CHAPTER 6

PURSUING A TRUE PARTNERSHIP

Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood ate lunch at Spago, the crown jewel of an empire presided over by Chef Wolfgang Puck, who had revolutionized American dining by popularizing California cuisine.

My dad had gotten me the job, so the team would have been well within their rights to roll their eyes while they were hazing me, but I was so excited to be there and worked so hard that everyone treated me like a kid brother.

I spent the summer there between high school and college, working as a busboy. Half a busboy, actually. Spago was a welloiled machine, and the bussers were impossibly fast and clean and efficient. Since I could never hope to keep up with them, they gave me half a station; every other busser had fourteen tables, while I had seven. I did half the side work-the behind-the-scenes maintenance work required to keep a restaurant running smoothly, like polishing glassware and folding napkins-and received half the tips.

Then, one afternoon during a busy lunch, I opened the door to the credenza in the dining room where the clean silverware, napkins, and plates were kept. The cabinet had been stocked so that a tall stack of bread and butter plates leaned precariously against the closed door; as soon as I opened it, those plates slid to the ground and shattered into a million pieces.

The crash was deafening, and the bustling restaurant fell silent for a second or two. A few people clapped.

The noise, the waste, the mess, the mistake-I was horrified. I certainly didn't need anyone else to be mad at me. Nevertheless, the kitchen doors flew open, and the chef de cuisine charged out of the kitchen, already screaming. At the top of his lungs and in front of everyone-my colleagues and all the guests-he told me exactly what he thought about my clumsiness.

The memory of the shame and rage I felt that day will always be on my shoulder when I'm handling a mistake made by someone on my own team. I never forget how much impact-for good or for bad -a gesture by a leader can have. And the big-picture message the chef de cuisine was sending was very clear: he didn't respect me or anyone else working in the dining room. In his view, fine dining was all about the food; we were just there in service of whatever magic he was making in the kitchen.

And I thought that sucked.

The duck I'd eaten at that dinner with my dad at the Four Seasons had been delicious, but it was part of a much bigger picture -the spectacular room, the artwork, the lighting, the floral arrangements, the tablecloths, the silverware, the staff's crisp uniforms-and the way the team had made twelve-year-old me feel like the most important person in the room. That combination had created an atmosphere of pure magic. The food was part of that magic, but it wasn't everything.

I loved restaurants, and I wanted to work with a team to take great care of the people we were serving. But I'd accepted that the highest level of fine dining wasn't for me.

For most of the twentieth century, when you went out to dinner, you went to see and be seen; the chef's name wasn't on the menu. Beginning in the 1980s, though, with the advent of the celebrity chef, the pendulum had swung toward the kitchen. People were eating better food than ever before, but hospitality had taken a hit. I don't personally enjoy my steak well done, but I'll defend your right to order it that way without finding yourself on the receiving end of a contemptuous sneer-or, in some places, the kitchen's flatout refusal to prepare it that way.

So when, at our meeting, Danny asked what I'd think about becoming the general manager at Eleven Madison Park, I wasn't sure what to say.

Never Say Never

Eleven Madison Park was in the same building as my old haunt Tabla, yet it could not have been more different.

At Tabla, that vertical space had been split in half. But Eleven Madison Park had been designed for impact; there, the ceilings soared.

The landmark Art Deco building had been designed as a home for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Had it been built as planned, it would have been the tallest skyscraper in the world. But the Great Depression hit right after construction began in 1929, and only thirty of the intended hundred-plus stories were built. So the lobby spaces on the ground floor, where the restaurants were located, were outrageously grand-they'd been imagined for a building three times the size.

The word I always return to when I describe EMP's room is significant . Another way to say it: the first time you walk into the space, your jaw drops.

Danny had created a successful brasserie there, the kind of humming, convivial French restaurant where you knew your martini would be icy cold and the steak frites would be delicious. He'd outfitted the room with black leather banquettes and commissioned the artist Stephen Hannock to make an enormous piece for the back wall. Massive floral arrangements anchored the two dining rooms, and waiters bustled through them bearing classic, sturdy, red-rimmed plates loaded with côte de boeuf and other French standards.

The scale is astonishing-thirty-five-foot ceilings, terrazzo floors stretching out in front of you for days, and massive, two-story-tall windows looking out onto Madison Square Park. When you cross the threshold, you feel that you are standing in a living slice of New York's vibrant past, in a room that captures the spirit of a lost age. A space like this will not-cannot-be re-created in our time; nothing like it will ever be built again.

People loved that version of Eleven Madison Park, but Danny always felt a nagging disconnect between the room and the purpose he'd given it. Guests felt it, too. They booked tables to celebrate significant anniversaries and birthdays; they brought engagement rings so they could propose there. Which was weird, because at the time, EMP wasn't a special-occasion restaurant-except it felt like it was . The room's magnificence and over-the-top drama seemed to demand you dress up and celebrate an occasion, not order a burger.

Daniel Humm was only twenty-nine, but he'd started cooking professionally in some of the finest Swiss hotels and restaurants at fourteen and earned his first Michelin star at the age of twenty-four. His cooking at Campton Place had earned the restaurant four stars from the San Francisco Chronicle in a review that raved about his contemporary take on technique-driven European cuisine.

EMP had opened in 1998 to a two-star review from The New York Times. And after receiving another middling two-star review in 2006, Danny set out to reconcile what had long bothered him and asked Richard Coraine to travel around the country to find a chef who could make food elevated enough to match that spectacular room.

The story is that Richard didn't even make it all the way through his meal at Campton Place before stepping outside to call Danny: 'I think I've found our guy.'

Danny agreed, as long as the new person came from within the company.

Daniel had hit the ground running at EMP, which meant the food was terrific, and getting better every day. But the restaurant as a whole wasn't working. The general manager had been hired from another restaurant group, and his approach wasn't meshing well with the existing staff, the new chef, or the culture of Union Square Hospitality Group. So, a few months in, Daniel told Danny he thought the restaurant needed a new GM.

To which Daniel said, 'Okay. What about Will?'

The two of us didn't really know each other, but every week, the general managers and chefs of USHG met around the big table in the boardroom at the offices in Union Square. At the end of the meeting, everyone would share their pet projects, and while I was the youngest person in the room, I was so excited about everything we were doing at MoMA, I talked more than anyone else there: 'Guys, we got this amazing matte-black BUNN coffeemaker!' 'I'm throwing a company-wide competition for best barista. Send your team, because I convinced a coffee company to donate a trip to Italy as a prize!' 'You guys have to hear about this gelato cartseriously, have you ever seen anything as perfect as this tiny blue spoon?'

Meanwhile, I was blindsided by Danny's offer-and not immediately thrilled. I wasn't sure about fine dining at all, and he was talking about sending me to the restaurant that he was trying to make into the finest dining-est restaurant in the company?

Daniel was probably irritated by how much I talked in those meetings, but he could sense a passion that made him think I might be a good match for the task ahead.

I called my dad.

My dad has always said: Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don't want. So he asked me straight-out: 'What's your dream job?'

I knew the answer to that immediately. 'I want to run Shake Shack.'

'I don't know about this,' I told him. 'No matter how amazing a chef is, I don't want to work for one. It's got to be a partnership: I can't work with someone if they don't respect what we're doing in the dining room.'

My dad said, 'You love working for Union Square Hospitality Group. Do you want to grow with that company?'

At the time there was only one, but I was obsessed with it. I loved the concept and the food. (ShackBurger, cheese fries with the cheese on the side, and a Coke. I'm still obsessed with Shake Shack.)

I told him I did.

I went back to Danny with a proposal. 'I'll be the GM of Eleven Madison Park for one year-if, at the end of that year, I can go work at Shake Shack.'

'Well, if you want them to be there for you when you need them, then you need to be there for them when they need you.'

He agreed.

Make Decisions Together

The next step was a meeting between Daniel and me, and I was really nervous about it. I'd run away from a certain level of fine dining because of the supremacy of the chef. My experience was not unique: in that world, there seemed to be an inherent divide between the people who cooked the food and those who served it. We were all part of the same team, but it usually didn't feel that way. One side or the other always seemed to be winning the tug-ofwar-and in fine dining, the victor was usually the chef. If I was going to go to Eleven Madison Park, I needed to know Daniel was willing to approach our partnership in a new way.

There were some major differences, too. Daniel had come up in Europe, working in extremely classic, Michelin three-star restaurants, while I'd been inventorying walk-in refrigerators at Restaurant Associates and learning a warmer, more relaxed form of hospitality under Danny Meyer. So we looked at the worldespecially the world of hospitality-in very, very different ways. Ultimately, though, we felt our differences would be complementary.

We met at Crispo, a lively Italian restaurant on Fourteenth Street, where we discovered a mutual love of pasta and Barolo. There were some similarities between us. I'd been working in restaurants since I was fourteen; so had he. We were both perfectionists, passionate about what we did, and unapologetically ambitious.

We ended the night at a Dominican bar, two doors down from Crispo, drinking beers until late. It was there I told Daniel why I was so uncomfortable with the concept of fine dining.

'I love hospitality,' I told him. 'I want to make people happy. And I don't want to have to spend my whole life convincing you what I do is as important as what you do. If it's not a partnershipif what happens in the dining room doesn't matter as much as what happens in the kitchen-then I don't even want to start down this road.'

More open communication between the kitchen and the dining room made sense to Daniel, too. He'd worked at one European restaurant where the culinary team hadn't been allowed in the dining room at all. Another installed a plexiglass window over the pass (the area in the kitchen where food is plated and finished before it's taken to the dining room), so the service team couldn't speak to the people working in the kitchen; instead, they communicated through notes. That one hurt. The kitchen staff doesn't see the guests' faces light up with anticipation and appreciation when food arrives at the table, as servers and runners do; they don't see a diner swooning with pleasure at that first perfect bite. A chef shouldn't have to check the plates coming back to the dishwashing station to know whether a table liked their food.

By the time Daniel and I parted ways that night, slightly worse for wear, we'd made a decision that would guide our company's trajectory over the course of its lifetime: we'd decided we would be a restaurant run by both sides of the wall.

A restaurant driven by the chef was always going to do what was best for the food, while one driven by the restaurateur would always do what's best for the service. But if we had to make decisions together, we decided, we would end up with what was best for the restaurant as a whole.