CHAPTER 7

SETTING EXPECTATIONS

'To be the four-star restaurant for the next generation.'

At the time, the fine-dining scene in New York was in flux. Many of the old-school, classic white-tablecloth establishments in New York, like Lutèce and La Caravelle, had closed; people, especially younger people, didn't want that kind of stuffy formality anymore.

That was our first mission statement at Eleven Madison Park, and the one Daniel and I came up with most organically, over those first beers at the Dominican bar and any number of late nights after that.

Some high-end restaurants were thriving, but even the ones we loved, like Jean-Georges and Daniel and Per Se and Le Bernardin, were owned and run by people twenty-odd years older than we were. While they had legions of devoted regulars, those restaurants were stalwarts, not the vanguard. Beloved as they were, they weren't at the center of the conversation.

Meanwhile, Daniel and I were in our twenties, and people our age were most excited about places characterized by irreverence and informality. Babbo's pasta was impeccable-and you ate it listening to Led Zeppelin IV turned up loud. At Ssäm Bar, the first thing you saw when you walked in the door was a life-size photograph of the combative tennis player John McEnroe-and that photo was the only decoration in the room. Prune's dining area was the size of a New York apartment bedroom, the open kitchen so close a line cook could and did reach over the pass to place a bowl of olives on your table. And the most precisely made and innovative cocktails in the world could be found at a speakeasy you entered through a phone booth in a hot dog joint in the East Village.

These restaurants paved the way for what was to come a few short years later: Kung Pao Pastrami at Mission Chinese and the Cheezus Christ pie at Roberta's, a barely converted, concretefloored, graffiti-covered former warehouse in Bushwick. These restaurants served the best food the United States had to offer and fundamentally changed American dining. Owners spent money on ingredients, not fancy glassware, and the servers they hired were more likely to be pierced and tattooed than French and tuxedoed.

But, as wonderful as the food at those spots could be, a huge part of the hospitality experience was missing. The bo ssäm at Momofuku was a pork shoulder, cooked for hours, which you wrapped in lettuce at the table with oysters. It was, hands down, one of the most delicious dishes you could eat in New York. But the restaurant didn't take reservations, and there was no room inside the crowded restaurant to wait. So if you wanted that slow-roasted pork, you had to stamp your feet for an hour outside in the February cold-and when you were seated, it was on a knockedtogether plywood stool without a cushion or a back.

Daniel and I had a vision for a fine-dining restaurant where we could have a good time without feeling like some grown-up was going to rap our knuckles for not sitting up straight. But we wanted to do it without sacrificing any of the exceptional amenities and glorious traditions of service that make a fine-dining meal so memorable and special. We wanted to marry the care and attention, not to mention the excellence and luxury, of classic four-star dining with the surprise and delight-the fun -of a more casual experience.

We wanted to make fine dining cool.

That was the dream, anyway. In reality, we had a ways to go.

Reconnaissance Matters

You should never waste an opportunity to gather intel before your first day on the job.

Luckily, I had an ace advance team already in place at EMP. Sam Lipp, an enthusiastic guy with an unrivaled passion for making people happy, had gone over to EMP a few months before, along with our colleague Laura Wagstaff; the two of them had been among my best managers at MoMA. So before I started, I took Laura out for a drink.

The other thing about Laura? She never complains. Ever. So when she was shaking her head over her cocktail, telling me that what was going on at EMP was bad, I knew it was bad.

Laura is relentlessly can-do, a brilliant problem-solver, and a tireless advocate for the people who work for her, which is why I'm never happier than when she's next to me, whispering in my ear. It's Laura who tells me when a staff member needs a little TLC, when I'm being too intense, and when my attention is on the wrong thing. She's the one who taps my shoulder and says, 'Hey, this needs a little finessing,' or 'You gotta chill out a little bit.' (If it isn't already clear, I think every leader should have a Laurasomeone who feels comfortable telling you when you aren't acting as the best version of yourself.)

Or, in her words: ' bad bad.'

The first problem, she said, was that two factions had developed among the people who worked there.

The first faction was the old guard, servers and managers who had been working at the restaurant for years. EMP only had two stars in those early years, but it was a popular, busy restaurant with a ton of devoted regulars, which meant a server could make a healthy living working there. And the style of service had matched the food, which is to say that it was friendly and relaxed, without a lot of focus on precision or finesse.

The other faction was the fine-dining squad, the managers who had come in with Daniel. They came from prestigious restaurants all over the country, and they knew EMP could be exceptional. Unfortunately, they weren't doing a very good job of bringing the existing staff along to their style of service, or of helping the folks who weren't suited to that kind of service to find another place to work. They wanted the staff to be doing things their way-the 'right' way-and were constantly irritated everyone wasn't living up to their exacting standards.

So the servers and managers who had been running the restaurant for years and were proud of everything they'd created felt unsettled and disrespected, while the fine-dining squad was frustrated by the lack of progress toward excellence.

The friction within the team was aggravated by the fact that the restaurant was badly disorganized. There were plenty of standards in place, but no real systems to communicate them. Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of inconsistency.

In short, everyone was pissed off.

My first week there, I watched a dining room manager correct the way a server was carrying a tray. The poor guy hadn't made it another ten steps before another manager stopped him and told him to hold the tray the way he'd been holding it in the first place. A minor inconsistency, fine-but if the managers couldn't agree on how they wanted a tray carried and communicate it to the people carrying them, what hope could there possibly be for the larger vision?

Plus, the room had the same number of seats as it had when EMP had been slinging steak frites. It's not unusual, at even the best-run restaurant, for there to be a moment of real hustle on Saturday night at prime time; it's part of what makes restaurant work so fun. But there's also a reason you don't see four-star restaurants with a hundred and forty seats; you simply cannot serve that type of food-or deliver that level of service-at brasserie volume.

Meanwhile, a menu that had been more or less static for years was now changing all the time. Many of the purveyors were special and new, and the type of guest who was excited about Daniel's food did want to know which upstate farm the chèvre came from, and which hillside herbs the little goats were snacking on in the spring. But information-and there was a ton of it, including a huge and rapidly evolving wine list-came in on the fly, in an intense barrage nobody could be expected to absorb, especially twenty minutes before they were expected to share the excitement with guests.

So basic service, the black-and-white piece, had slipped. Guests were waiting past their reservation times and too long for food when they were finally seated. During the worst nights, the whole bar would be packed with people running out of patience.

One weekend, there was such a disparity between the number of reservations the restaurant was taking and what the kitchen was able to put out, the team began humming the Guns N' Roses song 'Welcome to the Jungle' when they ran into one another at the service station. They were supposed to be delivering an elegant, gracious experience, but a dining room manager turned to Laura and said flatly, 'We might as well be working at Denny's.'

Because it was a Danny Meyer restaurant, the team was quick to respond with complimentary champagne, along with lavish apologies for the wait. But there are only so many glasses of bubbles you can pour, or drink. People were coming to dine at the new EMP either because they loved Danny Meyer's restaurants or because they'd heard great things about Daniel's food. In either case, they were leaving disappointed. The restaurant was making more people mad than happy.

Invite Your Team Along

There's a fascinating and possibly overlooked advantage that businesses with strong cultures have: when an employee comes up in the organization, any other way of doing things just feels wrong.

In retrospect, I can now name everything that was going sideways and tell you what I did by way of correction. In the heroic version of this story, I struck a masterful pose and enumerated a number of inspirational management tenets, all of which transformed the restaurant within the week.

And wrong is how EMP felt when I walked in on my first day.

But the truth is, Danny's way of doing things-the way he treated his employees and guests-was so baked into my consciousness that for the first few months I was acting on instinct alone.

Mostly, the team needed to be brought along. They needed to feel seen and appreciated. They needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained. They needed discipline to be consistent. They needed to feel like vital and important parts of an exciting sea change, not obstacles to making it happen.

From a management perspective, we needed to return to first principles, and at Union Square Hospitality Group, the first principle is to take care of one another. The fine-dining squad hadn't come from within USHG-and even if they had been able to absorb this crucial, employee-centered aspect of the culture, they'd been so focused on making their mark on the restaurant that they'd let this central principle fall by the wayside. That's why Danny had insisted the next GM come from within the company; for him, that aspect of the culture was not negotiable.

It was my hope that both fixes would make the team feel saferand inspire them to come along on our mission. There was a lot to be done to make the restaurant better, but there would be no point to doing any of it if the people who worked there didn't love coming to work. If I couldn't succeed in getting hearts and minds on board for the bigger project, then the grand vision of a push toward excellence would be dead on arrival.

To bridge the gap between the two factions, improving communication was going to be key. At the same time, we needed systems, so everybody would know what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it.

Leaders Listen

I had heard through the grapevine that, a few years before, a guy called Christopher Russell had made a big impression on his team with his first speech as GM at Union Square Cafe. (I wasn't there, so I'm paraphrasing.)

I loved this. It was a profoundly confident display of leadershipboth a rallying cry and a way of telling the team, right away, exactly what they could expect from him as a leader.

He said: 'I am so excited to be here; I believe in and love this restaurant with all my heart. I'm also clear about what my job is, which is to do what's best for the restaurant, not to do what's best for any of you. More often than not, what's best for the restaurant will include doing what's best for you. But the only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.'

I was inspired to use that same approach as a template for my own first-day speech. Except that Christopher had worked as a server and a manager at Union Square Cafe for years before that promotion. He knew every inch of the restaurant, and every one of the people in that room, down to their favorite cocktails and the names of their pets. People trusted him. He'd earned the right to give that speech. I hadn't.

Having eyes and ears on the ground, especially those I trusted as much as Laura and Sam, was a gift. But aside from the insights they'd given me, I didn't know anything . So while I was tempted to deliver a similar rousing first-day speech about where the restaurant was going, I first needed to know where it was at.

Some of the best advice I ever got about starting in a new organization is: Don't cannonball. Ease into the pool. I've passed this advice on to those joining my own: no matter how talented you are, or how much you have to add, give yourself time to understand the organization before you try to impact it.

One of the hardest parts about being dropped into a new environment is everyone is telling a different story. You have to connect with everybody and accept it might take a minute to determine if that manager really is a horrible person or if his agenda just differs from whoever's doing the complaining. You're not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you've got to start by listening.

It didn't even matter who was right and wrong, though, because nobody was communicating effectively. The front-line staff weren't talking to one another because nobody was talking to them, and they weren't listening to one another because they felt like nobody was listening to them. So I spent my first few weeks sitting down with every single member of the team and hearing them out.

In those early months at EMP, there was lots of finger-pointing and plenty of blame to go around; I've never been in a situation where it was so clear everyone was wrong and right at the very same time. Some of the old guard were phoning it in-and yet, it wasn't hard to see why so many of them thought the fine-dining crew needed to chill out.

That was a whole education in itself; I learned a lot of information about the restaurant it would otherwise have taken me a long time to figure out. Those meetings also taught me that time spent goes a long way. Sitting down with people shows them you care about what they think and how they feel and makes it that much easier for them to trust that you have their best interests in mind.

For this reason, I'd later ask the managers to stop sitting together during family meal, which the staff shares together before the restaurant is open. By spreading out, they'd learn, as I had, that the meal is a perfect opportunity to gather ideas and perspectives that might otherwise slip through the cracks.

Find the Hidden Treasures

My dad had his own platoon in Vietnam. He'd be the first one to tell you it wasn't a great one-in fact, it's highly likely he got it because nobody else wanted it.

My dad channeled his initial frustration into getting to know the team. Talking to Kentucky, he learned the kid had lived his entire life in the dense, deep backwoods of the rural South and that his supernaturally good sense of direction had been honed by a lifetime of navigating that land. Which also meant that, no matter how dark it got in the jungles of Vietnam, no matter how thick the foliage or how confusing the terrain, Kentucky could always find his way-in stark contrast to my dad and all the other city slickers, who were encountering those conditions for the first time.

In the platoon, there was a guy they nicknamed Kentucky, after his home state. Kentucky was lazy and wasn't in great shape; he had no hand-eye coordination, and terrible aim. And he was not the brightest bulb on the string; in the early days, my dad says, he wasn't sure Kentucky was plugged in at all.

So my dad moved Kentucky from the middle of the pack, where he'd been put as damage control, up to the point-the very frontwhere he excelled for his whole tour. In getting to know the guy, my dad turned one of the worst guys in the platoon into one of its strongest assets.

In business, he'd tell me, you choose your team; even if you inherit them, you decide if you want to keep working with them or not. In war, your team is assigned to you, and you can't fire anyone, and many of them don't want to be there at all. And the consequences of a poor decision in Vietnam were considerably more severe than a plate of food ending up in front of the wrong guest.

I thought about that often when I was sitting down with the new team at EMP. It was tempting to weed out everyone who had a reputation as a less-than-stellar employee; eventually, some folks would need to be managed out. But first, I needed to make sure a hidden capability wasn't lurking behind someone's subpar performance.

A leader's responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.

Eliazar Cervantes was having issues in his role as a food runner; his managers repeatedly complained he didn't care. Which was true in a way, because Eliazar wasn't particularly interested in learning about the food. Of course he couldn't remember how old the balsamic vinegar was; he wasn't passionate about it.

Eliazar became an expeditor in the kitchen. The expeditor is the person who tells the cooks when to start preparing the food and makes sure each dish gets to the right person at the right table in a timely fashion. A good one will know exactly what a table ordered, where they are in their previous course, and how long their entrées will take to cook. At a restaurant like EMP, he might be holding thirty different tables in his head at any moment.

After spending time with him, I discovered something about him others hadn't. He was incredibly organized and a natural leader, the kind of person who carried authority easily, and who could keep a steady hand on the wheel, even when it felt like the whole enterprise was headed off the rails. The solution wasn't to reprimand or fire him, but to give him a different role.

In other words, the expeditor both conducts a symphony every night-and makes sure the planes don't collide in midair. It is one of the most important jobs in any restaurant, and one of the hardest.

And watching Eliazar do it was like seeing someone play chess in three dimensions. Once he'd moved from a position with no organizational component or opportunity for leadership into one that depended on those skills, Eliazar quickly came into his own, and the whole restaurant got to see his genius.

He went on to shine as head expediter at Eleven Madison Park for years, becoming an essential part of our success. Finding his hidden gifts, and those of others on the team, was an important step. The pieces were starting to come together.

Keep Emotions Out of Criticism

You know when one of your friends has fallen out of love but can't quite get it together to have the tough conversation with their partner about why the relationship isn't working? So they act like a giant jerk instead, in the hopes that the other person will get fed up and do the dumping? There had been a lot of that going on, managerially speaking, under the previous regime at EMP.

The most valuable class I took at Cornell was Spanish, and the second most valuable was the one where I learned Excel. But I also have to give some credit to a class called Organizational Behaviormostly because they made us read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson.

So I let the team know I wasn't afraid to have difficult conversations-hearing difficult things, or saying them.

I still give The One Minute Manager to every person I promote. It's an amazing resource, in particular on how to give feedback. My biggest takeaways were: Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.

When someone who worked for me did a task well, I made sure to find a way to hype them up for it, and in front of as many of their colleagues as I could. Receiving praise, especially in front of your peers, is addictive. You always want more.

To ensure we were doing it consistently, we instituted the monthly Made Nice Award, where the entire management team voted for one person from the kitchen and one person from the dining room who had gone above and beyond-whether with a guest or for their colleagues.

We posted the Made Nice Award with the employee's picture above the time clock, so they'd enjoy the recognition of their peers. We also gave them a hundred-dollar gift card to the restaurant-a way for them to show off where they worked to their friends and family.

This was inspired by the Employee of the Month awards you see at places like McDonald's. Those awards are usually unloved-four months out of date and hanging in a cheesy frame outside the bathroom-but it's amazing to establish a regular rhythm for giving praise .

We were as thoughtful about criticism as we were about praise. I invited people on the team to come to me if they thought we could be doing something better, and to do so well before their frustrations reached a boiling point. Similarly, I encouraged managers to address their own issues with the team as soon as one popped up-before the problem became entrenched, and therefore emotionally charged.

So when a server comes in with an unironed shirt, you let the minor infraction slide in the interest of creating a friendly environment, both for the server in question and-let's face it-for yourself. You don't say anything. And you don't say anything when you notice the shirt isn't ironed the next day, and the next day, and the next.

When young managers take the reins of power-and most managers in our business are young when they start because of how little money they make-they want to be liked. They work with people fourteen hours a day, and often they end up going out for a drink after work; it's normal to want to be seen as part of the group.

By day twenty, you've started to take those wrinkles personally. The reality is that this guy hasn't ironed his shirt because nobody's told him to. But in your mind, he's not ironing his shirt because he doesn't respect you as a manager, or the restaurant he works at, or the other members of his team. That sloppy shirt has become a blinking neon sign for you: this guy couldn't care less about the amazing organization you're trying to build.

At our manager meetings, we talked about how to avoid moments like this. Many of these confrontations could be avoided with early, clear, and drama-free corrections-like pulling that guy with the wrinkled shirt aside on day one to say: 'Hey! Good to see you this morning. That shirt's looking a little rough; why don't you head upstairs and give it a once-over with the iron before we sit down for family meal?'

Your resentment festers, so by the time you eventually get around to addressing this unironed shirt issue with your employee, it feels personal-and emotional. Spoiler alert: the conversation you finally end up having with him is going to go badly.

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear. And your team can't be excellent if you're not holding them accountable to the standards you've set. You normalize these corrections by making them swiftly, whenever they're needed.

Correct an employee in front of their colleagues, and they'll never forgive you. In fact, the wall of shame that goes up may mean they can't even absorb what you're telling them. Issue the same correction in private, though, and it's a different exchange.

And make those corrections in private . I can still feel the flush of shame and horror that crept up from my collar when I was screamed at in the dining room by the chef de cuisine at Spago; I'll remember it for the rest of my life. And while it was a terrible experience, it was also a privileged peek at a mistake I never wanted to make.

Whether criticism or praise, it's a leader's job to give their team feedback all the time . But every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well than what they could do better, or they're going to feel deflated and unmotivated. And if you can't find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that's a failure in leadership-either you're not coaching the person sufficiently, or you've tried and it's not working, which means they should no longer be on the team.

These rules help your team to feel safe-especially if you practice them consistently. Consistency is one of the most important and underrated aspects of being a leader. A person can't feel safe at work if they're apprehensive about what version of their manager they're going to encounter on any given day. So if you're the boss, you need to be steady, controlling your moods so you don't end up taking out that morning's squabble with your spouse on a server with a wrinkled shirt.

This is the ideal-but let's be honest: every once in a while, you're going to mess up. When you do, apologize. There's an inherent intensity that comes with being passionate about what you do, and on occasion, it can get the better of you. I've certainly expressed exasperation and disappointment in ways that weren't textbook illustrations of how to handle a correction in the workplace. But every time, I've made sure to apologize-not for the feedback itself, but for the way I delivered it.

Thirty Minutes a Day Can Transform a Culture

In spite of this mushy talk about listening and learning, at heart, I'm a systems guy. And in 2006, EMP desperately needed some systems.

Most restaurants hold a daily meeting before service. It's called line-up or pre-meal and is a time to introduce and review new menu items, new wines by the glass, and new steps of service.

When initiating change, I look for the best lever, whatever will allow me to transmit the most force with the least amount of energy. And there's no better lever than a daily thirty-minute meeting with your team.

But it can be much, much more than that: A daily thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team. In fact, I firmly believe that if every dentist's office, every insurance company, every moving company had a daily thirty-minute meeting with their team, customer service as we know it would profoundly change.

At EMP, the way we ran our pre-meal meetings set a tone that was at least as important as what we said. Attendance was mandatory. The meetings started on time, at eleven and five, and lasted exactly thirty minutes. For the first year, I ran every single

meeting myself, both lunch and dinner, Monday through Friday. I wanted the team to see me, and to know I was accessible and accountable to them, and consistent-that I'd do exactly what I'd said I would do, when I'd said I would do it.

This basic transfer of information was vitally important, especially because so much was changing. At Danny Meyer's other restaurants, managers offered printed line-up notes, including new menu items, new wines, and information about new farms and producers, so the material could be taken and studied at home. But, probably because they were moving so fast, that practice had fallen by the wayside at EMP.

In the restaurant's previous iteration, pre-meal had been exclusively devoted to the items on the plate or in the glass: here is the main ingredient, here's how long it was aged for, here's what it's served with, and this is how you pour the sauce tableside.

I immediately reinstituted it: there would be no more ambiguity about what we expected the servers to know. All the menu and wine descriptions had to be carefully written out, edited, and spellchecked by the managers, who were expected to have their packets ready on time for the meeting so servers could take notes in the packet during the verbal presentations made by the kitchen team and the wine director.

Done right, a pre-meal meeting fills the gas tank of the people who work for you right before you ask them to go out and fill the tanks of the people they're serving.

I stayed late every night that first week designing a template for those line-up notes, so they would be beautiful as well as clear and well-organized. That was unreasonable, but the way you do one thing is the way you do everything , and I wanted those notes to be as thoughtful, as beautifully presented, as the lavender honeyglazed dry-aged duck we brought to our guests. In this case, the people on staff were the recipients of my hospitality, and I wasn't going to stand up and talk about excellence without modeling it myself.

Communicating consistent standards, with lots of repetition, was important; a good manager makes sure everyone knows what they have to do, then makes sure they've done it-that's the black-and-

white part of being a leader. But a huge part of leadership is taking the time to tell your team why they're doing what they're doing, and I used pre-meal to get into that why.

Our meetings followed the same template every day, so everyone knew exactly what to expect. We'd start with housekeeping ('Thursday's the last day to make changes to your health insurance; call Angie if you've got questions'). Then I'd move into a quick riff on a topic that had inspired me. It could be an article I'd read about another company or a service experience I'd had somewhere else.

I spoke to the spirit of the restaurant and to the culture we were trying to build. I used those meetings to inspire and uplift the team and to remind them what we were striving for. Those thirty minutes were our time to celebrate the wins, even the small ones, a time to publicly acknowledge when someone on the team was crushing it.

Inspiration was everywhere. One day, the place where I ordinarily got my hair cut was fully booked, so I stopped into a classic New York City barbershop, complete with twisting striped pole and combs soaking in huge blue jars of Barbicide. As I was paying for my haircut, the gruff barber asked me, 'What do you want?'

I told the story that afternoon at pre-meal. Who on earth thought of that mini-shot? It was ridiculous, irrelevant, whimsical. A tiny dose of generosity designed to-what? To surpass your expectations, to change your channel, maybe just to put a smile on your face as you were walking out the door. It was wonderful, and I wanted the team to be as inspired by it as I had been.

I looked up, confused; he was pointing at three huge handles filled with gin, vodka, and whiskey. 'Whiskey!' I said, grinning, and he handed me a shot in a tiny disposable cup, the kind your dentist uses for mouthwash, before sending me on my way.

The beginning of every pre-meal started with a call-andresponse: 'Happy Wednesday!' 'Happy Wednesday!' They ended with one, too; I'd say, 'Have a good service!' to which the staff would respond, in the tradition of the French kitchen, 'Oui!'

You knew when you'd given a good pre-meal by the way they said 'Oui!,' and I got a good one that day.

Stealing thirty precious minutes for pre-meal from an already over-crammed day was a big ask, and sometimes my insistence on these meetings felt like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic . This was especially true because the managers immediately let me know that taking the full thirty minutes for the meeting would mean less time for side work, which was already squeezed into a slot too tight for everything to get done.

The answer, for me, was easy. 'So let's dial back on some of this side work to make the time.'

In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another. If that meant using a more basic napkin fold or simplifying the butter presentation so everyone had time to meet, then that was a trade-off I was willing to accept. How connected we were as a team was more important to me than anything.

Set Them Up to Succeed

In those early days, I sat down with one server, a smart, personable guy who should have been perfectly suited to our new mission. At our meeting, though, he seemed drained and overwhelmed.

Employees who aren't succeeding tend to fall into two camps: the ones who aren't trying, and the ones who are. The end result may be similar, but the two need to be handled differently: you've got to move heaven and earth to help the people who are trying.

When I asked what was up, he pushed a giant packet of paper across the table-the notes he'd been given on the wine list. 'I just don't think I'm going to be able to get on top of this,' he said, and I couldn't blame him; I was lost myself by page three.

This was one of those times. Yes, I wanted EMP to have one of the best wine lists in the world and knowledgeable servers who could expertly guide our guests through it, but drowning them in detail wasn't the way to get there. Expectations were too high. We needed to solidify our foundation before adding more stories. We needed to slow down to speed up.

Later, this would become one of our catchphrases. I would remind the team: 'You're busy, and there are a thousand things you need to do for your tables. But take ten seconds to double-check the order you've put into the computer, because entering the wrong dish has the potential to ruin your whole night-and that of your guests! Go too fast, and you'll end up slowing the whole restaurant down.'

But we were already squandering momentum by trying to do too much too soon. We had to rebuild the engine before we could shift into fifth gear.

There was no way I was going to stop all forward progress toward a more refined, high-end service experience; there were a bunch of us, Daniel and myself included, who had big aspirations for the restaurant. If we stopped in our tracks, that group was going to feel we were squandering momentum.

So I drastically cut what we were asking the dining room team to learn. It helped that I wasn't super knowledgeable about the kind of food and wine we were serving. Because I was learning the material right alongside my team, I had a better sense for what we needed to know-and for how big those pieces of information could be, while still remaining digestible.

We started giving the servers a food and wine test every two weeks. That probably seemed punitive to some members of the old guard, but it was part of the move toward clarity: now that we were communicating clearly what we expected people to learn, it made sense to hold them accountable.

Eventually, yes: we'd know all seven microclimates in a particular vineyard, and we'd charm guests with tales of the winemaker's grandfather and what his work in the French Resistance had to do with the enigmatic image on the label. First, though, the basics: 'This is a 2005 chardonnay made by Au Bon Climat in California, aged in neutral French oak. It's bright and mineral with firm acidity, and it pairs perfectly with the Scottish salmon with daikon, baby leeks, and citrus.'

But I outright rejected the first food and wine test the managers presented to me; it was much, much too hard. 'Nobody's going to pass this! I wouldn't pass this.' The point of these tests wasn't to fail people or to call them out; it was to make sure they felt confident and knew what they needed to know. Ultimately, this is one of a manager's biggest responsibilities: to make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.

'We're going to make this restaurant one of the best restaurants in New York,' I told the assembled team. 'It's not going to be easy, because being the best is never easy, but we are going to try to make it fun. If that's not right for you, I totally get it; we'll help you find a better fit. But if the idea of working at one of the most exciting restaurants in New York gets you fired up, then I hope you stick around, because we're about to take off.

It wasn't much longer before I finally delivered my rousing, Christopher Russell-style speech. It wasn't at my first pre-meal, or even my thirtieth, but the one I gave after I'd finally started to feel confident that everyone was talking to one another and to me and knew what was expected of them.

'I promise I'll try to be consistent, to do what's fair and what's right.' Then I did quote Christopher: 'I'm also clear about what my job is, which is to do what's best for the restaurant, not to do what's best for any of you. More often than not, what's best for the restaurant will include doing what's best for you. But the only way I can take care of all of you as individuals is by always putting the restaurant first.'

I finished with my own words: 'We're going to make the kind of place we want to eat at; we're going to create the four-star restaurant for the next generation. That's where we're going. Will you come?'