Will Guidara had a mantra that he often shared with the team at Eleven Madison Park: “Their perception is our reality.”
I remember hearing this trope uttered often in my restaurant days, where I spent over two decades working as a server in New York City hotspots like Babbo, Carbone, and The Grill. Try-hard managers always seemed to derive joy from reminding staff that no matter how great we thought we were, the quality of our service was always defined by the recipient.
Contrary to the old adage, the customer is not always right. But in hospitality spaces, it only matters if they think they are. It’s a lesson that’s taught early in one’s restaurant career and reinforced by prominent voices in hospitality who often glorify the self-effacing behavior that administering restaurant service requires.
On the surface, Guidara’s 2022 book Unreasonable Hospitality is a missive on the power of exceeding guests’ expectations. In it, he shares anecdotes from a decades-long career in fine dining that serve as parables for the transformative nature of hospitality. Since its release, the book has found an audience beyond restaurants, selling over a million copies and appearing on the New York Times bestsellers list for 27 weeks.
While Guidara’s impact on hospitality culture is undeniable, the book’s success has a hidden cost for the restaurant industry. It puts undue strain on hospitality professionals, who now face a new adversary because of it: unreasonable expectations. Guidara’s ideology may have been inspiring when the book came out four years ago, but it’s become harmful to the restaurant industry at a time when many small businesses, still reeling from the ill effects of the pandemic, are struggling to keep the lights on.
In an op-ed for Food & Wine last November, restaurateur John Winterman derided the book’s effect on guest behavior. Since Unreasonable Hospitality was featured on Season 2 of The Bear (Richie is seen reading the book in the “Forks” episode and later reenacts Guidara’s now famous hot dog story, but with deep dish pizza), Winterman noticed more diners coming in with “a heightened and nearly impossible ideal of what a restaurant can or is expected to deliver.” Restaurants like his don’t have the resources to hire a full-time “dreamweaver” like Eleven Madison Park had under Guidara, a position whose sole responsibility it was to design bespoke hospitality magic tailored to individual guests. To Winterman, Guidara’s idealism makes the everyday warmth of a competent restaurant staff seem spartan.
With inflation weighing on margins, restaurants shouldn’t be expected to pull hospitality rabbits out the hat for every guest. If anything, the industry needs to disabuse itself of the notion that simply meeting guests’ expectations is a failure and embrace the value of reasonable hospitality.
In his book, Guidara frames hospitality as a selfish pleasure. “It feels great to make other people feel good,” he writes. It echoes the sentiments of his progenitor Danny Meyer, who wrote in his own book Setting the Table: “It may seem implicit in the philosophy of enlightened hospitality that the employee is constantly setting aside personal needs and selflessly taking care of others. But the real secret of its success is to hire people to whom caring for others is, in fact, a selfish act.”
But hospitality ideologues like Guidara and Meyer never like to talk about what happens when that selflessness becomes self-destructive.
The recent New York Times exposé on the systemic abuse by René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen should remind us that the guest’s perception of a restaurant often doesn’t match the reality for the people working in it. Valuing perception over reality promulgates such abuses; many Redzepi apologists seem willing to excuse his behavior on the grounds that it was in service of more disciplined cooking or a better guest experience. In Unreasonable Hospitality, we never get to hear from the people tasked with doing Guidara’s dirty work, likely because running out in the middle of a busy service to buy sleds for a bunch of rich tourists isn’t nearly as glamorous as he would like us to think it is.
