my busted kitchen, drinking Milwaukee's Best from a red Solo cup and whipping up scrambled eggs with truffles for a bunch of wasted college kids. Did one of the most celebrated chefs in the world do a keg stand on my pool table? I'll never tell.

'I am the chef from the event tonight,' Daniel explained in his charming French accent as the two of us approached the front desk, 'and I must get into the kitchen.' Once in, we rounded up pans, butter, eggs, truffles, and caviar and headed back to 130 College Avenue.

The party reluctantly broke up around three in the morning. We parted with hugs all around.

The Nobility in Service

A month and a half after the Guest Chefs' dinner, all the arrangements were in place for my parents to attend my graduation. Then, two days before they were set to leave, my mom slipped into a coma.

By the time I got to my mom's hospital room in Boston, it was late in the evening. My dad had gone back to the apartment already, and I fell asleep lying on my mom's bed. When I woke up in the middle of the night, she was awake.

My cousin Liz drove out to Ithaca with her family in an RV so I wouldn't be alone for the ceremony. I threw my cap in the air, then ran straight to my car.

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in six years, my mother was able to speak intelligibly. 'You graduated?' she asked me, and I told her I had. We talked easily and for a long time. I didn't have to strain to understand her, and she didn't have to struggle to speak.

The next morning, I went back to the apartment to see my dad. He was exhausted after logging serious hours by my mom's side at the hospital. In an effort to cheer both of us up, I suggested we hit the racquetball court for a quick game. Afterward, as we were getting changed, his phone rang. As soon as I saw his face, I knew my mom was gone.

Eventually, she slipped away again. I ran to get a doctor: 'She was awake!' But it didn't matter; she had fallen back into a coma.

I wrote a speech to give at her funeral, but when I got up to deliver it, the words I'd written didn't feel right. I ended up telling a couple of funny stories instead, including the fact that, despite the many challenges my mom had in communicating, she was always able to perfectly articulate my dad's credit card number whenever she shopped over the phone. Then we had a huge dance party. Instead of mourning her loss, we celebrated her life.

Much later, a guest at Eleven Madison Park would tell me that while most people save the best bottles of wine in their cellars for celebrations, he drinks his best bottles on his worst days. I thought of my mom's funeral immediately when he said that, because that was exactly what we did that night. The party was perfect; she would have loved it.

As anyone who has lost someone important knows, the days immediately after a huge loss can get very dark. Visiting relatives go home, the casseroles stop coming, and the immediate family is left alone. The shock wears off, and grief sets in.

It was my dad who pushed me to keep the commitment. 'What are you going to do, sit around here and be sad? Get on the plane. If you change your mind, you can always turn around and come home.'

The week after my mother died, I was supposed to fly to Spain for an internship, where I would be working as a prep cook in exchange for room and board at a hotel school owned by a former Cornell grad. But it didn't feel right to jet off to Spain a week after my mother's death. Mostly, I didn't want to leave my dad alone.

So in the middle of this intense mourning period, I started scrambling to make plans to travel to Spain. Even though I was in Boston, the only flight I could find last minute was out of New York's JFK, so my dad offered to drive me down.

People wait months for reservations at Daniel, but the email I got back could not have been more gracious: 'I would love to have you. You welcomed me into your home; now I will welcome you into mine.'

That gave me an idea. With nothing to lose, I emailed Chef Boulud: 'Is there any way I could bring my dad to the restaurant next Saturday?'

My dad and I were running so late for the reservation, we had to change into our suits at a gas station off I-95. I didn't have the slightest idea what to expect, but even if we hadn't been going to one of the best restaurants in the world, I would still have been anxious: this was the first time in my life I was bringing my dad to a restaurant, as opposed to him bringing me to one.

At Daniel, the general manager greeted us at the door. 'Chef Daniel is excited to have you with us tonight. Your table is right this way.' He brought us through the bar, the formal dining room, into the kitchen, and upstairs into the Skybox, a luxurious, glassenclosed private dining room that looks down over the kitchen, where forty cooks-and Chef Boulud-work in a state-of-the-art facility.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime table, and I was too stunned to speak. But the ice was broken immediately as Daniel's voice boomed over the intercom into the booth: 'Willieeee!'

That night was the saddest I have ever been, or ever want to be, and the same was true for my dad. Yet, even in the midst of that sorrow, Chef Boulud and his staff were able to give the two of us what still feels like four of the best hours of my life. It's astonishing to me that one of the most famous chefs in the world stayed until the wee hours to give us a tour, but the meal was so beautiful and so long that by the time Daniel was embracing us goodbye, my dad and I were the last people in the entire restaurant-not the last guests, but the last people, period. There was no check.

The kitchen proceeded to send us a series of exquisite courses, which Daniel personally spieled over the intercom as each plate arrived. As we tasted the delicious food, drank the superb wines, and experienced the warmth of Daniel's hospitality, I watched years of exhaustion and pain lift from my dad's face.

I had already happily chosen a life in restaurants, but that night, I learned how important, how noble, working in service can be. During a terribly dark time, Daniel and his staff offered my dad and me a ray of light in the form of a meal neither one of us will ever forget. Our suffering didn't disappear by any means, but for a few hours, we were afforded real respite from it. That dinner provided an oasis of comfort and restoration, an island of delight and care in the sea of our grief.

Most important, we have an opportunity-a responsibility -to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.

When you work in hospitality-and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business -you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones.