It Took 50 Years But I Finally Get It

I was in the hospitality business for 50 years. I’m retired now. Most of that 50 years, I worked in the restaurant business. The rest of the time, I was in the wine business. Most of the time I spent in the restaurant business was in restaurants I owned. I was an owner/chef. I was always the cook. I enjoy cooking. It’s not work to me. Well, it wasn’t until the very end.

In the beginning, I worked in restaurants that other people owned. I learned how to run a restaurant and I learned how not to run a restaurant. A lot of restaurants take shortcuts. Most of the time those shortcuts cut quality as well as time. I never wanted to do that in my restaurants.

I was a firm believer that the restaurant business was composed of 3 things - food, service and ambiance. I always felt that food was the most important. I felt that people would wait, even in a hole in the wall in a bad section of town, if the food was good. I had seen hundreds of examples of that. I was wrong. I was also of the opinion that the customer is not always right but he is always the customer. I was wrong there too. I should have taken it a bit further.

Recently I saw an Anderson Cooper, 60 Minutes interview with Danny Meyer, the owner of Union Square Hospitality. He is one of the premier restaurateurs in this country, if not the world. He has 15 successful restaurants and the booming burger chain Shake Shack. The interview was quite compelling. It exposed Mr. Meyer as an extremely successful and caring restaurant owner. It also told the reasons behind that success.

I have read the book “Sweetbitter” by Stephanie Danler, which shows a different side to the Union Square story but doesn’t come right out and name the restaurant. Much like Anthony Bourdain’s book, “Kitchen Confidential”, this book wallows in the culinary underbelly. It seems that sells books.

Nevertheless, Ms. Danler hits upon the foundation to Mr. Meyers success. He hires “people” people. She calls it being a fifty-one percenter. These are employees who have the God given gift of understanding people and being able to engage them. That is the fifty-one percent part, the gift. 

Most of the job is the forty-nine percent, the knowledge and skill. The ones with the gift find out what the customer needs and gives it to them. They make the customers feel good. Of course the food has to be great. The service has to be great. The surroundings have to make them feel like they want to be there. The end result is customers walk away happy. They are happy about their whole experience, not just the food. They feel this way because of this restaurant. They feel this way because of these "people" people, the fifty-one percenters. That's hospitality.

There are a lot of knowledgeable, experienced and skilled people in the restaurant business. There are a lot fewer people that are adept at making people feel good. There has to be an underlying compassion in their approach to other people. This is something you have or you don’t have. It can’t be taught. People can be taught about service, food, wine, liquors and how to flame a duck but you can’t teach them to care about people. I will admit that there are scam artists out there that can fake this. We have all met them at one time or the other. We eventually figure out they are scammers.

The real "people" people are rare because they actually care. My old friend, Mr. Bernie Smith is one. Both my wives, ex and existing, are too. They accounted for a lot of my success in the restaurant business. I had a lot of employees that were "people" people. I had some employees that weren't. Shame on me.

The benefit of this gift is the restaurant gets return customers, the best kind. These return customers also tell their friends. This is free advertising, the best kind.

Mr. Frank Bruni, the former restaurant critic for the New York Times understands this concept. He wrote, “I think back to my pre-critic days, in Rome, and to the handful of restaurants I kept circling around to. The servers and owners there would exult when I walked through the door, because they understood how to make me happy and they could have a conversation with me different from the ones they had with newcomers, a conversation built on shared history and reciprocal trust, a dialogue between honest-to-goodness friends. I wasn’t special. But I was special to them.” This gift is not a purely American phenomenon. The Italians have it too.

Mr. Meyer appears to be psychic when it comes to restaurant trends. He’s always on the cutting edge, sometimes way ahead of the cutting edge. He was one of the first to eliminate smoking, provide single diners with comfortable fine dining and provide quality wines by the glass. He helped develop the concept of fine casual and is trying to eliminate tipping to do away with the disparity between the back of the house and front of the house incomes. I could go on and on but you get the idea. It’s hard to argue with success. From this interview, you get the idea that these concepts might not have started out to be trend setting. They just might be the way Mr. Meyer likes to eat. Obviously, he is not alone. Other people want to eat this way too.

I think his most innovative concept is the little sign he imagines around the neck of his customers that says, “Make me feel important by…”. The answer is different for each customer. He goes on to say that it is up to his people to figure what that answer is and to supply it.

His concept of figuring out who at the table is the "boss" and focusing on them first is spot on. If you make him or her feel good, he or she will be back and bring others with them. All this takes “people” people.

I was lucky to have my wives as partners in the restaurants we owned. I am not a “people” person. They are. I do recognize that quality in others. I realize I don’t have it. I know food. I love to cook. After watching this interview, I realized that food is not the most important thing in the restaurant business. Of course, if the food is not great people will not come back. But it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is how you make your customers feel about the total experience. After 50 years I finally get it. Sometimes I’m a little slow.

This makes you wonder, what does Mr. Meyer get out of all this? Of course he gets the money and prestige of running successful restaurants. Is that all? No. We all know there are easier ways to make a buck than the restaurant business. I think the major part of his motivation is revealed in the last part of the interview. 

At the beginning of the interview, Mr. Meyer takes Mr. Cooper to the first Shake Shack which is in Madison Square Park. Mr. Cooper has a ShackBurger, fries and a coffee shake. This is his first. He has walked by this restaurant a thousand times. He has never eaten here because of the lines, usually an hour wait. The next day as they are finishing up the interview, Mr. Cooper tells Mr. Meyer that he is not really a food person but that over the last 24 hours he has thought about that burger and shake a lot. 

Mr. Meyer tells him, “so all you need to know about me, after all these questions, is that nothing in the last 24 hours makes me happier than hearing what you just said”. He said this with a big grin, a sincere grin.

For some the restaurant business is like living at the beach. Once you get that sand between your toes it’s hard to shake. That’s why he does it. It makes him happy. Now that I think about it, that’s why I did it too. 

The Promise

He slowly opened one eye. He was still half asleep. It was cold, overcast and that time before sunup when it starts to hint at light. They were staying in the apartment with the tall antique windows. They had been on the island for a few days and had left the windows open the night before. The cold wind was blowing in and he was under the covers. He was warm. He drifted off for a moment. When he woke again, he could hear the voices and movements of the people on the street. He could hear the children as they hurried to the school at the end of the block.

Then it started. The images came slowly. They appeared. They were gone. At first this scared him. Was it his time? When you get old that’s always in the back of your mind. A palm tree, a young boy, a young girl, a beach, white sand, a sandwich, a plate of woven palm fronds, a guard gate, a P X, a high and tight haircut, a wooden television console, rabbit ears, Roy Rogers and a masked man. He squeezed his eyes. What was happening?

Rows of corn, a green tractor, a black bull, a yellow chicken, a pig pen, wild asparagus in a fence row, a large Victorian house, a red barn, a soybean field, weeds, a plastic communion cup, purple juice, a graduation, body bags, a slender youth, his father in a coffin, his mother with the look of those who can't remember. His heart started to race.

A keg, a bra on the floor, a rose garden, a roof, a trailer, a bottle of Everclear, a dance floor, leather bound book, a pixie cut, eyes the color of the water off Key West, a crowd, a wooden cigar box, a small wrinkled piece of paper. Stairs, Eden Alley, the sign above the door of the Shack, a bicycle, a tip tray, a cold raging ocean, a tall sand dune, an old butcher block, a chef's knife, a flaming pan with half a duck and cherries, skis, snow, a narrow mountain trail, a copper bar, the sign at the entrance to Sawmill Farm, a simple village church, a wine glass filled with ice cream and chocolate sauce, a player piano, a gold chain with a small gold bear, a worn baby's locket, a gold ring. He calmed and let the images flow.

A picture of a pear, a Gorman print, a framed photograph, the Ponte Vecchio, an antique mirror, The Rebel, an old quilt, bookcases of cookbooks, a Zero's grub steak and cheese, a silver hair brush from Tiffany's, a bundle of letters.

The images started to speed up. There were cars. He had owned all of them. There were houses. He had lived in all of them. There were restaurant stoves. He had cooked on all them. There were finished entrees waiting in the window for service. He had cooked all of them. There were perfectly garnished plates served in hundreds of restaurants. He had eaten all of them all. There were images of vineyards and wineries. He had been at all of them. There were rows of wine bottles and half filled wine glasses. He had drunk them all. There were tables of food, wine and friends. He had sat at all of them. There were copper pots and pans hanging from a rack. They all belonged to him. Uneasiness crept into his heart.

The faces started. There were friends from school, teachers, bullies, pretty girls. There were friends who had died, friends who still lived and friends who were no longer friends. There were women he had known, his mother, Gran, Abby, Ellen, Brenda, Maggie and Mary, the faces of his stepchildren, the faces of his grand babies. The images were flying by.

He closed his eyes. The images stopped. He looked at her head on the pillow. The dark hair had flecks of gray. Her eyes were closed. He knew they were the color of the water off Key West.  He had watched them sparkle a thousand times. The skin on her face was tan. It had wrinkles. His heart caught in his throat. She was beautiful. He smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t his time yet.

He rolled over. He looked at the old tile roof on the ancient church across the narrow street he heard its bells begin to clang. He wanted stay in the warm bed but he remembered his promise. He got up and quickly dressed.

He walked down the stairs and out into the street. As he walked he remembered how content he had been. She likes pain au chocolat with her morning coffee. It can’t be the one from the first boulangerie he came to or even the second. No. It must be from the third, the one at number 78. This baker used two pieces of Valrhona chocolate and Bordier butter. It was the best.

He entered the small shop and wished the owner a good morning. He bought two pain au chocolat and a baguette. He walked to the far end of the street and stopped at the bridge. He looked up at the magnificent old cathedral. He never tired of the overwhelming beauty of it.

On the way back, he took the street by the river. It was longer but he liked looking at the water. He thought he would get back in the warm bed. No, it wouldn’t be the same. It’s never the same and he had a few miles to go.

The Messenger

I saw the blue box. I got a tight pain in my chest. I always got that when I saw the box. I always got it when I saw that medium robin’s egg blue. I can’t stand that color. I can’t walk by a Tiffany’s store.

It was a Tiffany’s box, a large one with the wide white ribbon. It once held a silver bowl. It was a gift from one of my two failed marriages. I couldn’t remember if I got if from the union to the spawn of Satan or the nice guy I could never love. It didn’t matter. I had gotten rid of that bowl a long time ago.

Now it held relics from the marriage that never was. There were fading pictures, well creased letters, clipped yellowed newspaper articles and old ticket stubs. 

“Damn you. Damn you to hell.” I said this to him but he wasn’t here. I didn’t know where he was. Over the years, I heard stories, rumors. He sold his restaurant and moved to Florida. Then it was Colorado. He got hooked on cocaine and was dealing. He got busted and was in jail. He died from an overdose. He scored a bit hit and was living on an island in the Caribbean. In these rumors he was always with her, not me.

“Damn her too.”

I was in my attic. I was downsizing. My kids were out on their own, pursuing their dreams. I was alone. I didn’t need 4000 square feet of house. I was moving into a 1500 square foot condo, modern not colonial like this drafty old house. Changes were afoot.

The box was in the bottom drawer of a nice Queen Anne chest. I hadn’t used the chest in years. I hadn’t looked at that box in years. I wasn’t going to now. Changes were afoot. That chest needed to be sold and that box needed to be burned.

I put a tag on the chest with a price I thought reasonable. I picked up the box. I threw it into the black garbage bag I had for trash. I went through the rest of the attic. I’m pretty neat so the garbage bag was only half full when I had finished with my tagging. My friend was going to be by the next day to pick up the furniture to sell in her shop. She had a passion for old things. Perhaps that’s why we had been friends for so long.

I took the bag downstairs to the kitchen. It was raining. I decided to wait to put the bag in my bins out back. Then I thought about what was in the bag. I grabbed an umbrella and made my way outside and dumped it into the nearest bin.

Back in the kitchen, I made a cup of tea. I sat down at the table to enjoy it. It was cold outside. I looked at the china cup. In the pattern was a medium robin’s egg blue. I had never noticed it before.

I jumped up. I dashed out the back door into the pouring rain. I tore open the bag in the bin. I found the box and ran back in. The next I knew I was on the floor of the kitchen with the box opened. The wide white ribbon was beside the lid. I held a picture in my hand.

“Damn you”. A single tear slid down the wrinkled skin of my right cheek.