CHAPTER 8

BREAKING RULES AND BUILDING A TEAM

Apparently, I'd done something wrong. While walking through the dining room during an early service, I recognized a good regular from Tabla. It was great to see him again, and I spent a couple of minutes at the table, chatting warmly and catching up.

'Um, Will? Can I talk to you for a second?'

A few minutes later, the service director, firmly in the finedining faction, had caught up with me. 'You leaned on the table? When you were talking to 42? That's a real fine-dining no-no. We don't put our hands on the table. We never do that.' I felt for the guy: it's awkward to yell at someone when that person is also your boss.

'How come?' I wasn't trying to be a jerk; I was genuinely curious.

'But why?'

I thought his head was going to explode. 'It's a classic rule of fine dining, that you don't touch the table.'

'I don't know why; we just don't. We just don't do that .'

Before I started at EMP, I'd done a short training at the Modern, the most formal restaurant in Danny's company at the time. It had been uncomfortable. I knew many of the people who worked there, but I'd always been the casual café guy, and they didn't bother hiding their skepticism about my new role at Eleven Madison Park. One of the senior managers went so far as to ask me, 'Why do you think you're going to be able to succeed there? You've never even worked at a four-star restaurant.' She wasn't being mean; given my background and stated interests, I was not a natural fit.

It was a small, awkward moment in a period full of them. But for me, it took on an outsize significance and determined my approach to how we moved forward.

Most of the time, excellent training makes you better at what you do. Athletes practice all day every day so their muscle memory will take over as soon as the ball or the racket is in their hands. By definition, impeccable training enables you to perform your tasks without needing to think about why you're doing what you're doing -which is fantastic if your job is to have an astronomical freethrow percentage.

Over the years, though, I came to see my four-star inexperience not as a weakness but as a superpower. My inexperience enabled me to look critically at every step of service and to interrogate the only thing that mattered: the guests' experience. Did a rule bring us closer to our ultimate goal, which was connecting with people? Or did it take us further from it?

But muscle memory isn't always a good thing; training like that can also be like putting on a pair of blinders. Those meticulously schooled fine-dining folks were doing what they'd always done; they weren't thinking critically about the rules they were enforcing. They weren't in any position to determine whether those rules were good ones or not.

Knowing less is often an opportunity to do more. I'm no enemy of tradition-indeed, I believe much of our success at EMP was rooted in our deep love of the history of restaurants and our respect for many of the classic rituals associated with fine dining, even as we were determined to refresh the model. But a rule borne out of tradition that doesn't serve the guest-or, worse, one that stands in the way of a staff member being able to cultivate an authentic relationship with the person they are serving? That wasn't going to work.

When you ask, 'Why do we do it this way?' and the only answer is 'Because that's how it's always been done,' that rule deserves another look.

In fact, I suspected blind faithfulness to those rules was why so many of those long-esteemed, established four-star restaurants had closed.

Tastes change. My great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized almost anything on the walls at MoMA as art; two generations later, I loved it. In the same vein, my friends and I didn't want to eat at the kind of place where the waiter stood, statue-still, next to our table with his hands clasped behind his back (and yes, I'm using that 'he' deliberately). I wanted to celebrate at a restaurant where the people serving me felt comfortable enough to lean in and chateven if it meant putting their hands on the snowy white tablecloth in front of me.

Fairly soon, we also started to serve our soufflés 'wrong.' I'll spare you the technicalities, but in the classical presentation, the server turns their body away from the guest, ending up with their elbow near the guest's face. My way-the 'wrong' way-enabled the server to maintain eye contact and a conversation with the person they were serving, which was the clear priority in my eyes.

As it turned out, hands on the table was the first of many finedining rules we would get rid of at Eleven Madison Park.

Later, we'd have cooks run food to the tables in their whitesand they were encouraged to kneel on the ground when they spieled the dish, if they felt comfortable doing so. They hadn't done that at Le Pavillon.

It was a different kind of correct.

My unorthodoxy drove the fine-dining crew nuts; how the hell were we supposed to get another star from The New York Times if we couldn't even get the basics right? But I wasn't suggesting you could serve a soufflé any which way; I simply wanted it done in such a way that tradition didn't interfere with hospitality.

Similarly, when I first got to Eleven Madison Park, our goodbye gift was a small bag of canelés. These dark pastries, flavored with rum and vanilla and baked in special copper molds coated with butter and beeswax, are notoriously difficult to make, so the gift was one last impressive flex as the guest was on their way out the door.

To me, this seemed unnecessary. If we hadn't wowed them with everything they'd experienced over the course of their meal, then it wasn't going to happen. In the best-case scenario, those pastries would be gobbled down in the cab on the way home; at worst, the little bag would end up going stale on the kitchen counter. The canelés were too much about what we wanted to serve and not enough about what our guests might actually want to eat.

It was excellent coconut and pistachio granola, in a jar stamped with our four leaves. (The morning granola was often the last photo in a guest's Instagram post about their meal.) But it was also an intentionally humble final touch, designed to make our guests feel that, even after all the sumptuous luxury, they had been welcomed into someone's home.

When you get too caught up in showing your prowess-'Look at what we can do!'-you're losing focus on the only thing that matters, which is what will make your customer happy. So we canceled the canelés and sent our guests home with a jar of granola instead. Because most people don't eat obscure French pastries for breakfast, but everyone is psyched to sit down to a bowl of granola and yogurt.

In restaurants-and in all customer-service professions-the goal is to connect with people. Hospitality means breaking down barriers, not putting them up! We would spend the next ten years coming up with systemized and intentional ways to break down those barriers. Some of them were complex, but the first one was easy: Create a genuine relationship, and do what you need to in order to connect with the people you're serving.

Hire the Person, Not the Résumé

In the early days at EMP, I was at the restaurant all the time.

Really, though, I was there so that eventually I wouldn't have to be.

It was good for the people who worked for me to see I was in the trenches with them. I wouldn't hesitate before jumping in to help, whether that meant lending a hand to clear a table or attending to a disgruntled guest.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good I am at taking care of people. This is purely a numbers game; even in a modestsize restaurant, there's no way one manager can touch every single

table or connect with every guest. A leader needs to be able to trust that their team will operate on the same level as they do. Which meant that if I was going to make any kind of meaningful change, I was going to have to surround myself with a great team.

We were looking for the kind of person who runs after a stranger on the street to return a dropped scarf, who stops by with a plate of cookies to welcome a new family to the neighborhood, or who offers to help carry a stranger's heavy stroller up the subway stairs. The kind of truly hospitable person, in other words, who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.

But as I set out to do that, I made the conscious decision to veer away from servers who had fine-dining experience. Our intention was to usher in a more elegant style of service, but I found if I hired people who had worked in fine dining, they already had too many bad habits. So we started looking for people with the right attitude and philosophy of hospitality.

So it didn't matter if our new hires didn't know a ton about wine or how to pronounce turbot . If they were excited about what we were up to, then we could teach them what they needed to know.

Practically speaking, this helped with the weeding process; if someone was going to balk at starting out as a kitchen server, they probably weren't a good fit. And the system helped us to train people in a way that was truly comprehensive, because what we needed them to know was much bigger than the correct way to open a bottle of wine.

Fairly quickly, I implemented a new policy: everyone we hired started as a kitchen server, running food from the kitchen to the dining room. This meant they started at the lowest position in the dining room, even if their previous position had been as a general manager somewhere else.

It's a cliché that culture can't be taught; it has to be caught. And what better way to appreciate the exquisite nature of Daniel's food than to spend six months ferrying plates from the kitchen to the table? More important, while we were teaching people the technical points a little bit at a time, it would give them the opportunity to fully absorb the culture we were building, long before they became point person with a guest.

And how we chose which people to invite onto the team became central to our success.

Every Hire Sends a Message

You know in the movies when the soldier shouts, 'Cover me,' then runs across the field while his squadron protects him by raining fire on the enemy? A little dramatic for a metaphor about working in restaurants, fine-but if you don't trust the people behind you, then you're never going to perform that huge, heroic hospitality gesture (or even a tiny one) that ultimately saves the day.

That's one small example, of a thousand that might happen over the course of an evening, of how a trusting team operates. And it's why hiring is such a sobering responsibility. Because when you're hiring, you're hiring not only the people who are going to represent and support you, but the people who are going to represent and support the team already working for you.

When EMP was up and running, I felt confident that the entire team had my back-literally. Let's say I was clearing a table and a guest started to engage me in conversation. It's gross to stand there chatting with an armful of dirty dishes, yet I never wanted to squander an opportunity to connect with a guest. So I'd tuck the dishes behind my back, knowing that no matter how badly my wrists strained, in a second or two, one of my colleagues would notice and be on their way to grab them from me.

Morale is fickle, and even one individual can have an outsize and asymmetrical impact on the team, in either direction. Bring in someone who's optimistic and enthusiastic and really cares, and they can inspire those around them to care more and do better. Hire someone lazy, and it means your best team members will be punished for their excellence, picking up the slack so the overall quality doesn't drop.

At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means you must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn't willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.

I've also (unfortunately) been in a position to find out the answer to that question. It's more detrimental to saddle yourself and your team with the wrong person, suffer the damage they do, and then end up right where you started three weeks later. Everyone would rather work a couple of extra shifts a week until you find the right person.

It's also why you've got to hire slow. It's so dreadful to be shorthanded that managers tend to rush in and find a body to fill the void. I know what it's like to think, We need someone so desperately-how bad could this person be?

Someone wise once told me, 'When you hire, you should ask yourself: Could this person become one of the top two or three on the team? They don't necessarily have to be all the way there yet, but they should have the potential to be.'

We were gearing up for a big push. I needed to be confident that anyone could shout, 'Cover me,' knowing that the rest of the team would have their back.

Build a Cultural Bonfire

Many people get into restaurant work because it's a flexible, fun way to pay their bills while they devote time and energy to whatever it is they really want to do. And at the old EMP, a server could punch the clock, put in their hours, and leave work at work, which made it a great job if you were also attending art school or planning a Broadway debut.

But it was quickly becoming the kind of restaurant that required more, and the food and wine tests provided us with an efficient way to find out who was up to the challenge and who needed to move on. Some people, from both factions, understood what we were trying to do and decided they wanted to take the ride with us. Others decided they'd be happier with less of a commitment, which meant we had to replace them.

Three or four times, I hired someone I thought showed promise. But they'd last only a month before the flame of their enthusiasm dimmed and died, and then they'd quit.

In truth, hiring was hard before we got the culture of the restaurant fully dialed in. When we had an opening, I'd find someone good to join the team-not necessarily impeccably trained, but energetic and enthusiastic about the mission. But even if that person was all charged up when they got hired, the residual negativity of some of their colleagues would eventually infect them. The fine-dining crew was still being snooty, and some of the remaining members of the old guard weren't ever going to get on board.

So the next time a position opened up, I didn't race to fill it. Instead, I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time. Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect the tiny flame of their enthusiasm, that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out.

In the years to come, I would tell every group at their new-hire meeting, 'You are part of a class, just as if you were starting college. Lean on one another; support one another.' But the first time I ever gave that speech, it was to those three. I wanted them to know that if they approached their shared experience as a team, the impact they could have on the restaurant would be profound.

Make It Cool to Care

In high school, the cool kids tend to be the underachievers. Cool kids don't study; they don't care what the teachers think of them. At that age, it's slicker to hold back, to keep your cards close to your chest so it never looks like you're trying too hard.

Except that when you grow up a little, you realize the people getting the most out of their lives are the ones who wear their

hearts on their sleeves, the ones who allow themselves to be passionate and open and vulnerable, and who approach everything they love at full-throttle, with curiosity and delight and unguarded enthusiasm.

I like to say I had two groups of friends in college. One group I played music with and partied with. The other group was Brian. He had a gecko. He loved playing chess. He wore purple Converse, and he always had a yo-yo on him. He was the complete opposite of all my other friends-and he was more confident than any of us.

That was my friend Brian Canlis in a nutshell.

Even during our first year in college, when most kids are trying to figure out who they are-and all too often pretending to be things they're not to fit in-Brian was uniquely himself. He was unapologetically invested in the things he cared about, and he never let other people's cynicism or a bad attitude distract him. His energy set the tone. Which made him the coolest person I knew, despite the fact that nothing about him was objectively cool.

Restaurants aside, Brian and I could not have been more different. Nevertheless, we sat together in every class and worked together on every group project, including a truly horrendous restaurant test concept named Agave, which featured his gecko, Milo, sitting proudly atop the host stand.

We found each other on one of the first days of school and quickly discovered we'd both grown up in restaurants. In 1950, Brian's grandfather built the fine-dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called 'Seattle's fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.' His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis's Instagram account for 2020.)

I'd always been good at school, but I'd never had a partner in crime before. With Brian, I didn't have to worry about being a tryhard, an overachiever-I could go for it, engaging fully in what I was studying. Soon, my other friends started circling our little group, curious to see if we'd open our study sessions-not just because we were getting great grades, but because we were having a blast getting them.

That's why I thought of him the day I realized caring had become cool at EMP. There was a soup course we did in those early days that took three people to run for a six-top. If you did it just right, the three runners got to the table at the exact same moment, put the bowls they were holding in their left hands onto the table, moved one step to the side, switched the bowl that had been in their right hands into their left, and put that bowl down, too. Then, in glorious synchronicity, they lifted the lids from all six bowls simultaneously.

Brian had made it cool to care.

Plenty of fine-dining restaurants feature synchronized service, and most of them made sure that the plates dropped at the same time. But many times, I'd watched two runners circling the table, waiting for the third one to arrive, so that what was meant to be elegant felt awkward instead.

For me, this was important. If we cared about this particular service detail, we should do it just right. Dancers learn choreography so their movements are precisely coordinated with the people on either side of them, and that was all this waschoreography. The runners bringing up the rear would have to move a little faster so they'd arrive at the table at the same time as their colleagues in the front, who would in turn move a little more slowly to give their buddies time to catch up. Turn, drop the first plate, step, switch, drop plate number two, lids.

Not the end of the world, maybe-but not perfect, either.

We practiced it. And practiced it, and practiced it, and practiced it.

One day, I was running food with two other people on the team, and we killed it. Our delivery was so perfect you could imagine it filmed from above in one of those 1950s movies where the dancers bloom like flowers.

When we got back into the kitchen, one of the other guys turned to me, a gleeful grin on his face, and gave me the most exuberant high five I've ever gotten. We'd nailed it, and he'd gotten the same dopamine rush from it I had. We were overachievers-we cared-and we were proud of it.

The conversations I started overhearing at family meal were changing, too. People were talking excitedly, not about the new bar or their most recent hookup, but about a table they'd had the night before and how happy they'd been able to make them.

They were talking about hospitality-giving and receiving it. (I was almost more excited to hear them breathlessly sharing details about the meals they'd had at other places-there's no more powerful incentive to give great hospitality than to be on the receiving end of it.) And their colleagues were hanging on every word. When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don't have to hide your passions-you can sing them from the rooftops. And when the people you work with aren't hanging back but cranking it all the way up, then you can meet them there; you don't have to dim your light to succeed.

At EMP, it had become cool to care.