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.