Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide (The Unreasonable Hospitality Collection)

Guidara, Will

 
9798217045235: Unreasonable Hospitality: The Field Guide (The Unreasonable Hospitality Collection)
ISBN 13: 9798217045235
Verlag: Optimism Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author, former co-owner of the #1 restaurant in the world, and co-producer of the Emmy Award-winning series The Bear comes the much-awaited interactive guide to putting the principles of Unreasonable Hospitality into action in your organization.

With over one million copies sold to date, Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality issued a compelling invitation: “No matter what business you’re in, you can make the choice to be in the hospitality industry.” His lessons about service and leadership celebrated the one principle that never goes out of season: the human desire to be taken care of.

If Unreasonable Hospitality is the why, then The Field Guide is the how—a step-by-step roadmap to applying those lessons, including:

• Building and leading your team with consistency, integrity—and yes, hospitality
• Developing a culture of hospitality with five essential components—excellence, communication, collaboration, feedback, and repair—and the systems that will keep those values front and center
• Creating bespoke gestures with the power to transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences—as well as how to create a ready-made toolkit of easily implemented ones that feel bespoke

Featuring deeply personal stories, his own as well as those of readers he’s encountered, the book is packed with practical exercises that are as relevant to the CEO of a Fortune 500 as they are to the ambitious intern at the front desk. Each can be done on your own, with your team, or company-wide at the annual retreat.

Beautifully designed and illustrated in full color, this delightful, participatory guide—meant to be marked up and discussed—will have you feeling like a kid about to crack open a new coloring book. You’ll walk away inspired, with a power pack of specific, immediately actionable ideas to help you elevate the magic in what you do—for yourself, the people you work with, and the people you serve.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Will Guidara is the author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality. He is the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, which under his leadership was named the Best Restaurant in the World. He is the host of The Welcome Conference, a co-producer on the Emmy Award-winning series The Bear, and a recipient of the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award.

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Chapter 1

Welcome to the Hospitality Economy

At home, we were on top of the world.

Our restaurant, Eleven Madison Park, had recently received four stars from The New York Times, and a couple of James Beard Awards, too. But when my chef-partner Daniel Humm and I arrived at the cocktail reception the night before the awards for the 2010 World's 50 Best Restaurants, we understood: this was a whole different ball game.

Imagine every famous chef and restaurateur you've ever heard of milling around, drinking champagne and catching up with friends-and not one of them was talking to us. I'd never felt so much like a freshman at a new high school trying to figure out where to sit in the cafeteria, not even when I was a freshman.

It was a huge honor to be invited. The 50 Best awards had begun in 2002, but they'd become immediately meaningful in the industry. First of all, they were decided by a jury of a thousand well-regarded experts from around the world. And nobody had ever considered before how the best restaurants on the planet ranked against one another. By doing so, the awards gave these restaurants a push to become even better when they might have been content to rest on their laurels.

The awards ceremony itself was held at London's Guildhall, so regal and imposing it might as well have been a palace. As Daniel and I sat down, more than a little intimidated, we foolishly tried to gauge where we were going to land on the list based on where we were sitting relative to chefs like Heston Blumenthal of England's Fat Duck, or Thomas Keller of Per Se, both of whom had been in the top ten the year before.

I guessed forty. Daniel, always more optimistic, guessed number thirty-five.

The lights went down, the music played. The emcee for the night was a handsome, debonair Brit. And while I'm sure there were all the usual formalities and introductions and "thank you for comings" before the bomb dropped, in my memory there was little preamble before the man said, "To kick it off, coming in at number fifty, a new entry from New York City: Eleven Madison Park!"

That knocked the wind right out of us. We slumped over and stared at our feet.

Unfortunately, what we couldn't have possibly known (because it was our first year at this event, and because we were the very first restaurant called) is that when they call your name, they're also projecting your image onto a gigantic screen at the front of the auditorium, so that everyone can see you celebrating your win.

Except we weren't celebrating. We were at the very bottom of the list! Mortified to see our dejected faces on the thirty-foot-tall screen, I elbowed Daniel, and the two of us mustered a smile and a wave, but it was too little, too late: an auditorium filled with the most celebrated chefs and restaurateurs in the world-our heroes-had already borne witness to our devastation. The night was over for us before it had even begun.

At the reception afterward, we ran into Massimo Bottura, the Italian chef of Osteria Francescana, a Michelin three-star based in Modena-and number six on the list (not that we were counting). He saw us, started laughing, and couldn't stop: "You guys looked pretty happy up there!"

Fair enough, but Daniel and I weren't laughing. It was an honor to be recognized as one of the fifty best restaurants in the world; we knew that. Still-in that room, we had come in last place.

We left the party early and headed back to our hotel, where we grabbed a bottle of bourbon from the bar and sat, ready to drown our sorrows, on the steps outside.

We spent the next couple of hours moving through the five stages of grief. We'd staggered out of the auditorium in denial-had that really happened? Then we got mad-who the hell did they think they were? We breezed through bargaining and spent the better part of the bottle on depression before settling into a state of acceptance.

On one level, it's absolutely ridiculous to call any restaurant "the best restaurant in the world." But the importance of the 50 Best list is that it names the places that are having the greatest impact on the world of food at a given moment in time.

The techniques that Spanish chef Ferran Adriˆ pioneered at El Bulli introduced molecular gastronomy to the world. RenŽ Redzepi championed foraged and wild-caught foods from the land and water surrounding his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, and a local food movement was born. And if you've eaten out or walked down the aisles of your local grocery in the last ten years, you've felt the impact those innovations have had on my industry and beyond.

These chefs had the courage to make something no one had made before, and to introduce elements that changed the game for everyone.

We hadn't done that yet. We'd worked our butts off to earn a spot on that list, but what, really, had we done that was groundbreaking? The more we talked, the more it became clear: nothing.

We had everything we needed: the work ethic, the experience, the talent, the team. But we'd been operating as glorified curators, picking the best features of all the great restaurants that had come before us and making them our own.

Our restaurant was excellent and made a lot of people happy. But it hadn't yet changed the conversation.

When I was young, my dad gave me a paperweight that read, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" That's what I was thinking about when Daniel and I wrote, "We will be Number One in the world," on a cocktail napkin.

It was very late, and the bottle was mostly empty by the time we stumbled back to our respective rooms. I was exhausted, but my mind kept racing back to that napkin.

Most of the chefs on the 50 Best list had made their impact by focusing on innovation, on what needed to change. But as I thought about the impact I wanted to make, I focused on the one thing that wouldn't. Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

Daniel's food was extraordinary; he was undeniably one of the best chefs in the world. So if we could become a restaurant focused passionately, intentionally, wholeheartedly on connection and graciousness-on giving both the people on our team and the people we served a sense of belonging-then we'd have a real shot at greatness.

I wanted to be number one, but that desire wasn't just about the award; I wanted to be part of the team that made that impact.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I smoothed out the napkin and added two more words:

"Unreasonable Hospitality."

Service Is Black and White; Hospitality Is Color

When I was younger, I took a lot of pride in coming up with interview questions.

I now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we're trying to build? Do they have integrity; are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself-and my team-happily spending a lot of time with?

But before I had the experience to let the conversation flow, one of my favorite questions to ask was, "What's the difference between service and hospitality?"

The best answer I ever got came from a woman I ended up not hiring. She said, "Service is black and white; hospitality is color."

"Black and white" means you're doing your job with competence and efficiency; "color" means you make people feel great about the job you're doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you're serving, so you can make an authentic connection-that's hospitality.

Daniel Humm and I spent eleven years turning Eleven Madison Park, a beloved but middling two-star...

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Verlag
Optimism Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217045235
Einband
Flexibler Einband
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland