What Could Possibly Go Right?

Dear Pros,

Back in 2014, well before my time at Food & Wine, I became the editor in chief of Cooking Light. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew enough to implement a culture of service and hospitality for the team at our healthy cooking magazine, thanks to Setting the Table, Danny Meyer's best-selling book about the power of enlightened hospitality in business.

Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group in New York City had become my North Star for hospitality and consistency when I was a $10-an-hour line cook nearly a decade earlier, in 2005. I loved the way the staff at places like Gramercy Tavern made me feel (even if I could only afford the Tavern burger once or twice a year). So, in that first week at Cooking Light during our annual sales meeting, I gave everyone on the sales and editorial teams a copy of Meyer's book and outlined the culture of service and hospitality we would cultivate.

Our journalistic version of service was the easy part. No, we wouldn't serve restaurant food, but we could offer service on every page in the form of useful recipes for home cooks, cooking advice, and nutritional guidance.

Hospitality was harder to translate, but what I asked the team to develop was a warmer tone emanating from the brand, starting with the writing voice and the way we could make people feel. Our culture, based on Setting the Table, was the antithesis of what I experienced in my restaurant work and intentionally different from the dysfunctional cultures of other food magazines where I had led the food programs.

At Cooking Light, we called our new culture of hospitality The Good Egg Culture, and we still practice a version of it daily at Food & Wine. It's pretty simple. Can we be competitive, surprise and delight our audience, grow revenue, and win awards while actually being nice to one another and hiring team-first employees? Twelve years into the experiment, it's going pretty good.

As for Meyer, Union Square Hospitality continues to set the gold standard for restaurants in New York City four decades in (and, thanks to Shake Shack, for the fast-casual burger nationally, too). This month, What Could Possibly Go Right? The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture — Meyer's follow-up to Setting the Table — is out, and I can't recommend it highly enough for Pro readers. We're living in a world that is changing so rapidly that leading through change has become the main duty of anyone who manages people. This book is also shot in the arm for anyone who needs a reminder to embrace optimism in these chaotic and dark times.

For Food & Wine's annual Restaurant Issue (on newsstands later this month!), I spoke to Meyer about his inspiring new book — I've shared an edited version of that conversation below.

And I hope you'll join Meyer and me in New York City on September 14, where we'll continue that conversation in People Inc.'s new live event series, People Talks, at the People Inc. Auditorium in New York City. Meyer and I will discuss his decades-long career in the restaurant industry and What Could Possibly Go Right?, in a special event supporting Southern Smoke Foundation. Reserve your free spot through Southern Smoke. Meyer will also be the guest on the October 13 episode of the Tinfoil Swans podcast.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

HUNTER LEWIS: With whom do you get the most pleasure at the table?

DANNY MEYER: I can have a good time with someone who eats to live, but I have a much better time with someone who lives to eat.

Round table or rectangle?
Round or square. Rectangular is hard because someone always gets left out.

What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a restaurant?
How the staff are interacting with each other. Are they focused on their work and having a great time with each other? If so, I know I'm going to have a great time, too.

What wine are you pouring at home?
A white Burgundy. And always an Italian red, like a Rosso di Montalcino. If someone really knows wine, I'll serve a Brunello.

Are optimists a dying breed?
Gosh, I hope not. Optimists and pessimists die the same way; they just live their lives differently. "What could possibly go right?" is the food I feed on. If I wake up saying the opposite, it's time to retire. Life's too short. I'm trying to make my life easier. It only makes life harder to go the other way.

You are really honest in the new book about failure.
Twenty years have gone by since I wrote Setting the Table. That's two decades' worth of mistakes but also of growth. Drilling deep into the power of hospitality paved the way for that growth, but it didn't teach us how to deal with it. I wanted to write a book about how to sustain your culture in the midst of growth. How can you grow and make it feel the same, or better, than before you grew?

Finish this sentence: It seemed like a good idea at the time to _____.
…convert our [frozen] crinkle-cut fries at Shake Shack to fresh-cut french fries, but it's not what our guests wanted.

What is something you've become less ambitious about?
Chasing the stars. Before opening Gramercy Tavern, I spent a lot of time studying Michelin two- and three-star restaurants. There was a time when I would go to a three-star restaurant for lunch in Paris and then a three-star restaurant for dinner. God knows how my stomach handled that.

How do you know when you've been a good guest?
A lot of it has to do with showing appreciation. A huge effort goes into getting your meal on the table, and when the server, the sommelier, the maître d', and the chef know that you appreciate all that went into it, that's being a good guest. You know you're a good guest when the next time you call they say, "We can't wait to see you."

What's the difference between a customer and a guest?
You can't have a guest if you don't have a host, just like you can't have a follower without a leader. We call our customers guests in our restaurants because we want to reinforce with our team that it is our job to host.

Chick-fil-A also refers to customers as guests. And their employees are trained to say, "my pleasure."
"My pleasure" is way better than "no problem" or "no worries." And the one that crept in a couple years ago: "of course." One day I hope we can get back to "you're welcome."

What's the biggest misconception people have about Danny Meyer?
That nice guys finish last. You can be competitive and hospitable at the same time. I grew up in St. Louis, where people are kind, but that doesn't mean we don't want to win.

What is something someone said to you that has stayed with you?
In 2005, [now U.S. Senator] John Hickenlooper visited the original Shake Shack in Madison Square Park five months after it opened. He took a bite of a ShackBurger, smiled, and said, "Everything has already been said, but not everything has been said superbly. Even if it had been, everything must be said freshly, over and over again. That's what you're doing with your burger. You didn't invent it. You found a fresh way to say it, and if you're going to be successful here, you've gotta keep doing that thing consistently, over and over and over again." I'll take that to my grave. That's why Union Square is 41 years old, Gramercy is 32, Shake Shack is 22, and The Modern is 21. It's because every day we find a way to say it freshly, and we do it over and over again.

Best,
Hunter