CHAPTER 20

BACK TO BASICS

Throughout the years that we were climbing through the ranks of the 50 Best list, Daniel and I were traveling to food and wine conferences and culinary events all over the world. And any time we went to a new city, we'd take a night to go see what our competition was up to.

At Fäviken in Sweden, instead of twenty servers describing twenty different dishes to twenty different tables, our friend Magnus came out from the kitchen, clapped his hands, and announced the next course, which everyone in the dining room then ate at the same time, like guests at a dinner party in his home.

We found ourselves deeply inspired by every one of the restaurants on the list. At Narisawa in Japan, while we enjoyed our hors d'oeuvres, proofed bread dough baked tableside in a screaming-hot stoneware bowl, showcasing an ancient and elemental process that usually took place behind the scenes. It became one of the most delicious bites of our meal.

At Mugaritz in Spain, we pounded spices and seeds for soup in an iron bowl with a pestle. Then a captain invited us to run the pestle around the edge as if it were a Tibetan singing bowl, and for a breathtakingly beautiful moment, the entire dining room came together in community to create music.

At Alinea in Chicago, pastry chefs brought ingredients for dessert into the dining room, artfully scattering chocolate, custards, pralines, pieces of cake, and fresh berries across a silicone tablecloth-Kandinsky, if his medium had been sugar. Everyone else on earth looked at a table and saw a table; Chef Grant Achatz looked at a table and saw a plate.

These crescendos were both thoughtful and beautiful. They provided these already extraordinary meals with an exclamation point within the experience, an unforgettable moment that was as delicious to recount weeks later as it had been to eat.

We felt confident in the crescendos we'd added to the experience of dining at EMP; what was missing now was a sense of place. It was the age of Noma, and every one of the restaurants at the top of the list was serving an experience that was so deeply specific to where they were, the meal wouldn't make sense anywhere else. This felt especially important in an increasingly globalized and homogenous world where you could travel sixteen hours on a plane, then walk down a luxury row virtually identical to the one in the city you'd left behind.

And they reinforced why the 50 Best list had been so good for our industry. The best restaurants in the world were encouraging and inspiring one another to ever-greater heights when they might instead have become complacent. The friendly competition and exchange of ideas pushed the whole profession forward.

Plus, we saw a real opportunity. Our restaurant was in New York -not only the birthplace of so much art and music and industry (and so many food traditions), but an important and underrecognized agricultural area. And while each of the best finedining restaurants in New York did have a strong sense of place, the places they were celebrating weren't New York, but Japan, and Italy, and France. So when EMP made it to number ten on the 50 Best list in 2012, we were resolved to explore what it meant to be a restaurant of, from, and about New York.

The meal began with a savory take on the iconic black-and-white cookie and ended with chocolate-covered pretzels. There was sturgeon smoked at the table under a glass dome. We learned that the potato chip had been invented in New York, so we made our own and had custom chip bags printed, so expensive I practically

We threw ourselves into research and turned up such a wealth of inspiration that we abandoned our new menu format (and, with it, the diner's ability to choose what they would eat). We adopted a straight tasting menu with a New York theme, to ensure that everyone who ate with us would experience all the things we were excited about.

had to hide the bill from myself. (Hey, 95/5.)

Our cheese course became a Central Park picnic. We commissioned Ithaca Beer Company to make a Picnic Ale, made pretzels with that beer, and partnered with the iconic New York store Murray's Cheese to make a cheese washed in it. The course was served in picnic baskets made in upstate New York, on porcelain plates that looked like paper made by a Brooklyn artist named Virginia Sin.

Tartare has roots in New York City, so we used New York carrots -grown in the nutrient-rich mud that upstate farmers call 'black muck'-to make carrot tartare. And instead of leaving a bottle of cognac on the table at the end of the meal, our gift was a customlabeled applejack from Laird's, the first licensed distillery in the area, dating back to 1780.

Like many a wide-eyed tourist, I'd been fleeced by a three-card-monte dealer in Times Square when I was a kid coming in from Westchester to meet my dad at work. I wanted to incorporate a little of that old-school grittiness and some sleight of hand into the experience of dining with us-which led to my meeting with a team of magicians to create a trick where you picked the main ingredient in your dessert by choosing a card, though a chocolate flavored with that ingredient was already secretly on the table. (A sweeter ending than losing your allowance to a con man, for sure.)

An aside: the experience of coming up with the magic trick was fascinating. I had reached out to a company called theory11 because I wanted them to make us a custom deck of cards. But the owner, Jonathan Bayme, showed up for our first meeting with the magician Dan White, so I wasn't surprised when he suggested a magic trick instead.

I was immediately intrigued. I'd talked so much to the team about our responsibility to create magic in a world that needs more of it that the chance to approach this literally was too good not to consider. Especially when, after a couple of hours of brainstorming, Dan White blew my mind by describing the trick we ended up using.

My jaw dropped. 'That's incredible! But how would we do it?' Dan shook his head. 'Oh, I have no idea. We'll have to figure it out.'

Too many people approach creative brainstorming by taking what's practical into consideration way too early in the process. Working with Jonathan and Dan reinforced what I'd always believed: Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what's realistic or sustainable. Or, as I like to say, don't ruin a story with the facts. Eventually, you'll reverse engineer your great idea and figure out what's possible and costeffective and all the other boring grown-up stuff. But you should start with what you want to achieve.

I loved that-how unfazed he was to not know and how confident he was that we'd figure it out.

(When Dan heard the title of this book, he shared this wildly appropriate quote from Teller, the silent half of the famed magic duo Penn and Teller: 'Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.')

When the new menu debuted, I wanted every table to understand the rich history and the wealth of stories behind every course on the new menu. Not wanting to leave any part to chance or discretion, I wrote exactly what I wanted the captains to say, had them memorize it, and drilled them over and over and over again.

We also introduced a new, much longer mission statement for the team, complete with a New York City subway map-inspired graphic. This new statement included everything we were striving to embody: to be a New York restaurant, run equally by the kitchen and the dining room; to carry ourselves in a way that was genuine and good; to always be learning and leading; to balance the classic and the contemporary; to take risks in pursuit of reinvention; and to create a culture of family and fun. Finally, we made our goal four Michelin stars to match the number of leaves in our logo, even though Michelin didn't even give four stars!

We introduced the new menu on a Tuesday in September 2012. Four days later, The New York Times food critic Pete Wells came in for lunch.

It was a shock to see him; usually, they give you a minute or two to settle in after a big change. But I was able to exhale when I saw

he'd ended up in Natasha McIrvin's section. Natasha was, without question, one of our best captains-exceptionally talented, dedicated to excellence in all things, and unflappable even under intense pressure. I knew she'd get the story we were telling just right.

So you can imagine my surprise when, just a few days later, the Times published the article he'd written-a scathing takedown titled 'Talking All Around the Food: At the Reinvented Eleven Madison Park, the Words Fail the Dishes.'

On his way out the door-I was trying to be unobtrusive, futzing around in a corner next to the bar-Pete Wells looked me right in the eyes and nodded. That was deeply unusual: the critic and the restaurateur never acknowledge each other. I took it as a sign that we'd crushed it.

I'll spare you, but it included such descriptive gems as: 'stilted,' 'bloat,' and this knockout punch, my personal favorite: 'By the end of the four hours, I felt as if I'd gone to a Seder hosted by Presbyterians.' The article was so awful that in their own gleeful piece about it (that's right: it was so bad, there were schadenfreudey think pieces written about how bad it was), Eater dubbed him 'Pete 'The Punisher' Wells.'

It was deeply humiliating. And there was nothing I was less excited for than to stand up and confess that my bad decisions had gotten us this savage review. In moments like this, in an effort to not look bad in front of their team, leaders tend to brush mistakes under the rug, foolishly hoping that everyone will forget they've happened. Instead, I once again stood up in pre-meal to take responsibility and apologize.

And he might as well have addressed it directly to me. He didn't love everything he ate, but he loved a lot of it. The problem was what he called 'the speeches.'

There was a little bit of good news, though. The piece wasn't a true review with stars, which might have devastated the business, but a 'Critic's Notebook'-the critical equivalent of a warning shot. And it did exactly what it was intended to do: it allowed me to see the error of my ways and course-correct.

After some soul searching, I realized that in introducing the New

York menu, I'd made two mistakes. One I don't regret making, though we fixed it anyway. The other I do.

That mistake-trying to do too much-was easy to fix. We didn't change everything; we knew we couldn't be all things to all people. We kept the magic trick, because we could see, every night, that people loved it; it was a crescendo they'd still be talking about weeks, even years, later. But we did get rid of a lot of the speeches. And the potato chip course, which-painfully-meant recycling those expensive bags.

The first mistake was going too far. (That's the one I don't regret.) Yes, part of that exuberance was a show-offy 'Look what we can do!' But pushing the limits is also an unavoidable part of the creative process. If you don't explore the outer perimeter, how else will you know where the line is? A lot of those ideas were good; if we hadn't given ourselves the freedom to investigate them, we would never have known which of them to keep.

The second mistake I'd made was more serious. I'd wanted to make sure every idea we had was communicated properly, so I'd insisted the team learn a spiel. I'd made them performers, ruling out any possibility of a real, quality conversation between them and the guests. Of course the experience had felt inauthentic to Wells; there had been no room for Natasha to connect with him. I had taken away her ability to be herself at the table.

Worse, it was essentially the same mistake I'd made the year before, when I'd hesitated to promote a general manager. Once again, the guy known for talking about how much he trusted his team had acted as if he didn't trust them at all.

Not every guest wanted a history lesson during their dinner. Many were charmed and wanted to engage with us. But some people were there to talk to their companions or to eat; they wanted us to drop off their food and leave them alone. I had stripped the team of their authority to read the table and deliver an appropriate level of detail-to tailor the service experience to the guest. In my pursuit of a sense of place, I'd actually made the meal less hospitable.

In truth, I'm not surprised I made this mistake-and I'm almost certain I'll make it again in the future. My compulsive attention to

detail is one of my superpowers; it's how I take aim at perfection. But that tendency also means I'm always walking a tightrope between my desire to guarantee excellence by controlling everything and knowing I want to create an environment of empowerment and collaboration and trust among the people who work for me. Like excellence and hospitality, these two qualitiescontrol and trust-are not friends.

I returned to trusting people on the team to introduce the menu in the way they saw fit and to deliver an appropriate level of information for their tables.

I like to think I gain awareness every time I make this mistake. I have surrounded myself with people I trust, who tell me when it's time to back off. But I'm pretty sure managing the tension between these two is an issue I will struggle with for the rest of my career. All I can do is stay aware, so my superpower doesn't turn into my villain origin story. And when I do (inevitably) screw up, I need to fix the mistake quickly and with as little ego as possible.

Meanwhile, we kept inching up the 50 Best list. In 2013 (despite the Presbyterian Seder), we moved up to number five. In 2014, we were number four. And early in 2015, Pete Wells came back. By his second visit, we knew he was there to give us a proper re-review. No more warning shots.

In March of that year, he awarded us four stars It was, as I like . to say, the worst four-star review ever in the history of The New York Times . It still makes me laugh to read it. He's so grumpy! He can't resist calling back to his first experience with the New York menu in 2012, calling it 'the most ridiculous meal I've ever had.'

It was nerve-racking to see him, because we'd stuck to our guns on a number of things he'd hated. But we'd used his criticism wisely; we'd changed what we wanted to change and were proud of the experience we were giving our guests.

Then he proceeds to list fault after fault with the new experience -except that he's finally forced to cry uncle: 'Objections . . . buzzed before my eyes so insistently that at times they blinded me to what was going on in the soaring Art Deco space across from Madison Square Park. Which was: a roomful of people almost goofy with happiness . . . and finally even me, the overthinking picker of

nits and finder of faults. Under the restaurant's relentless, skillful campaign to spread joy, I gave in.'

But in pre-meal the next day, I congratulated the team, acknowledging that the review was an affirmation of their commitment to Unreasonable Hospitality. Wells hadn't agreed with everything we were doing-he didn't even like a lot of it. And yet, by sticking to the principles of Unreasonable Hospitality, we'd left him with no choice but to acknowledge that he loved the way we made people feel.

We did celebrate that night, though I should note that holding on to four stars feels very different than earning them for the first time; the mood was more relief than jubilation.

Serve What You Want to Receive

At the 50 Best in 2015, the air was thick with rumors, as alwaysand the big one was that we were going to come in at number one. It's best to ignore gossip, of course, but we're human and it's hard. So our hopes were up.

It was a real blow. Of course, it's pretty incredible to be named one of the top five restaurants in the world, no matter where you land. But this was the first time since we'd gotten on the list that we had fallen backward. As hard as we were pushing, something wasn't working.

But the speculation was dead wrong: instead of going from four to one, we slid backward, from four to five.

In retrospect, I think that slide backward was the best thing that could have happened to us, because it motivated us to change one last time. And we needed to change; the rumblings were already there.

Over the course of that year, Daniel and I had taken our usual field trips to the very best restaurants, and we had begun to notice another feature-or perhaps 'bug' is a better word-that most of those spectacular meals had in common. They were just too much.

As inspired as we were by those incredible crescendos, as wowed as we were by course after course of faultless food paired with remarkable wines, it was also overwhelming. Jaded as it might sound, we were starting to experience some fatigue. The excellence of the service and the theatricality of some courses were impressive; still, it was hard the next day to remember what exactly we'd eaten, or any part of the conversation we'd had while we were there. The truth was that 75 percent of the way through most of those meals, we were done and dusted-bellies full, restless, and ready to go. All this was in the back of our minds as we sat down to taste our own new menu at the end of 2015.

Those dinners also provided a valuable quarterly check-in for Daniel and me, a more intentional opportunity to connect than the ten thousand quick texts and hurried kitchen hallway conversations that made up the majority of our daily interactions.

Daniel and I had dinner together at the restaurant every season, the day after the menu changed. This was mostly practical; you already know I believe it's vitally important for a leader to experience the service they're providing just as an ordinary customer would. An idea is often different in practice than it is in conception, and eating the menu as guests gave us the opportunity to make adjustments when, say, we discovered a presentation we'd been excited about felt too fussy, or when we were trying to be generous but ended up stuffing the guest past the point of pleasure.

Indeed, that night we were not only analyzing our meal but had slipped into a deeper, more intense meaning-of-life-type conversation. Or were trying to, anyway-and I say trying because, as dialed-in as the service was, it felt like we were constantly being interrupted. With every distraction, I became increasingly annoyed; we ended up leaving before dessert was served and heading to an Irish pub a couple of blocks away so we could finish our conversation in peace.

When I got home that night, I did the math. For every course, the table was set with fresh silverware, new wineglasses were placed, food was served and spieled, wine was poured. After we were done eating, the plates were cleared, and the table was crumbed. Those six actions happened for every single course-which meant that over a fifteen-course menu, we were being interrupted ninety times over the entirety of our meal. And that didn't even include the introduction to the menu or any midcourse check-in.

We'd always believed we should serve what we wanted to receive. Serve only what you want to serve, and you're showing off. Serve only what you think other people want, and you're pandering. Serve what you genuinely want to receive, and there will be authenticity to the experience.

Ninety times-when our stated goal was to create an environment where people could connect over the table, where, as I had said a thousand times, the service and the food and the environment were mere ingredients in the recipe of human connection. That is unreasonable, but it's not hospitality.

That was why the restaurant had changed so much over the years. Not because we had the words 'endless reinvention' on the wall, but because we'd changed, and what we wanted to receive had as well. I was twenty-six years old when I took over the dining room at Eleven Madison Park and forty when Daniel and I parted ways. You change a lot between twenty-six and forty-and as you change, what you want to receive changes, too.

We were no longer serving what we wanted to receive.

Return to First Principles

A mission statement's role, in any organization, is to articulate the nonnegotiables. It needs to be clear and simple and easily understood, so that any time you're making any decision, no matter how big or small, you can rely on it as a filter to decide. Will taking an action help you achieve the goal laid out in the mission statement? Or will it take you away from that goal? That way, the decision is already made for you-all you have to do is ask yourself the question.

The complicated mission statement we introduced with the New York menu contained everything we wanted to embody: our commitment to one another, our love of New York, our absurd ambitions, and our desire to take care of our guests. But it was too

much.

It was time to get back to basics. Daniel and his team made unbelievably delicious food; my dining room team was as good as any in the world at spreading joy through Unreasonable Hospitality. And so, in reaffirming our superpowers, we rediscovered our nonnegotiables, landing on a simple, elegant phrase I posted above the time clock so every one of us would see it, every day:

Pete Wells had never seen that complicated, convoluted mission statement, but he'd felt it. No wonder he'd struggled to understand what the restaurant was! We hadn't known ourselves.

'To be the most delicious and gracious restaurant in the world.'

As my dad says: 'Don't run away from what you don't want; run toward what you do.' We didn't make the changes we made over that year because we were running away from complexity or difficulty or ambition, but because we were running toward a purer experience.

We weren't going to stop being 'of' New York or treating our colleagues like family. We weren't going to stop shooting for a fourth Michelin star, an ambition that could never be satisfied. But gracious and delicious-those were the criteria. Period.

Every change we'd ever made before had been additive. More intensity, more courses, more complexity, more components on the plate, more wines, more steps of service-more, more, more.

The first and most radical change was cutting the menu in half, shortening it from fifteen to seven courses. Every one would be memorable-extraordinary. And even though we'd slashed the number of courses, we didn't cut a single person from the dining room staff. Instead, we doubled down, going from two Dreamweavers to four.

This time, we went in the other direction. We were proud of what we could do, but there was no need for all of it. Instead, we could distill what we were delivering down to what made us special: the recognition that all this excellence was in service of Unreasonable Hospitality.

In the process of developing the New York menu, we'd moved away from the revised menu format and our core belief that the diner should have agency, the ability to choose. Why had we gotten

rid of that, when it exemplified the kind of Unreasonable Hospitality we wanted to offer?

That conversation was more than just conversation-it forged a connection. No more scripts. This was the beginning of a relationship.

We would return to this concept of the meal as a dialogue. And finally, we were ready to do it the way we'd wanted to do it in the first place, the way they did it at Rao's. There would be no menu at all, just a conversation about what you wanted to eat and what you didn't.

Kirk had moved on to open a new restaurant for us, so Billy Peelle, who had left EMP to work at the NoMad, came back as general manager-the perfect person to usher in this new iteration. Billy took genuine pleasure in creating a warm environment for the people he worked with and remarkable experiences for our guests. He embodied Unreasonable Hospitality as much as anyone I'd ever worked with, and he led with authenticity and humility.

Just a few months later, the 2016 50 Best awards were held in New York City for the first time. Since virtually everyone who votes for those awards attends the ceremony, there were suddenly a lot of them in our city, which meant we had the opportunity to host many of them at EMP. The changes we'd made had been so effective-the restaurant felt so good-that we weren't even nervous, just fired up to show the world who we were and what we stood for. We put our best foot forward, but mostly, we confidently and warmly welcomed our colleagues into our home. And it felt awesome.

The day after we introduced the new menu, Daniel and I sat down and had dinner. And after a truly extraordinary three-hourlong meal, we felt, after all those iterations and all those years, that the restaurant had become what it was meant to be. By paring our vision down to its essentials, we had finally found ourselves. I truly believe, at that moment, we were finally operating as the best restaurant in the world.

That year at the awards, we were voted number three in the world. More important, we won the first-ever Art of Hospitality Award, reflecting the impact we were having on the industry.

Since 2002, the awards had only ever acknowledged chefs and

their food. The introduction of a hospitality award was an indication the pendulum was swinging the other way, shining a light on the people in the dining room who worked tirelessly to provide fantastic service. It meant a lot to me personally that we won that inaugural award. Unreasonable Hospitality was no longer something that mattered only to us; it was starting to matter in our industry.

The Most Delicious and Gracious Restaurant in the World

The next year, we headed to the 50 Best awards in Melbourne.

As always, they started at fifty and counted down: forty, then thirty, then twenty. The further they got, the more excited and nervous we got; the longer we didn't hear our names, the better.

On the day of the awards, I took a long walk with Christina, trying not to let my anxiety get the best of me, before heading back to the hotel to change into my tux. Gary Obligacion of Alinea tied my bow tie; I've never learned how.

I pretty much blacked out when they got to number ten and only came to again when they hit number three. Still not us-so we had to be either number one or number two. Then they announced Osteria Francescana (owned by our friend Massimo, who'd ribbed us about our sad faces during that first, humiliating ceremony), and we knew we'd won it.

It was an incredible feeling, one of the best of my life. I kissed my wife, and Daniel and I went up to the stage with Billy Peelle and Dmitri Magi, our chef de cuisine. It was not lost on me, as I was handed the award, that I was the first dining room person ever to take part in accepting the award on behalf of their restaurant.

After seven years of hard work, creativity, a maniacal attention to detail, and a truly unreasonable dedication to hospitality, Eleven Madison Park was named the best restaurant in the world.

In my speech, I talked about the nobility of service, the importance of naming for ourselves that the work we do is important. This felt especially meaningful because everyone in that

room had dedicated their careers to creating memorable experiences. Everyone there had helped people celebrate their most important moments and given them comfort when they needed an escape. All of us were creating magical worlds in a world that needed a little bit more magic.

The tribute provided me with a moment to reflect on how far we'd come, and everything that brought us there. At one level, it's fundamentally ridiculous to say one restaurant is the best in the world. But the award acknowledges the restaurant making the greatest impact on the industry at a given time, the one that is changing the conversation and charting a new course for everyone.

I thanked our magnificent team (and asked them not to wreck the restaurant celebrating; we'd do that together when we got home). Not just the hundred and fifty people who worked for us at the time, but the countless others who, over the past eleven years, had given so much of themselves in pursuit of taking care of others. And I thanked Daniel for understanding that how we made our guests feel mattered as much as any one dish we served them.

We'd won because all of us in the kitchen and the dining room came together to create an experience that was thoughtful, gracious, and really, really nice. We'd won because of our collective focus on Unreasonable Hospitality.

It was our pursuit of excellence that brought us to the table, but it was our pursuit of Unreasonable Hospitality that took us to the top.

We had set out to achieve a seemingly impossible goal: to embody both excellence and hospitality-concepts in tension with each other, if not outright conflict. We had made the decision to be as joyfully unreasonable in our creative pursuit of hospitality in the dining room as the best restaurants all over the world already were in the kitchen. We'd decided not to reserve our best efforts only for what was on the plate, but to use everything at our disposal to make the people we worked with and the people we served feel seen and heard; to give them a sense of belonging and to create an environment where they could connect with others.