Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Have you guys read the book Unreasonable Hospitality? I'm sure most of you have, and if you haven't, let me be the one to introduce this to you. Will Godara, who used to be the owner of Levin Madison park, it was named best restaurant in the world, I think in 2017.
He has since left that because he wrote a book and now he travels all over the world giving talks and working with teams all over the world.
But he wrote this book about unreasonable hospitality, this idea of going above and beyond.
And I think it's right in keeping with what we're talking about because it's about giving people stories a foothold, something to talk about. I want to talk a little bit about Will. I want to talk a little bit about 11 Madison and that book, that idea of providing unreasonable hospitality, all of that. On today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown.
This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. I am your host here of the Restaurant Strategy podcast. I've been talking a lot about the Restaurant Profitability Summit and it is coming up. It's in October in Minneapolis. If you want to be there, I want you to be there. It's the best way I know to impact a massive amount of people. We're capping the event at 200, but it's a great energy in the room. Two different ways to join us. You're going to find the link in the show notes. Go grab your tickets, secure your spot for you and your team today. I also want to remind you, I wrote a book. It's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. You can find that link in the Show Notes if you want to read that. My new book, the Restaurant Profit Playbook and actually comes out in a couple of months. You'll hear way more about that in just in just a little while. I have a membership site, it's called restaurant foundations. It's 97amonth. There's a link in the Show Notes for you to get a free month. So even if you go in, get the thing for free, swipe all my files and cancel. It's totally cool. You could do it. And the very best way I know how to work with restaurant owners and help them increase their profitability, literally help independent restaurant owners make more money so that they can ultimately work less so that they can ultimately grow their businesses. It's the P3 mastermind. It's executive coaching for restaurants owners who are ready to grow. I teach independence, the things that the big groups and chains already know. If you want to learn more about that, click the link in the show notes and go watch a quick video. I explain more about the program.
Sign up for a call with me or someone from my team. We can ask each other a bunch of questions, see if you're a good fit for that program. If you are, we'll talk about how we get you started. If not, we'll shake hands and part ways. There is no hard feelings, but the P3 mastermind is the number one way I know how to help restaurant owners. Go click the link, sign up for a call to chat about that program. Program AI. You love to go out to eat. So, as a guest, what's your biggest pet peeve when you're trying to choose a place to eat?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah, as the father of two children, I can't leave the house for less than $30 an hour. My wife has celiac. So when we're going to make a. A dining decision, I live and die by that menu. I'm in there researching what's available. What can my wife eat? What can we share? What do I get to eat off of her pleat? Um, and so that menu is just a crucial part of all decision making for me as a consumer. It's why at Marquee, we focus so much on our menus, our menu integration, so that as operators, your menu that lives in your point of sale that you want customers to see is available and up to date everywhere.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com, m A R Q I-I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have.
Okay, so we're spending all these episodes talking about stories because I think stories are what give people a foothold. So it gives people context, a way to talk about you. And make no mistake, you need people to talk about you. We know about the power of word of mouth. The problem is they need something to talk about. You have to give them a shorthand. You have to give them vocabulary, something to say about you. And that's what these last many episodes have been about. That's what the next several episodes are going to be about. I want to spend today talking about Will Godara. I want to talk about his book Unreasonable, Incredible Hospitality. Most of you, I'm sure, have already read it. And if you Haven't. Allow me to introduce you to the book and the idea. So if you don't know. 11 Madison park was owned by Danny Meyer, and so Will was working there, eventually was introduced to the chef who was brought on to work there. And eventually they bought the restaurant from Danny Meyer and turned it sort of from like a. Like an elegant, upscale cafe into this mecca for fine dining. It eventually was given three Michelin stars, and it won best restaurant in the world. Number one restaurant in the world. You can only win it once, and then you are retired from the competition. I think that was 2017.
What happened is Will wrote a book about what they tried to do there. Not only great food, not only great service, but above and beyond. And he called it this idea of unreasonable hospitality. Doing the thing that certainly doesn't scale. And he figured out a way to scale the unscalable. We always talk about this. So there was a. I interviewed the guys who opened Noco, Noco's down in East Nashville. And when they opened that restaurant the very first year, the three owners committed to each other that they would call every single day. They would wake up. The very first thing they did when they got to the restaurant is they would call the reservation book from the night before. They literally divvied up the list and called and said, you know, hi, my name is John. You had dinner last night in my restaurant, Noco.
I want to ask you a couple of things about that experience, right? And first thing was, you know, first and foremost, did you have a good meal? Did you enjoy yourself? Right? And then they would ask a variety of questions. What happened is they said, we want to do this because we want to connect with our people. We want to personally thank them. We couldn't survive without them. And we want a finger on the pulse of what's actually happening, that if there are problems, we want to know right away if there are things that we should be celebrating. We want to go back to the people and celebrate them right away. We want to make sure we're dialing in the things, right? Dialing up the things we're doing so well, and we're fixing the things that we're not doing so well. And the way that we want to do this is to call every single person. And, of course, they're not stupid. They understood that was gonna give people something to talk about.
They were like, you'll never believe, right? Hey, where did you have dinner last night? Oh, we went to Noco over in East Nashville. Oh, I've heard about the place.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: How was it?
[00:06:29] Speaker A: It was really great. You'll never believe what happened, right? You'll never believe, comma, but you'll never believe it. But did you know, the owner called me this morning, thanked me for having dinner with us, asked me a couple of questions about the experiences. That's how they get better.
I promise you, the meal is not what get talked about.
I promise you that. What got talked about was the fact that the owners called them. For the life of me, I don't know, I haven't checked back in to see if they're still doing it all these years later, but they had committed themselves and I had them on the podcast to talk about it. They committed themselves to calling the entire reservation book every single day for the entire first year.
In a way that gets to the heart of what Will was talking about in unreasonable hospitality. How can we be so unreasonable with our hospitality? How can we scale what is seemingly unscalable, right? How can we call 200 people, 150 people every single day? I don't know. They figured out a way. They just divvied it up. They made the time. They said, this is important enough that we're going to commit the time to do this. And so Will gives all these stories, and the most famous one is the hot dog cart story, right? So he talks about how he was eavesdropping at a table, he's clearing a given course, and he heard this group of, you know, this four top of European tourists who had specifically come to New York to dine. To dine at the best restaurants in New York. 11 Madison was the last meal they were having. They were having lunch there before, before heading to the airport. And one of them said, you know, oh, you know, you know, this meal was great. This feels good. But you know what? The only thing I feel really heartbroken about is I never had, you know, a hot dog here, a street cart hot dog right Here in New York, we call them a dirty water dog, right? Because that's. They're sitting, boiling and, you know, dirty water that's been there all day.
Will heard this and said, oh, I know what I'm going to do. Cleared the dishes, put them in dish pit, ran out the back door, ran to the nearest cart, bought a hot dog, brought it back in and talked to Daniel, who was the chef, still is the chef. And basically they. They had the shorthand. They had a fight about it, right? And they have the shorthand, which was really interesting, which he talks about in the book. He says, anytime we would Argue. We would work it out, and sometimes, you know, one side would win or the other, unless.
Unless one of them said, this is really important to me. And that was like their code word for please stop arguing about this. This is really important to me. We have to do this. And so that's what Will said. Will said, this is really important to me. And Daniel stopped, relented, plated it like a fine dining restaurant. You know, cut the hot dog into four, plated it with, like, swishes of ketchup and mustard and a little bit of relish, and, you know, all of that. And then we sent it. They sent it out, like, in between their next two courses. And basically, Will dropped the, you know, thing. He says, you know, for your next course, you know, a little off menu offering. This is streetc hot dog from New York City. I overheard you saying, this is the one thing you felt heartbroken that you hadn't had. And this is something we could do. And the way he tells it in the book is everybody was, like, overjoyed. And it gave him a deeper idea that eventually they created a role in the restaurant called the Dream Weaver. And the Dream Weaver's job was basically to connect with the nightly reservation book and figure out if there was a way to make their night above and beyond. If there was a way to do something, serve something, provide something, There was a way to create the night of their lives.
Why? Why would you do that? Number one, to make sure they had a great time, but most importantly, to give people something to talk about. I promise you. I promise you, when those four European tourists got back on a plane, got back home, they talked about all their restaurants. And the thing they said first, not just because it was written about years later, but the thing they talked about first, and probably more than anything else was about the hot dog, was about how somebody was sensitive enough to hear, empathetic enough to put themselves in their shoes and realize that they had the power to do something about it.
Did it mess up the flow? Did it make it a little clunky? Probably, but they did it, and they made their day more than all the fancy food. That one chef, all these accolades, that was the thing that got talked about.
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And so again, how Will talks about it in the book is about how they realized the impact of that one gesture and realized that they can and probably should be doing this over and over and over and over and over again. Later in the book, Will talks about dropping the check. He said, you know, we rethought so many different aspects of the meal. How can we do this differently? That differently, this differently? Like we have one of the, you know, the most elevated, elegant restaurants in the world. We certainly don't have to do everything like we've done it right. How can we go above and beyond? How can we do things differently? The idea is that, so people are like, oh, that's funny. I've never seen a restaurant that does that or does that or does that. If you do that over and over and over again, it makes a difference, it makes an impression. And he talks about the last beat. The last beat of every meal is always the most unpleasant. He said, it's where you drop the check.
And so when you drop the check, it's like, oh, this is. And it's also an unpleasant moment because it's where we're parting you from your money.
And so what they started doing, as he explains in the book, is that we started dropping a bottle of cognac. And he said, here's the check. There's certainly no rush. You know, enjoy the rest of your time here. I want to bring you a little bit of cognac. And he said he would bring the bottle, pour a little bit for everybody, and leave it on the table. He's like, a little bit of cognac. I'm going to leave the bottle. You're welcome to have as much or as little as you want, basically, to say, here's the check. We need you to pay. It's time to go. But you're in no rush. We do not need to push you out of here. If you want to just crush this bottle of cognac, it's our compliments, and certainly we would invite you to do so. Now, obviously, I think you and I can imagine that most people probably didn't have more than a sip or two. Cognac is not for everybody at that point. You've eaten so much and already had so much to drink.
You don't really need much. It was just the gesture. And in saying, here you go, you owe us money. Please get out.
At the same token, you're saying, here's the money. It's time to leave. But if you're not ready to leave, then here's a way to continue enjoying your experience here.
Again, do people talk about how great the meal was, how expensive it was? Maybe. But they probably also talk about that last beat.
They're like, oh, my God, I've never been to a restaurant and have them just bring me cognac.
Which actually isn't quite true, because when you're in Italy, especially down in southern Italy, down like, near. Near the Amalfi coast, almost always they bring you limoncello, at least in my experience. Very often they bring you limoncello as a gift. A gift on the house. When I was in Greece, they do this. They give a little dessert. So very few people order dessert because dessert just comes. They give you, like, the frozen Greek yogurt with a little bit of crushed pistachios, a little bit of honey drizzled on it, and it's just a little something sweet to finish off your meal. I got a crazy sweet tooth. So I'm like, oh, man. I felt like you robbed me of dessert. I want some of the other desserts. And sometimes we ordered other desserts, and sometimes that was just plenty. It was just the little sweetness that I needed.
The point being is that they did it. They realized they had power, they had agency in this moment, and so they did it.
My point to you is you have agency in your restaurant.
You can do whatever you want One of my clients took a page from Will after reading his book, and now they greet every single table with a glass of champagne. Literally. They have a whole setup right at the host stand of a couple bottles of champagne in ice, and then all these champagne glasses, and they pour everybody a half glass of champagne, and they said, hi, welcome. Let me take your coat. May I pour you a little champagne? They pour your champagne, they toast them, and then they take them to the table.
It's perfect.
It's perfect because nobody's expecting it. They're expecting to be sold to. And there's plenty of opportunities for us to sell to people over the course of the meal.
But when they come in, we can do something unexpected. And my point to you is you can do something unexpected that is going to give people the shorthand, the vocabulary, the words, the stories to talk about you.
If you've never read Will's book, I strongly urge you go out and read his book. It's called Unreasonable Hospitality. I obviously, for everybody who already has read it, you know what I'm speaking about. You understand the power of that book. I think it's a really, really impactful idea. Again, guys, I appreciate you making time for this podcast. If you want to work with me and my team personally, the way we do that, the best way I know to make an impact on the restaurant owners out there who are struggling is through the P3 mastermind. If you are ready to grow, you cannot grow until you've hit consistent, predictable 20% returns. That's what you need. And if you're running a quick service or fast casual, it' probably more like 24, 26, 28%.
Trust me, I'm not crazy. This is what all the big restaurant groups and chains are targeting. I'm simply showing you how to target that. If you're ready to make more from your business, then I'd love to chat. Go click that link, watch a quick video, grab time in the calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team. We'll answer, ask each other a bunch of questions. Hopefully I can answer those questions, and if you're a good fit, we'll talk about what next steps are.
Again, I look forward to talking with many of you. The summit is coming up. I'm looking forward to meeting many of you in Minneapolis. I appreciate you guys, and I will see you on the next one.
