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The transcript begins with the speaker describing his experience owning and operating a restaurant called 11 Madison Park. He explains that 11 Madison is a very fancy restaurant on the corner of 24th and Madison in New York City, with servers wearing suits and ties, crisp ironed white tablecloths, more than 30 cooks in the kitchen, and 10 to 15 course tasting menus. When he got there in 2006, it was a middling brasserie, but by the time he sold it at the beginning of 2020, it had been named the number one restaurant in the world.
He clarifies that the kitchens served unbelievably delicious and incredibly innovative food, and the service was as close to technically perfect as possible. The dining room was one of the most beautiful out there, and for these reasons the restaurant was consistently on the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world. But it was a hot dog that earned them the number one spot on that list, or rather the winning strategy that it gave birth to: unreasonable hospitality, the principle that guided them as they took ordinary transactions and turned them into extraordinary experiences.
In early 2010, on a busier than normal lunch service, he was in the dining room helping the servers when he found himself clearing appetizers from a table of four foodies on vacation to New York. They were going to the airport to head home after their meal, and he overheard them talking about what an amazing trip it had been, listing the best restaurants they had visited, including per se, Laburnum, Daniel, Momofuku, and 11 Madison Park. Then another person jumped in: yeah, but the only thing they didn't get to try was a New York City hot dog.
He describes the moment as one of those cartoon moments where a light bulb goes off over a character's head. If you had been in the room that day, he says, you would have seen him calmly and gracefully walk back into the kitchen, drop off the plates, and then literally run out the front door and down the block to the hot dog cart. He bought a hot dog and ran just as fast back into the kitchen. The hard part was convincing the chef to serve it in their fine dining restaurant. The chef looked at him as if he had lost his mind, serving what New Yorkers call a dirty water dog in a four-star restaurant, but he asked the chef to trust him and told him it was important to him. Eventually the chef agreed to cut the hot dog into four perfect pieces, adding a swoosh of ketchup and a swoosh of mustard on a peach plate, finishing them with a canal of sauerkraut and a canal of relish.
Before serving the table their final savory course, which was a honey lavender glazed Muscovy duck that had been dry aged for two weeks using a technique that had taken years to perfect, they brought the guests their hot dog. He introduced it to make sure they didn't go home with any culinary regrets: a New York City hot dog. The guests freaked out. He says that in his career he had served thousands of dishes and many thousands of dollars worth of food, and he could confidently say no one had ever reacted to anything they served better than they reacted to that hot dog. Each person said it was not only the highlight of their meal but of their entire trip to New York, and they would be telling the story for the rest of their lives.
That hot dog changed the way he approached restaurants from that point forward. Until then he had been so focused on excellence and all the little details that go into making a meal great that he hadn't realized something really important: in restaurants, their reason for being is to make people feel seen, to make them feel welcome, and to give them a sense of belonging. The food, the service, and the design are simply ingredients in the recipe of human connection that is hospitality. He realized that if they could be unreasonable in their pursuit of that, they could give people the kind of experiences they would remember forever. He realized he wasn't actually in the business of serving people dinner; he was in the business of serving memories.
He obsessed over that hot dog, going back to the experience and trying to figure out what happened and what needed to happen for it to start happening all the time. The first element was being present. He acknowledges the term is overused these days, but for him being present means caring so much about the thing you're doing or the person you're with that you stop caring about all the other things you need to do. This is essential in delivering unreasonable hospitality, because so often we have such long to-do lists that we can't slow down enough to listen to the people around us, to the things they're saying and the things they're not saying. If he hadn't been present at that table, he never would have heard that throwaway line about the hot dog.
The second element was taking what you do seriously without taking yourself too seriously. Too often in customer service businesses, self-imposed standards get in the way of giving customers the thing they actually want. A hot dog in a four-star restaurant is sacrilegious, but look at the way it made the guests feel.
The third element was the acknowledgment that if what you are trying to do is give people a sense of genuine belonging, one size fits one. Hospitality is about making people feel seen, and the best way to do that is not to treat them like a commodity but as a unique individual. He believes he could have comped that table a bottle of vintage champagne and given them a free bucket of caviar, and it would not have had the same impact as that two dollar hot dog, because it would not have been specific to them.
The hot dog gave them a new true north, and now they had a road map. He started talking about it constantly at staff meetings, telling the team what led to the gesture and encouraging them to go out into the dining room to find opportunities of their own. The team was just as fired up, and they got started right away every night, finding a few really cool experiences to deliver to guests. They had unlocked something important. They knew it was working, but they wanted more of it, wanted to give these kinds of things to almost everyone, and wanted to make it a bigger part of their culture. They recognized they needed to invest in resources to make that possible, so they added a position to the team: someone whose only responsibility was to help everyone else bring their ideas to life. They called the position the Dreamweaver, named after the song by Gary Wright.
With that position, they were on fire. A guest warned them in advance that his dad was more of a Budweiser, steak and potatoes kind of guy than sauternes and foie gras, so the Dreamweavers turned their fancy champagne cart into a Budweiser cart filled with every available type of Budweiser from every bodega in the neighborhood. A couple came in to console themselves after their beach vacation flight was canceled, so at the end of their meal the team turned their private dining room into their very own private beach, with reclining folding chairs, a ton of sand on the ground, and a kiddie pool filled with water to dip their feet into while they drowned their sorrows in tropical mai tais with little umbrellas. A family of four from Spain was in the restaurant on vacation in New York, and while they were eating, the kids noticed snow falling outside the massive windows, the first time they had ever seen real snow. The Dreamweaver found a store still open at eight o'clock on a Friday night, and when the family left the restaurant, a chauffeur-driven SUV was waiting to take them to Central Park for a special nightcap: a few hours of play in the freshly fallen snow.
With these gestures and many more, guests were happier than ever, and so was the team. For the first time, the team had creative autonomy. They were no longer just helping to execute someone else's vision by serving plates of food someone else had created. They were coming up with their own ideas, and those ideas were affecting the guest experience. They were empowered, but mostly they were happy because they were making other people really happy. He notes there are few things more energizing than seeing the look of complete joy on someone's face when they receive a gift you are responsible for giving. As the team became addicted to going above and beyond for guests, they found themselves going above and beyond for one another as well.
He addresses the thought that unreasonable hospitality is only for fancy restaurants. Some of the gestures were quite extravagant, and they did hire people to help execute them more consistently. But the hot dog only cost two dollars, and its impact was priceless. It does not take a big budget to start infusing this into your culture, because it is not the cost of the gesture that matters but how it makes people feel.
For most of America's history, the country was a manufacturing economy. Now it is a service economy, dramatically so: more than three quarters of GDP is driven by service industries in the United States, and globally it is more than 65 percent. Whether you're in real estate, retail, construction, finance, insurance, or computer services, you do the same thing for a living that he does: you are in the business of serving other people. If you look closely enough, you will find opportunities for unreasonable hospitality to give people more than they could ever expect.
He uses real estate agents as an example. Every time he has bought or rented a new apartment, at best the agent has left a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge as a thank you and congratulations gift, and at worst they have thrown the keys on the kitchen counter. Yet this is someone with whom he has spent weeks, if not months, looking for a new home, and if they had been paying attention, they should know every intimate detail of his life. He imagines instead that the first time he and his wife walked into the apartment they ended up choosing, the agent overheard her talking about the nook where she imagined doing yoga every morning. When they moved in, instead of the obligatory bottle of bubbles in that nook, there was a brand new yoga mat with a candle and a note that said, "Welcome to your new home." He thinks that would be pretty cool, and compared to the average commission, it is a pretty insignificant investment in what will inevitably become a lifelong relationship. It is not rocket science; it just requires caring a little more, trying a little harder, being present, not taking yourself too seriously, and remembering that one size fits one.
He asks the audience to imagine if the person who checked them into the dentist's office started thinking this way, or the person who sold them their next car, or, better yet, if everyone on their entire team started thinking this way. Making good products is no longer enough, and serving them efficiently is no longer enough. It is how we make people feel that matters most. He believes we are on the precipice of becoming a hospitality economy.
Unreasonable hospitality helped his restaurant accomplish every single one of its goals, and it turned the people he worked with from a collection of individuals into a trusting team, unlocking a collective creativity and capacity they had never experienced before. The next time you find yourself pursuing a relationship with someone you work with or someone you serve, he encourages you to try being a little more unreasonable, to give people that sense of belonging and a memory that can last a lifetime. It will transform your business, and it will make you and all the people around you feel really, really good.