Design Matters: Will Guidara

Will Guidara—an elite New York restauranteur and author—talks about his storied career as a leader in modern luxury dining, delivering service that transforms a meal into a magical experience.

Debbie Millman:

What do we want when we go to a restaurant? Good food. Yes. Good service? Sure, that too. But restaurateur Will Guidara says it's more than that. He believes that what people really crave is human warmth served through the medium of delicious food. In other words, great hospitality. Will Guidara has been part of the New York City restaurant scene for what seems like forever, as general manager and then co-owner of the fabled Eleven Madison Park, and co-owner of the trendy Nomad restaurants. He is also the author of five books, the latest of which is a memoir of sorts, titled Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. He joins me today to talk about his life, his book, and his remarkable career. Will Guidara, welcome to Design Matters.

Will Guidara:

Thank you so much. I’m really, really honored to be here with you and have been very much looking forward to the conversation.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, me too. Well, I understand that you’re quite the drummer. You started playing in junior high school and performed in punk bands and funk bands, and ska bands. And is it true that by the time you were a senior in college you were playing in a band called the Bill-Guidara Quartet?

Will Guidara:

Yes, although important to note that the Bill-Guidara Quartet was a 16-piece funk band.

Debbie Millman:

That was my next question. How could a quartet also have 16 pieces in it?

Will Guidara:

It actually did start as a quartet. But I think actually the journey with that band is not dissimilar to how I’ve approached my career since then. Which is, I went into the restaurant business because I love being a part of a team. And the more amazing friends who were musicians that I met over the course of my time at college, the band just kept growing and growing, because I mean, music for me is such a way to bring people together, not just the people that are listening to the music, but the people that are playing it as well. And so that band, the people in it, were my closest friends in college. And every time we met a new friend, they had to learn an instrument and get good enough at it that they were able to join the band.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that's wonderful. Did you ever think about pursuing music after college professionally?

Will Guidara:

Yeah. For me, it's always been music and restaurants since I was a little kid. I’ve been playing the drums since before I can remember and I’ve always wanted to be in the restaurant business. And so it was always going to be one of those two, but eventually I recognized that I could go into the restaurant business and continue being a musician, but not vice versa.

Debbie Millman:

You were born in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Your mom was a flight attendant for American Airlines, and your dad was the president of a large restaurant organization. So I guess it's safe to say that hospitality is in your blood.

Will Guidara:

It's in my blood for a bunch of reasons. I think from a career perspective, and I draw the distinction, right? Because when people think about hospitality as a career, they think about what's classically known as the hospitality industry, which are restaurants and hotels. And my entire thesis is that, well A, I don't care what you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality industry. It's also just a way of not just working, but a way of living. Whichever lens you decide to look at it through, I got both of those things from my parents. I grew up going to work with my dad because well, anyone who has ever had a parent that's worked restaurant hours knows that if you want to spend meaningful time with them, you have to go to work with them. Then watching him and my mother after some adversity early on in my life, I got to experience firsthand the feeling of giving and receiving hospitality and got addicted to it because of that experience.

Debbie Millman:

At one point, your dad was the regional vice president for Ground Round, is that correct?

Will Guidara:

Yes. There he was.

Debbie Millman:

And I want to explain to our listeners in case they might not be aware, Ground Round was a old school casual dining chain, known for passing out whole peanuts and encouraging the patrons to throw the shells on the ground. And Will, I’m only bringing this up not because I think it's an important part of your history, but because I thought you might want to know that when I was a teenager living on Long Island, me and my band, used to perform there.

Will Guidara:

Oh, okay. Hold on, hold on.

Debbie Millman:

I know.

Will Guidara:

First of all, that's amazing. Second of all, what did you play? And third of all, what was the name of the band?

Debbie Millman:

I’m so embarrassed. The name of the band was Nova, and it was me and two of my girlfriends. And we played a lot of Fleetwood Mac and a lot of Neil Young. Basically, anything that we could get away with that had as few chords as possible.

Will Guidara:

Oh wait, which instrument did you play?

Debbie Millman:

I was the singer, and Suzanne played the guitar and the piano, and Kathy played the piano.

Will Guidara:

Oh, I love that. The thing I don't say in the book is that my band when I was that age was called My Dog Mary. I feel like you could, honestly, you could blackmail people just by threatening to release their band names when they were a teenager.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Or what they were recording, in my case.

Will Guidara:

I will say about Ground Round, I found that some of the greatest inspiration comes from the most unlikely places, and there was a course I did years later at Eleven Madison Park where I was at my dad's house for Christmas and we were all unwrapping presents. And I was struck by how much people like unwrapping presents, and I was like, "Why can't we bring that into the restaurant?" And so going forward from that point between Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, the first course was on the table when you walked in, so when you walked into the restaurant, every table was filled with wrapped presents. And in all of those presents was your first course, which was a very elaborate caviar course. But the thing wasn't just that people like unwrapping presence and how cool would it be to begin an experience by tapping into one of the most childlike wonder moments imaginable, but also encouraging people to throw the wrapping paper on the floor to effectively take an environment that could be considered by so many to be so precious, and eliminate that emotion from the beginning of the meal.

And I thought about Ground Round back in the day when I was innovating that because, I mean, Ground Round was a chain of restaurants that was known because you could throw the peanut shells in the ground. That was its thing. And it made people feel like they were in an extension of their home. And I always loved it because I always imagined the first meeting where someone brought up that idea ,how cool of a company culture it must have been that it wasn't shot down right away. Because that's a ridiculous idea that in most organizations would be like, "Stop. That's ridiculous. Let's move on to the next idea."

Debbie Millman:

Exactly.

Will Guidara:

If someone was like, "Hold on, let's unpack that a little bit." And I think it's pretty inspiring because I think so many good ideas have probably never seen the light of day because they were too quickly dismissed.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. I am on the board of a nonprofit and we’re thinking about having a gala, a fundraising gala in 2023, and somebody came up with the idea of wrapping bento boxes, and I know this has been done before, it's not original, but everybody actually really loved the idea rather than wrap them in paper. I think now people are wrapping them in scarves or fabric that then people can take with them as a little gift, a remembrance of the evening.

Will Guidara:

I love that.

Debbie Millman:

And I like that idea too. For your 12th birthday, your dad took you to the Four Seasons for dinner, and at the time, you had no idea that the Four Seasons was the first truly American fine dining restaurant, and you’ve said that it was the fanciest and most beautiful place you’d ever been in your entire life. What made that experience, aside from the fanciness, what made it so special?

Will Guidara:

There's the quote that's often attributed to Maya Angelou, although when I was writing the book, I found out it might not have actually come from her. "People will forget what you say, they’ll forget what you do. They’ll never forget how you made them feel." And I think it's the most true statement about hospitality.

In that quote, you recognize the distinction between the product, how you serve it, and how you make people feel. Right. There are three completely different things. For whatever reason, I had become obsessed with the idea of going to the Four Seasons for dinner, and somehow I convinced my dad to take me there. And I don't remember much about the meal. I remember a few details. I remember that it was the first time that I’d been to a restaurant so fancy that when I dropped my napkins, someone brought me a fresh one and called me sir when they handed it to me. I remember a couple other details them carving a duck tableside. But really all that I remember was that for those few hours that I was there, everything else in the world ceased to exist, and all that was left was my dad and me sitting across from one another at that table.

Remember my dad was my hero growing up, and so time spent with him was always precious to me, but being in a place where the conditions were so intentionally and beautifully created that I felt closer to him at the end of that meal than I did when we walked in. The way I’ve articulated it to my teams since then in trying to explain to them why our work is so important was inspired by that night. And it's that in restaurants, we have this beautiful opportunity or perhaps even responsibility, to create these magical worlds in a world that needs more magic. By the time I left that restaurant that night, it was very, very clear to me that I wanted to one day own my own restaurant, and it's the only thing I’ve ever done since.

Debbie Millman:

You stated that while the question of what you wanted to do, which your dad asked you, I think that you said that you knew by the time you left the restaurant you knew exactly what you wanted to do with your life. And shortly thereafter, your dad asked you what you wanted to do. You’ve said that while the question might have seemed like a crazy thing to ask someone so young, your dad was incredibly intentional with his parenting, as with everything in his life. So I have two questions about this. First, what did intentionality mean to him? And then second, how did that intentionality manifest as you were growing up?

Will Guidara:

Well, so when I was four, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. And although she survived the cancer, the radiation treatment she received to help with the removal of the tumor wasn't very refined. And over the years that followed, deteriorated her physical state to the point where she was a quadriplegic. My dad was working 12, 14 hours a day. He’d have to wake up in the morning, get her out of bed, get her showered, put her in the wheelchair, get her ready, make sure I was awake and ready to go to school. Then he’d go off, do the restaurant day, come back, do it all in reverse. And he still managed to be an unbelievable father to me.

And also, this was back in the day when parental roles were more divided. There was like the mom and there was the dad, and in many ways he was also a great mother to me. And he only was able to do that because of how intentional he was and how he spent every minute of his day. For him, intentionality wasn't a choice, it was a necessity. If he was going to do all of those things well, he needed to understand what he was trying to accomplish out of every hour of his day and make sure that his moves, his words and his thinking, were surgically directed at accomplishing that thing. And that thing didn't necessarily always need to be like checking something off the list. That thing could just be making sure that his son felt loved by him. You think about that. It's not different from the idea of training at high altitude. If I could take the lessons that he needed to learn in order to get through a season that would’ve been crushing to many, and apply them to a life where I didn't have a wife who is a quadriplegic, and think about how much more and how much good I could do.

Debbie Millman:

How did you manage through your mother's illness?

Will Guidara:

For me, it happened so early in my life that that was my normal. It wasn't as if one day we were out having all this fun and doing all this stuff, and then suddenly that was taken away. That was the world that I grew up in. And my dad never let me see him feeling bad for himself. Honestly, nor did my mom. And so it never even occurred to me to feel bad for myself. The contrary, I mean, listen, if I could go back in time and change that, obviously I would. I would’ve loved to have had a healthy mom and for her to still be with us today, she’d passed away right after I graduated from college.

But I mean that experience made me who I am watching the profound way in which he served her inspired me to want to serve others, and also, I was forced by necessity to also serve her. I would feed her dinner most nights when my dad was still at work. And that showed me how good it felt to serve. I think the other thing that I learned from her is she couldn't talk or walk, and yet I’ve never felt more loved by anyone in my life than I did by her. Hospitality, it's not hard. It just requires caring enough to try a little bit harder. And if I could feel that much love from someone who couldn't talk or walk, imagine how much love you can show to someone when you can.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Absolutely. The way that you describe her smiling at you in your book is just stunning, really breathtaking.

You got your first real job at 14 working at the Baskin Robbins in Terrytown, and I understand that you left many ruined cakes in your wake. You’ve stated it's harder to pipe happy birthday onto an ice cream cake than you think. So I only have one question about this, and is it true about what people say about working in an ice cream shop that you eventually end up hating ice cream?

Will Guidara:

Oh yeah. I mean, I’m from just outside of New York and I worked there all year long, which meant that for many months, you’re just sitting in an ice cream shop that was empty. Not that many people are buying ice cream in November. And so yeah, you end up eating a lot of ice cream, which set me up for success in a very profound way going into my marriage.

Debbie Millman:

I was going to say there seems to be a little bit of a common denominated there. In high school, you also worked as a dishwasher and a host at the Ruth's Kris Steak House, and over a summer vacation, as a busboy at Wolfgang Puck's Hollywood restaurant Spago, and there you had a really formative event occur. It not only has stayed with you ever since, but it's also influenced how you manage and treat people who work for you. And I was wondering if you can share what happened in that formative experience.

Will Guidara:

For sure. And I think this story is indicative of how much power people have even when they don't recognize. Especially if you’re in a leadership position. That's something that is perhaps extraordinarily inconsequential moment in your day, can be one that lives with the other person for the balance of their life.

Debbie Millman:

Yes. Yes.

Will Guidara:

And shows you the extent to which you need to wield your power carefully.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. It's a great story for so many reasons.

Will Guidara:

I was a busboy at Spago in Beverly Hills. And I cared so much about that job. And I, mean I wanted to be in the restaurant business. I was a kid. I was working at one of the great restaurants in America. I was working so hard to be great at that job. And then one day I was resetting tables and there was the credenza right outside the kitchen where we stored all of the stuff you need to reset a table. And I opened the cabinet door and whoever had stacked the bread and butter plates in that cabinet last had done so in a way that they were tilting over, leaning on the door. So the moment I opened the door, they all just came falling out and just shattered all over the floor. And I was mortified.

I mean, when someone cares about their job and something like that happens, they’ve already tortured themselves as much as they need to be tortured. But the chef came running out of that kitchen and just screamed at me. In front of all my colleagues, in front of all the guests, and it was those moments where you’re just overwhelmed with shame. And the byproduct of shame that normally quickly follow is anger. From the day that I went to the Four Seasons for dinner, I’d always wanted to be in restaurants, but I’d wanted to be in that restaurant, fine dining. But over the time between those two events, the dinner and the plates, the world had changed around me in the restaurant business. Restaurants had gone from places where you went to see and be seen, to these places where you went to pray at the altar of the chef, and that experience solidified for me the reality that was happening. Which was the people in the kitchen didn't think that the work being done by the people in the dining room mattered as much as their work did. And honestly, it really turned me off from fine dining. And I loved restaurants still, but in that moment I said, "I don't want to be in fine dining anymore."

Debbie Millman:

I was thinking about that. And I’ve been simultaneously watching The Bear, and seeing how in the fine dining establishment that the chef had originally come from, everybody was so cruel to each other. Well, not everybody, the chef was so cruel to the people that worked for him. And then that behavior inspires the person who's being treated poorly when they get into a position of power, treating others poorly. And that's ancestral trauma right there. And I wonder if there's an opportunity for breaking those patterns now in this different way that people can treat each other, certainly. In the environments that you’ve inspired. But I’m wondering if that's the exception more than the case.

Will Guidara:

Well, it's interesting. One of the things my dad always encouraged me to do my entire life was to keep a journal. Specifically as I was coming up through the ranks of the industry. His thing was always that perspective has an expiration date, and every time you get promoted from one position to the next, you can maintain the perspective of the people that you are now managing only for so long before you lose that perspective. And once you lose it, you’ve lost it forever. But if you can maintain the perspective of the experiences that got you to where you are, you can be a much more empathetic leader. I think that as we go through our careers, you learn from the great leaders and the bad leaders. You learn the things you want to copy and the things you want to try never to copy. I think the issue why people end up repeating the mistakes of the people that they worked for in the past, even though they hated when those people did that stuff, is they weren't able to hold onto their perspective.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. It becomes, I think, an assertion of power. And somehow reclaiming that power. But in fact, it does the opposite.

Will Guidara:

As opposed to what a beautiful opportunity it is to learn the thing you don't want to do. And because if, by the way, we could all go through our lives, and every time someone did something that we want to do, we start doing that and every time someone did something that we didn't want to do, we never do that again. I mean, we’d all be superheroes.

Debbie Millman:

Right? Oh, God.

Will Guidara:

So the goal is just to get as close to that as you possibly can, and not… By the way, just it comes down to being as intentional as possible.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. That word again. You attended Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. And in your last semester, you took a course called Guest Chefs, which turned out to be your favorite class. And I believe your professor, Giuseppe Pezzotti taught you how to peel a grape with a fork and a knife. And I was wondering why exactly would anyone need to know how to do that?

Will Guidara:

So okay, the answer is no one needs to know how to do that.

Debbie Millman:

For tarts maybe?

Will Guidara:

But I’ll tell you why he taught us it. I’ve built a career honestly, on bringing a beginner's mindset to the highest echelons of fine dining. And challenging or asking the question of why things are done a certain way, and if the answer is because that's how they’ve always been done, not doing them that way anymore. My career is built on this idea that the food, the service, and the design in a restaurant are simply ingredients in the recipe of human connection. And if anything that you’re doing isn't bringing you closer to that than it's not something worth doing.

But, I’ve always tried to be really mindful as I work to move my little part of the industry forward, that I don't do so without being very respectful of where it's come from. Giuseppe taught us how to do those things because when you look back at old school, classic fine dining, tableside service was a big part of it. And there were all these little things they did to wow people, just to show technical proficiency. And when he showed me how to do that, it not only showed me how the world had been, such that we could figure out how to modernize it together, but it also inspired me that in a restaurant, it's not just the people cooking the food that can show unbelievable technical proficiency, but that the people serving it can as well if they challenge themselves too.

Debbie Millman:

Guest Chefs also provided you with the experience of running a real restaurant. And every semester, a guest chef would come to do a dinner staffed entirely by the students, and one group of students would serve as the chef's management team. Another group would work as the kitchen staff, and while the third group ran the dining room and you were the marketing director. And the chef that was brought to Cornell that year was rather legendary. Who came that year to guest chef with you?

Will Guidara:

That was Daniel Boulud, one of the great chefs in the world. And, yeah, if you’re the marketing director and one of the greatest chefs in the world is coming to do a dinner, it does not require that much marketing.

Debbie Millman:

I was going to say, what did you have to actually do?

Will Guidara:

I mean, I always try to, in moments like that, to use the fact that it's going to be successful no matter what as an opportunity not to be complacent, but rather to just try to do something new. I had now spent enough time in restaurants and across America working in internships to have learned about the chef's table, the table that sits in the kitchen, and we had an ugly, ugly commercial kitchen at the hotel school. But I got a red velvet rope and built a table in there and auctioned it off online, and raised thousands of dollars and donated the money to Taste of the Nation, which was happening locally at the time, the Share Strength fundraising event. And I always say adversity can invite creativity, but I think so can success if you don't allow it to make you complacent.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I understand that you had a rather rocking evening. And after a night of debauchery, Daniel Boulud joined you and your fellow classmates in your kitchen, in your home, where he proceeded to drink Milwaukee's best from a red solo cup, while whipping up scrambled eggs with truffles. And of course, I have to ask, were they the best eggs you’ve ever had?

Will Guidara:

Well, in the spirit of the night we were having, I don't quite remember, but I have to imagine that they were.

Debbie Millman:

Now you hint that one of the most celebrated chefs in the world did a keg stand on your pool table. And just want to confirm or have you deny that as a fact?

Will Guidara:

You know what? On this podcast, I can confirm that that happened.

Debbie Millman:

Okay then, we’ve got a scoop. Talk a little bit about what it was like for you to have an interaction with someone like that. Did you feel that it was something that was destiny? Did you feel that it was something that would influence how you were going to move through your own career?

Will Guidara:

I don't know. I will say to the point of how the smallest action by someone in a leadership role can have impacts beyond which they could ever possibly understand. If the one at before had the negative impact, this one had the positive impact. How generous Daniel Boulud was to just this random college kid, and how much he invested in me while we were together made me want to talk about, you learn the things you want to do and the things you don't want to do. That inspired me to always want to make sure that I was acting that way. If I ever happen to achieve as much success, that I would always pay it forward to the people that I met along the way.

Debbie Millman:

You had another interaction with him that was very moving after your mom passed away. Can you share what happened when you saw him again?

Will Guidara:

Yeah, so at the end of that class he said, "Hey, when you’re in New York, come and see me at Restaurant Daniel, which was his, still is his flagship. My mom passed away the day after I graduated college .and I went to Spain not too long thereafter to do this externship. And my dad drove me to New York because that's where I was flying from. And it was one of the saddest seasons of our lives for obvious reasons. And in an effort to try to find something to cheer us up, I reached out to Daniel and said, "Hey, I’m actually going to be in New York with my dad on this day. Is there any way I can come to the restaurant?" And he responded right away, said, "Yes, you invited me into your home. I’d love to have you in mine." My dad and I went.

We walked in the front door, they greeted us, they walked us through the bar, through the dining room, I was wondering where our table was, into the kitchen up, the set of stairs into this little private dining room called the Sky Box, which has a big window that overlooks the entire kitchen, this kitchen that was one of the greatest in the world. They proceed to serve us 16 or so courses with Daniel, personally, through an intercom introducing, every course to us. And at the end of the meal, there was no check. In one of the hardest seasons of my life, Daniel gave us four of the best hours of our lives.

When I talk about that idea of creating magical worlds in a world that needs more magic, it's because you can help people celebrate some of the best moments of their lives, or it's because you can inspire people to be better versions of themselves through your attention to detail, or it's because we can make the world a nicer place by being really nice to everyone walks through the doors. But that night it also showed me that through hospitality, you can create these magical worlds simply by virtue of giving people the grace, if only for a few hours, to forget about their most difficult moments.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that that night you learned how noble working in service can be. It's one of my favorite lines in the book. A nobility in service.

Will Guidara:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

By the time you graduated from Cornell, there was no question in your mind. You very firmly declare in your book that you wanted to work for Danny Meyer, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, which owned Eleven Madisons Park, still owns Gramercy Tavern, Marta, Blue Smoke, the Modern Union Square Cafe, and so many more. Why Danny Meyer specifically?

Will Guidara:

He was the only person in America that was bringing the same amount of creativity and intention to what was happening in the dining room as all the other great restaurants in America were to what was happening in the kitchen. It's hard to become great at something if you don't have a hero to look up to. And there were plenty of celebrity chefs out there. There was no celebrity restaurateur except for Danny. He was the guy. And so when someone is the guy, well, that's the person you’ll work for.

Debbie Millman:

While you tried to get a job there, I believe you worked as a management intern and then waited tables at Tribeca Grill. How did you eventually get an interview with Union Square Hospitality Group?

Will Guidara:

Well, one of Danny's partners actually came to teach one of our classes at Cornell. And me being a young motivated kid at the time, made sure I got his business card before he left, and so I had a connection right to the top.

Debbie Millman:

Your interview eventually took place at Eleven Madison Park, though you ended up getting a manager position at Tabla another of Union Square Hospitality groups restaurants, and God, that was an incredible restaurant.

Will Guidara:

By the way, the graphic design at Tabla. I think their logo was, I loved that logo. I loved that restaurant Floyd Cardoz, the chef who's who passed away during COVID became like family to me over the years, and I believed to this day that his cooking was some of the best ever.

Debbie Millman:

His raita was the best I’ve ever had, and it ruined me for all raita since. There was nothing like it. You’ve said that Danny Meyer's management style made it cool to care. In what way did it become cool?

Will Guidara:

One of the things I say in the book is cult is short for culture. That so many people when they call one company a cult, okay, some people are just straight up cultish and that's not okay. But when they call a company a cult, it's just because that company has a culture and their company doesn't have one, and so it feels like it must be a cult, right?

What Danny did expertly well was come up with shared language to articulate the ideals that we all wanted to aspire to embody. He came up with these isms, things that we could all rally around, things that made it easier to suggest and celebrate and reinforce or affirm. And in doing so, he created an environment where when you were in it, you just wanted to thrive, not in some cutthroat big bank way, but thrive in an effort to care for other people. I’ve always believed that the successful evolution of a culture only fully starts to happen when the people on the team, when they’re hanging out during lunch break or we call it family meal, people start talking about an amazing service experience they’ve received or delivered, or a meal they’ve had, or something like that, as opposed to how drunk they got at the bar the night before. Where people stop pretending to care less in order to be cool, but rather the environment celebrates the people that care more.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. When Danny Meyer announced that he was opening a restaurant and jazz club in the Flatiron called Blue Smoke, he asked you to be the assistant general manager. And while you were thrilled, when you shared the news with your dad, while he did indeed recognize you were getting an incredible education in restaurant smarts, he also wanted you to learn how to be corporate smart. Did that surprise you? He really wasn't as excited about that opportunity as you were.

Will Guidara:

Not only was he not excited, he made me quit. Now, my dad, you talk about intention. One of the in many ways that I’ve benefited from his intention was that he was surgical in helping me solidify the foundation of my career.

He insisted I work in every position all the way up. And then also insisted that I not just work within one company as I tried to learn all the lessons required to one day start my own, he wanted me to learn from different companies that approach things in different ways. And he talked about the fact that there were two types of companies, and by the way, the word I use is restaurant, but I believe this idea applies to any company that has a corporate office and unit level stores.

That they’re corporate smart companies, where the highest paid people work in the corporate office. Those are the companies that have more systems, more controls, they’re normally more profitable businesses because of that. And there are, the restaurant smart company is where the highest paid people work at the unit level. There's less systems, less controls, but there's more autonomy on the front line, and the experience at those places is normally better because of that autonomy and the sense of ownership and empowerment that the people who work there feel. He wanted me to work at a restaurant smart company and a corporate smart company, in hopes that one day I could take the best from each in starting my own.

Debbie Millman:

You turned Danny Meyer down. Was that hard?

Will Guidara:

Yeah. I mean, it was hard mostly because I didn't want to turn him down, but I trust my dad enough to know that that was in a season where I respected, loved, and trusted my dad enough to know that if he was giving me advice after decades of doing the thing that I was trying to do, that it was advice I should listen to. And even if I didn't appreciate the short-term impacts of that advice, that one day, I’d appreciate the long-term impacts of it.

Debbie Millman:

You ended up getting a job with Restaurant Associates. And I believe you had two jobs from 6:00 AM to noon, you learned how to inventory a walk-in refrigerator, how to calculate cost of goods sold, how to order food and supplies. And then after lunch, you would take off your whites, put on a blazer and a tie, and then start in with the numbers in the accounting department upstairs. And you’ve stated that it was impossible to overestimate how important it was that you were doing both jobs simultaneously. Why? How was that helpful to you?

Will Guidara:

Anyone trying to grow in any business should make sure that they spend a meaningful enough amount of time learning about the business side of the business. There's a lot of people in my industry specifically who talk about how spending time with the numbers is a distraction from their ability to be creative in the experience they’re trying to offer. Which is something I fundamentally disagree with. I think anyone who is really paying attention recognizes that the more resources you have to invest in being creative, the more creative you can be, right? If you have a more successful business, and you have more money to invest in building the best experience you can, more likely than not, the experience is going to be better than someone that doesn't, right? But you need to manage the business effectively in order to earn the right to invest in the experience you’re trying to create.

Doing both of those jobs simultaneously, the accounting and the purchasing, what was great about it was, okay, in the accounting office, I was learning the business side. And the lessons I learned then would pay off in extraordinary ways later in my career. But doing that alongside the purchasing made the things on those spreadsheets, not just a hypothetical, but something that I was seeing and touching and learning about and understanding on a daily basis. It was a unique experience, not one that everyone gets to have, but one that I would strongly recommend to those who can find it.

Debbie Millman:

When you left Tabla to go to Restaurant Associates, you thought you wanted to be Danny Meyer when you grew up, but that changed after you began working at Restaurant Associates. Was there a moment in time where you thought you wanted to be a chef and then changed your mind in terms of being a general manager? Or was being a chef something that you weren't as interested in from the beginning?

Will Guidara:

Yeah. I never wanted to be a chef. I’m an extrovert. I like to be in the room. I like to be the person that throws the party. I have an amazing amount of respect and love for the chefs in my life, and I have plenty of them. Not least important, my wife is a chef, but it's always been the dining room for me. I mean, listen, I just believe that the memories created around the table are some of the most profound ones that we all have in our lives, and being the person helping to create those for other people is always the thing that's gotten me out of bed in the morning.

Debbie Millman:

In 2004, you quite serendipitously ran into Danny Meyer in Union Square and found out that he was opening a high profile fine dining restaurant at the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art called The Modern, which would look out onto MoMA's legendary Sculpture Garden. Then the chef was Gabriel Kreuther, who was voted one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in 2003. And Danny ultimately offered you the exact job that you had really been fantasizing about, general manager for the casual food service operations in the museum. And this would give you the chance to find out if you could bring corporate smart to the most restaurant smart company in the world. How did you end up doing?

Will Guidara:

I mean, I did well. I loved MoMA. And yeah, I mean, it was an opportunity. The casual operations, the cafes, the cafeterias. It was more of a business than his other restaurants were. His other restaurants where these artistic enterprises, in addition to being businesses. This was a business that wanted to be also excellent. And I figured that was the perfect opportunity to test whether it was possible to be corporate smart and restaurant smart.

And one of the through lines of the book is this thing that I’ve always struggled with, but always pursued, which is why I’ve over time, become more successful at it. And it's the balance between, you can say it a bunch of different ways, control and creativity, corporate smart and restaurants smart, rules and trust, all that stuff. And there was where I started to really navigate through that for the first time. How do you create an environment where the chef feels empowered and creative and proud, but the food cost doesn't mind? How do you create an environment where the team gets to bring so much of themselves to the experience, but there's still communicating the things we need them to communicate? And every time we figured it out, in a bunch of different fun ways.

Debbie Millman:

Well, tell us about the spoons you ordered for the gelato cart at MoMA.

Will Guidara:

So the gelato cart was something I created there, which was me just so inspired by the Sculpture Garden that I wanted to create a little piece to add to it, and I wanted it to be very simple and very pure and very elemental. And so we just did gelato and we got this company called il laboratorio del gelato, some of the best gelato in America, and we partnered with him. And he provided this beautiful cart and we arranged to get the gelato at a steep discounts that he could be the official gelato of MoMA and all of this, and was approaching it with a ton of discipline to make sure it was a very profitable operation. But then, he showed me the spoon, the plastic spoon that he wanted to serve, to give people to eat the gelato, and it was perfect. The design was just perfect. And it was absurdly expensive for a disposable thing that you were just giving away.

But sometimes, you just realize that an experience demands this one detail. And I used it. I remember my boss when she first saw that spoon, she looked at me, she's like, "How much did this cost?" And I was like, "I’ll tell you later." And she's like, "All right." But that whole experience taught me something, a lesson that would ultimately help me manage all of my companies from that point forward. I call it the rule of 95-5.

Which is, that if you manage your money like a maniac 95% of the time, and when I say a maniac, I mean no, penny goes unaccounted for. Every little detail matters. Understanding that raindrops create oceans, and every one of those little decisions can have a profound impact in your profitability. Then 5% of the time you get to spend it "foolishly." And I say "foolishly," because that's 5% is actually not foolish at all. It's with great intention. And even if the ROI, the return on investment of that 5% is hard to measure, it doesn't mean that its impact isn't significant. I believe that that little spoon, as small a detail as it, was and as much as it may have cost, the operation was enough to say, this is a different experience than the ones you’ve had. And it's one worthy of respect and celebration. And that 5% and how I spent it came to be responsible for most of my success later in my career. But it started there.

Debbie Millman:

And you’ve used that 95-5 rule wherever you’ve worked. This was one of my favorite stories from the book, and one that I really appreciate because I love those small details. One of the things that really, really annoys me and my wife will laugh out loud when she hears me talking about this when she listens to the podcast is, when you go into a Pinkberry or any of the places that soft serve and don't necessarily think about all those things, how sometimes you get a plastic spoon that is rough on your mouth.

Will Guidara:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

And how that changes everything.

Will Guidara:

And that's the definition honestly, of a company or a leader of a company that's not taking enough time to experience their own product. Or when they’re tasting, they’re soft serve, they’re doing so in the office with a normal spoon, as opposed to experiencing it in the way that the people they’re serving are experiencing it. Because those things, when you experience it's so obvious to you. I think about that sometimes when I fly. When you fly coach, it's clear that the executives of the airline never fly coach.

Debbie Millman:

Correct. They probably don't fly business either.

Will Guidara:

There was this book by Alan Mulally, an American icon, or about Alan Mulally, who is the former CEO of Ford, and when he got to Ford, Ford owned Range Rover and Jaguar. And all of the executives were driving Range Rovers and Jaguars, as opposed to driving a Ford, which was the heart of the company. And he made them all stop and start driving Fords because he's like, "How can we sell people a car that we were not willing to drive ourselves?"

Debbie Millman:

Your experience at MoMA showed you that it was possible to be corporate smart and restaurant smart at the same time. And your team was empowered, the guests were happy, you were running a lean, mean, profitable business. And then Danny asked to meet with you again. What did he want this time?

Will Guidara:

This time he wanted me to be the general manager at Eleven Madison Park.

Debbie Millman:

And once again, you weren't sure.

Will Guidara:

Well, I wanted nothing to do with fine dining, and now he was asking me to be at the most fine dining restaurant in the company.

Debbie Millman:

And for our listeners unfamiliar with Eleven Madison Park. The restaurant opened in 1998 to a two-star review from the New York Times, and after receiving another middling two-star review in 2006, Danny Meyers set out to reconcile what had long bothered him about the restaurant. And asked Richard Kerene to travel around the country to find a chef who would make food elevated enough to match the rooms outrageously grand and over the top drama. And Robert found Daniel Humm. He was only 29 at the time, but had started cooking professionally in some of the finest Swiss hotels and restaurants at 14 years old, and earned his first Michelin star at the age of 24. But you felt that no matter how amazing any chef was, you didn't want to work for one, and you insisted that it’d be an equal partnership, that your work in the dining room be as respected as the work in the kitchen. What did Danny think of that at the time?

Will Guidara:

Well, Danny was all for that. It was a matter of whether the chef was as receptive to the idea that this was not going to run the same way fine dining restaurants ordinarily ran. Well, he was receptive to that. And I think that partnership is what ultimately led to the success of the restaurant. I mean, this exists in so many industries, whether producer, director, editor, publisher, or kitchen and dining room, where there's inherent tension between the people serving and those creating. The moment you establish it as a true even partnership and embrace all the tension that arrives, such that there's no trump card that can be played, no one has authority over the other, you need to actually navigate through the most challenging decisions knowing that if you can't agree, nothing happens. I think it opens up a world of possibilities that so many people haven't had the luxury of experiencing.

Debbie Millman:

Before you took the job, you once again consulted with your father who gave you this advice, "Run toward what you want, as opposed to away from what you don't want."

Will Guidara:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I love that. First of all, I think your father should write a book, or you should write a book called Advice My Father Gave Me.

Will Guidara:

I put a lot of it in this book.

Debbie Millman:

It's so good.

Will Guidara:

But he continues to put out good stuff. The other advice he gave me in that moment was he said, "Hey, do you want to work for that company?" And I said, "Yes." He goes, "What do you want to do with them? I said, I want to run Shake Shack one day." And he goes, well, "Hey, if you want them to be there for you and you need them, you better make sure you’re there for them when they need you."

Debbie Millman:

Good

Will Guidara:

Advice. It was always important to him that I understood, especially as someone from a younger generation, that it wasn't the company's responsibility to take care of me. It was our responsibility to take care of one another. And that I always approached every relationship in that virtuous way. I think you see a lot of people these days that just wait for the company to take care of them, not realizing that relationships are always two-way streets.

Debbie Millman:

You were serious about wanting to go work at Shake Shack after that first year. But with the success that you almost instantly had together, you decided not to go to Shake Shack and stayed at Eleven Madison Park. And in the 13 years under your joint leadership, Eleven Madison Park received four stars from the New York Times, three Michelin stars, and went from one to three in an unheard of jump. In 2017, landed at the top of the list of the world's 50 best restaurants. It won seven James Beard Awards, including outstanding service and outstanding restaurants in America, which was also really unheard of.

I’d like to talk a little bit about a few of the ways in which you were able to achieve this. From what I understand, first, you looked at organizations known for extraordinary company cultures at the time, companies like Nordstrom and Apple and JetBlue, and they all held what I’m very familiar with in the corporate branding world, strategic planning sessions or long form meetings where groups from across the organization get together to brainstorm ways for the company to grow. And you’ve written how this was a revelation to you as the practice was virtually unheard of in the restaurant world. What gave you the sense that this was something that you should do in the first place?

Will Guidara:

I mean, there was this review written about us in early days where the critics said she wished we had a bit more Miles Davis.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, a bit more cool.

Will Guidara:

And it started this entire thing where I was craving language to define what we were trying to be. I really believe that language matters so much, and having clearly articulated ideas that the team can rally around is essential to a company's success. And when she said that, I started reading everything I could about Miles to come up with the words that were most commonly used to describe the approach he took to the music. And those words ended up being like our mission statement, for lack of a better term.

Debbie Millman:

And those words were painted on the wall of the kitchen.

Will Guidara:

Yeah, exactly.

Debbie Millman:

I think Roger Martin helped you as well with his theory of integrated thinking, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you learned in that process.

Will Guidara:

Well, so Roger, I’ve only gotten to know more recently, and I love meeting people like Roger because you hear how other people articulate in a more studied way, the things that have come intuitively to you. Roger Martin, in his concept of integrated thinking, he talks about choosing conflicting goals, how rather than approaching things in an either or perspective, approaching them in a both perspective sometimes leads to the greatest innovations, because it requires you to be much more radically creative to figure out how to accomplish two seemingly opposite goals simultaneously.

But just going back, the Miles Davis thing showed me the power of learning from other people outside of our industry. I think anytime you’re trying to elevate something within an industry, making sure that you’re learning from people from different disciplines ensures that you’re bringing a fresh point of view to your discipline.

And so I just started studying these other companies and the idea of strategic planning was so amazing to me because when I looked around our team, we had 150 amazingly smart people, and yet it was just me and Daniel at the top making all the decisions. And imagine a world where we could harness the collective creativity of the many. It would always yield better results than relying on just that of one or two. And those strategic planning meetings, which over the years became a day every year where we’d come together and create our to-do list for the year that followed. We dream, crazy, big, small, and everything in between ideas, and many of the ideas that came from the most unlikely people ended up being the ones that made us who we ended up becoming.

Debbie Millman:

In 2010, you and Daniel were approached by Andrew Zobler, one of the partners in the hotel group that developed the Ace Hotel on 29th and Broadway in Manhattan. And you asked Danny Meyer if you could both run Eleven Madison Park and own this new restaurant, but he didn't think he could be partners with you at one restaurant and competitors with you at another just a few blocks away. Ultimately, Danny sold Eleven Madison Park to you both. Why did he let the restaurant go?

Will Guidara:

I think Danny understands that restaurants are living, breathing things, and at the end of the day, if you want to build something that stands the tests of time, we all need to recognize that in our highest and best form, we’re simply caretakers of it, for any measure of time. He put us in, we were a good team, we were making huge strides, but he also recognized that both of us wanted to be entrepreneurs. And the best way to keep Eleven Madison Park on its ascent was to pass the baton, which shows the unbelievable humility and selflessness and character and why he's just one of the best people that has ever existed.

Debbie Millman:

You and Daniel raised the money. You bought Eleven Madison Park from Union Square Hospitality Group, and you took all of your learning and brought it to your new venture at Nomad. How hard was it to create an entirely new and original restaurant from nothing? Eleven Madison Park had already existed when you came in to reposition and remake it, but Nomad was from scratch.

Will Guidara:

I mean, I’m not sure I’d use the word hard. It was electrifyingly fun and exciting and well, exhausting and challenging. I mean, this is the coolest thing about restaurants, is that we get to dream up these fantastical worlds in our heads. And then one day, we get to invite people to walk into them. Nomad, I describe as like an urban playground. This labyrinth of awesome. And creating that restaurant was one of the greatest experiences of my life. So was it easy? No. But it's hard for me to say it was hard because of how fulfilling it was.

Debbie Millman:

You described the hospitality that you’ve created as unreasonable hospitality. What is unreasonable hospitality?

Will Guidara:

When I look across disciplines at the people that are the most successful in them, whether it's directors, designers, tech entrepreneurs, you name it. They’re all unreasonable in pursuit of the product they’re creating. For me, unreasonable hospitality is making the choice to be just as relentless, just as willing to do whatever it takes, but not in pursuit of the product, not even pursuit of how you serve it, but in pursuit of how you make people feel when you do. To take the same amount of time, energy, intention, creativity, as so many do in my world, as chefs do in the presentation, the plating, the technique, the ingredients, but to do it in pursuit of all the little details that give people that sense of belonging, that make people feel seen, that make people feel profoundly welcome. It goes back to that Maya Angelou quote. If all that people are going to remember is how you made them feel, then if you’re going to be unreasonable in pursuit of anything, it should be in pursuit of that.

Debbie Millman:

One of the common denominators in both Eleven Madison Park and Nomad was your desire to take care of people, and create that feeling that they would never forget. And you’ve said that chefs all over the world are celebrated for being unreasonable in pursuit of creating the food that they serve. You chose to be unreasonable in pursuit of your hospitality, how it made people feel, and the depth of the gestures that you would give to the people in your dining room. And that was really palpable as somebody that has been to Eleven Madison Park twice and Nomad many, many times, I felt that all the time. And you and Daniel did that for a long time together. Yet in 2019, you decided to move on. You sold your shares of the company to Daniel Humm. What made you decide to do that?

Will Guidara:

We fell out of love. We spent a lot of time deciding how to split up the company, but in each of us respectively, trying to hold onto our piece, it felt to me like we were tearing it apart.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Will Guidara:

My dad at that point in my career, gave me the advice. He said, "Hey, you’re about to walk into one of the most challenging years of your life. At every cross section, ask yourself what right looks like and do that." He went on to say, "That's not always going to be the easiest advice to follow, because sometimes it’ll feel like the not best thing for you in the short term, but it’ll always be the best thing for you in the long term because integrity is the one thing you can never get back."

Debbie Millman:

You’re now at the helm of a brand new company called Thank You. Why that name and what have you set out to do in your new company?

Will Guidara:

There are a lot of restaurants, a lot of businesses generally, that once upon a time forgot they were in the business of serving people and instead, started serving their own egos. The company that I want to be remembered for is not one, regardless of accolades and success, that when people walk into our doors, we feel like they should be lucky to be there. But conversely, that we feel such immense gratitude that they’re there. I have always wanted to be in a gratitude first organization, both to the people we serve, and all that we work with. And if you want someone to act a certain way, put it in the title. And if you want a company to act a certain way, put it in the name.

Debbie Millman:

I know you’re also the star of a new television show called The Big Brunch, which was created in is hosted by the great Emmy-winning TV star, Dan Levy. Tell us about the show and what it's like being on air.

Will Guidara:

I mean, it was super fun to do. It was the first time in a very, very long time that I’ve been an employee. Where I could just show up and not have to worry about all the drama. That was fun. I like doing things where I get to learn something new alongside creative and interesting people. The thesis of it was to be the TV show that demonstrated that, okay, television needs to be dramatic, but you can have drama without being dramatic, or ill spirited, or tearing people down. That it's just as engaging to lift people up. And that was the spirit of the show, and the product that came through is one I’m really proud of.

Debbie Millman:

It's really, really fun. My favorite line in your memoir, I’ve already been sharing with all my students, my undergrads, my grads, they’ve already memorizing it and it is this, "The way you do one thing, is the way you do everything." You put into words what I have been trying to imbue in my students for decades, that every single thing you do counts. And the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Talk about how and why you came up with that line.

Will Guidara:

Too many people decide to turn off and on caring. They only choose to care at certain times, and then they turn it off and, "All right, I don't need to care anymore for a while." And I just don't think that's possible. I think that if you care, and honestly this can be directed at anything. If you care about people or details or excellence or hospitality, whatever it is, you can't just care some of the time, because you can never turn it fully on after it's been turned off. And I think that every detail matters in just how you want to show up in the world. And so I do think the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. That doesn't mean that you’re not going to do certain things better than other things, but it's what you bring to the table, how much of yourself you bring to the table.

Debbie Millman:

It's the intention.

Will Guidara:

Yeah, it's the intention.

Debbie Millman:

The intention you bring to one thing is the intention you can bring to everything. Your wife, who we’ve already mentioned, the great Christina Tosi is the founder of Milk Bar. Any chance we might see a collaboration between the two of you? Aside from Frankie?

Will Guidara:

I was about to say, the best collaboration in the world is about 20 months old. Her name is Frankie. And I mean, if that's any indication of what we can build together, we’d probably do something cool. But I think for now, we’ll stick to just creating people.

Debbie Millman:

Will Guidara, thank you for making so much work and so many experiences that matter. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Will Guidara:

I loved this conversation.

Debbie Millman:

Me too.

Will Guidara:

And I appreciate you so much.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. Will Guidara's magnificent memoir is titled Unreasonable Hospitality: the Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than What They Expect. You can read more about Will, and see more about what he's up to at his new company website, thankyou.nyc. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Named "one of the most influential designers working today" by Graphic Design USA, and "one of the most creative people working in business" by Fast Company, Debbie Millman is also an author, educator, brand strategist and host of the podcast Design Matters.

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