IT ALWAYS FEELS WONDERFUL to earn a rave from guests, and not just for the way we’ve nourished them. Over the years, the most consistent compliment we’ve received and the one I am always proudest to hear, is “I love your restaurants and the food is fantastic. But what I really love is how great your people are.”
The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. In many industries, and undeniably in ours, the competition to hire the most talented people is stiff. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The human beings who animate our restaurants have far more impact on whether we succeed than any of the food ingredients we use, the décor of our dining rooms, the bottles of wine in our cellars, or even the location of the restaurants. Because hospitality is a dialogue, I have always placed the highest premium on hiring the best possible staff to engage our guests.
Fortunately, a wave of highly intelligent and creative people has swept into the hospitality business since the
early 1990s. Many of them have been attracted to our restaurants for a variety of reasons: to express a spirit of caring for others, to advance their culinary skills, to pursue a passion for wine, or to fulfill an entrepreneurial vision.
Others join us for the purpose of making a living with a flexible schedule while they in fact pursue a separate career.
One reason for this surge in interest in the hospitality profession is that newspapers, television, magazines, websites, and cookbooks have made celebrities not just of chefs but also of restaurants themselves. After Eleven Madison Park was featured as a location in an episode of S*x and the City, hordes of people (even a bus tour) descended on the restaurant just to experience a stage set for the hit television show. Having a resumé that includes working for a celebrity restaurant or chef confers legitimacy within the industry and usually ensures at least an initial interview for a job applicant. (It also assuages the parents of a recent college graduate who’s getting a first job at a restaurant to know that it’s a good one.) The restaurant business has at last arrived as a legitimate, valid career choice and entrepreneurial pursuit. I believe that enlightened hospitality as a way of doing business has helped make it attractive for people to pursue careers not just in our kitchen, but also in our dining room.
In 2004, as we prepared to open one restaurant, two cafés, and a staff cafeteria at the Museum of Modern Art, and enter the off-premise catering business as well, we knew that the size of our organization was about to double to over 1,000 staff members, and it was critical to develop an even larger team of extraordinary leaders. We searched high and low for the rare employees who love teaching, know how to set priorities, work with a sense of urgency, and—most important—are comfortable with holding people
accountable to high standards while letting them hold onto their own dignity. Time after time, I had noticed that great leaders tend to have a heightened sense of how to attract and hire other extraordinary people. So that we can achieve our business goals of extending warm hospitality while performing at a high level of excellence, we look intently for strong emotional and technical skills when hiring staff people. Theoretically, if the ideal candidate were to score 100 on a suitability test (something we have never administered), his or her potential for technical excellence would count for 49 percent, and innate emotional skills for hospitality would count for 51 percent.
I first learned this concept of “51 percent” from the dynamic restaurateur Rich Melman of Chicago, when I visited him in the late 1980s. Rich was an effervescent teacher and a willing mentor, and I was eager and honored to learn from him. The concept made perfect sense to me, and now it is a cornerstone of my business. Our staff performance reviews weigh both technical job performance (49 percent) and emotional job performance (51 percent)— how staff members perform their duties and how they relate to others on a personal level. In some respects this is another intentional business strategy based on instincts I developed while I was growing up. Among my friends were plenty of good athletes and talented students. But far more important to me than a friend’s skills was always his or her goodness as a person.
Imagine if every business were a lightbulb and that for each lightbulb the primary goal was to attract the most moths possible. Now what if you learned that 49 percent of the reason moths were attracted to a bulb was for the quality of its light (brightness being the task of the bulb) and that 51 percent of the attraction
was to the warmth projected by the bulb (heat being connected with the feeling of the bulb). It’s remarkable to me how many businesses shine brightly when it comes to acing the tasks but emanate all the warmth of a cool fluorescent light. That explains how a flawless four-star restaurant can actually attract far fewer loyal fans than a two-or three-star place with soul. In business, I want to be overcome with moths.
Our staff must be like a scintillating string of one- hundred-watt lightbulbs, whose product is the sum of 51 percent feeling and 49 percent task.
It is my firm conviction that an executive or business owner should pack a team with 51 percenters, because training them in the technical aspects will then come far more easily. Hiring 51 percenters today will save training time and dollars tomorrow. And they are commonly the best recruiters for others with strong emotional skills. Nice people love the idea of working with other nice people.
Over time, we can almost always train for technical prowess. We can teach people how to deliver bread or olives, take orders for drinks or present menus; how to describe specials and make recommendations from the wine list; or how to explain the cheese selection. And it’s straightforward to teach table numbers and seat positions to avoid asking “Who gets the chicken?” (That question sounds amateurish and makes a guest feel as if the waiter didn’t pay attention to him or her in the first place.) A cook needs to know from his chef precisely what the sautéed sea bass is supposed to look like when it’s sautéed properly, how it tastes when it is seasoned perfectly, and what its texture should be when it has been cooked gently and properly. We can and do train for all that. Training for emotional skills is next to impossible.
We aim to hire people who possess an emotional skill that chef Michael Romano calls the excellence reflex.
People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn’t right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring, and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can’t train for. Either it’s there or it isn’t. So we need to train how to hire for it.
We don’t believe in pursuing the so-called 110 percent employee. That’s about as realistic as working to achieve the twenty-six-hour day. We are hoping to develop 100 percent employees whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence. As I’ve mentioned above, we refer to these employees as 51 percenters.
To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I’ve learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we’re to be champions at the team sport of hospitality. They are:
- Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full)
- Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
- Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be
done)
- Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
- Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)
I want the kind of people on my team who naturally radiate warmth, friendliness, happiness, and kindness. It feels genuinely good to be around them. There’s an upbeat feeling, a twinkle in the eye, a dazzling sparkle from within. I want to employ people I’d otherwise choose to spend time with outside work. Many people spend a large percentage of their waking hours at work. From a selfish standpoint alone, if that’s your choice, it pays to surround yourself with compelling human beings from whom you can learn, and with whom you can be challenged to grow.
When we look for intelligence, we’re thinking about open- minded people with a keen curiosity to learn. Do they ask me questions during interviews? Do they display a broad knowledge about a lot of subjects, or a deep knowledge about any one subject? A hallmark of our business model is to continually be improving. I need to stock our team with people who naturally crave learning and who want to evolve
—people who figure out how each new day can bring rich opportunities to do something even better. Striving for excellence, as we do every day, requires curious people who also take an active interest in what their teammates do. I appreciate it when waiters want to learn more about cooking. I love it when cooks want to learn about wine. I adore it when hosts and reservationists want to learn more
about the person behind the name they are greeting on the phone or at the front door.
A strong work ethic is an indispensable emotional skill for any employee who is going to contribute to the excellence of our business. We want people on our team who are highly motivated, confident, and wired to do the job well. It’s not hard to teach anyone the proper way to set a beautiful table. What is impossible to teach is how to care deeply about setting the table beautifully. When I walk into any one of our restaurants as its dining room is being set up for ser vice, one of the most lovely sights to me is a waiter lifting a wineglass off the table, holding it up to the light, and checking for smudges. This is not because I’m an unreformed smudge freak, but because someone is showing care for a small detail—smaller even than what the average guest may notice. When an employee does not work out, the problem more often stems from an attitude of “I won’t” rather than “I can’t.”
A high degree of empathy is crucial in delivering enlightened hospitality. Empathy is not just an awareness of what others are experiencing; it’s being aware of, being sensitive to, and caring about how one’s own behavior affects others. We want waiters, for example, who can approach a new table of guests and intuitively sense their needs and agenda. Have they come, for example, to celebrate or to conduct business? Are they here to experience the cuisine, or simply to connect with a colleague over a light meal? Do they want extra attention from the restaurant, or would they prefer to be left alone?
Guests may think they’re dining out to feel nourished, but I’ve always believed that an even more primary need of diners is to be nurtured. The most direct and effective way to let our guests know that we’re on their side has always
been to field a team that exudes an infectious kind of empathy. No business can truly offer hospitality if the preponderance of its team members lack empathy. But when each member of the team goes to bat for the others, the mutual trust and respect engendered among them creates an infectious environment of caring for our guests.
Self-awareness and integrity go hand in hand. It takes integrity to be self-aware and to hold oneself accountable for doing the right thing. I want to work with people who have a handle on what makes themselves tick. Self- awareness is understanding your moods (and how they affect you and others). In a sense, it is a personal weather report. Is the mood dry or humid? Is it raining or stormy? Is it warm and sunny or chilly and cloudy? The staff members’ individual and collective moods influence the customers’ moods; and in the intricate, fast-paced dance between the kitchen, dining room, and guests during a meal—when hundreds of people are served—it’s crucial for my staff members to be aware of and accountable for their own personal “weather reports.”
No one can possibly be upbeat and happy all the time.
But personal mastery demands that team members be aware of their moods and keep them in check. If a staff member is having personal trouble, and wakes up angry, nervous, depressed, or anxious, he or she needs to recognize and deal with the mood. It does not serve anyone’s purposes to project that mind-set into the work environment or onto one’s colleagues. We call that “skunking.” A skunk may spray a predator when it feels threatened, but everyone else within two miles has to smell the spray, and these others may assume that the skunk actually had it in for them. It’s not productive to work with a skunk, and it’s not enjoyable to be served by one either. In a
business that depends on the harmony of an ensemble, a skunk’s scent is toxic.
It may seem implicit in the philosophy of enlightened hospitality that the employee is constantly setting aside personal needs and selflessly taking care of others. But the real secret of its success is to hire people to whom caring for others is, in fact, a selfish act. I call these people hospitalitarians. A special type of personality thrives on providing hospitality, and it’s crucial to our success that we attract people who possess it. Their source of energy is rarely depleted. In fact, the more opportunities hospitalitarians have to care for other people, the better they feel.
No matter how focused or purposeful we are when we hire, we’ve still made plenty of mistakes. Most of those mistakes have occurred when we’ve misread an employee’s emotional makeup. Technical strengths and deficiencies are relatively easy to spot. I can watch any cook sautéing a piece of fish for sixty seconds and gauge whether or not he has what it takes. I can watch a server and determine immediately if he or she has the ability to take orders gracefully. Emotional skills are harder to assess, and it’s usually necessary to spend meaningful time with people— often in the work environment—to determine whether or not they’re a good fit. But it’s critical to begin by being explicit about which emotional skills you’re seeking. Doing that— even if you do nothing else—greatly increases your odds of success.
FOR YEARS, WE’VE USED a system called “trailing” to test and hone a prospect’s technical skills—the 49 percent—and to begin to assess his or her emotional skills, the 51
percent. Trailing is a combination of training and auditioning; it’s rigorous and sometimes awkward. We generally keep people on probation until we’ve first observed their behavior within the real environment of the dining room or kitchen, and until we’ve assessed their overall fit with our team. We’re upfront about this process, and we tell candidates that we also expect them to audition us as prospective employers. We urge those who trail to ask themselves, Is this really the kind of place I’m going to want to spend one-third of my time? Is this place going to challenge me and make me feel fulfilled?
Our frontline managers arrange for trails in each job category. Most prospective employees go through four, five, or six trails, during meal periods and often trail with a different waiter or cook each time. For each trail after the first, there is a specific and increasingly advanced list of what needs to be learned and accomplished during that session. Trails begin with a physical orientation to the restaurant and culminate with “taking a station” while being closely monitored by the trainer. Trailers are paid for their shifts, whether they’re hired or not. In the dining room, our guests can tell who the trailers are by the fact that they are not wearing an official uniform, or by noticing that a trainer is the one standing back, observing.
Our training is designed not as a hazing, but as a healthy way to foster a stronger team. Staff members, by being directly involved in the decision making, have a good deal of influence over who is hired and thus a stake in the ongoing success of the outcome. Trailers don’t advance to their second trail unless the first trainer recommends this to the manager; they don’t move on to their third unless the second trainer endorses it; and so on. After five or six trails we end up with a well-trained candidate who has also been endorsed by as many as half a dozen team members. And
the candidate doesn’t move along unless he or she agrees that the fit seems good. By creating a built-in support system for new hires, we greatly enrich the subsequent team-building experience.
What is almost impossible to train for is the emotional stuff; identifying hospitalitarians is a tricky skill to teach. I know I have a knack for looking across a table and sensing that a person is, or is not, the right fit for us. But how do I make the subjective objective, and the implicit explicit? One effective way to articulate my gut feelings to others doing the hiring is to teach them how to listen to their own gut feelings. To do that, I ask managers (whose intuition and judgment we trust, or they wouldn’t be managers) to pose themselves three fundamental hypothetical situations when they are hiring.
Situation 1: Think of someone you know well (a spouse, best friend, parent, sibling) who has an uncanny gift for judging character. If this person were on a jury, he or she could take one look at the defendant and almost always render a correct verdict. For me that someone is my wife, Audrey, who is eerily adept at reading character and integrity and who, in a flash, can almost always tell if what you see is what you get. So the first check is to imagine that you have invited the prospective employee to your home for dinner with your judge of character. The three of you discuss many things over a two-hour dinner. When the prospect leaves and the door closes behind him or her, what will be the first thing your character judge says? “What the hell are you thinking?” Or, “Hire that person immediately!” For judges of character, there is no such thing as the color gray.
Situation 2: Imagine your keenest rival in business—if you’re the Yankees, say, then it’s the Red Sox. Then imagine that the day you make a job offer to a prospect, he or she
calls you back and says, “Thanks, but I just got a great offer from the Red Sox and I’m taking the job with them.” Is your immediate reaction “Shit, we blew it!” Or, “Whew, we’ve dodged a bullet!” Ask yourself.
Sometimes I’ll go too far down the road in a hiring situation with someone who isn’t quite right for our team. I am still amazed at how often I have felt enormous relief when someone we’ve actively pursued ends up taking another job. This leaves me asking myself how I let the interviewing process get so far in the first place?
I’m aware that that one of my blind spots when hiring is my natural inclination to make other people feel comfortable. This impulse is so powerful that I tend to have a tough time turning it off when it’s inappropriate—for example, in a job interview. It’s not my job to soothe prospective employees. It’s my job to assess whether they’ll be a good fit for our team. That takes self-awareness. Unless we have tools like gut checks, it’s very easy to get trapped into making some dangerous mistakes.
Situation 3: Most business owners or managers have a core group of customers or other people whose opinions carry special weight for them. In our industry, such a person could be a restaurant critic, who, if he or she writes for a major publication, shares those opinions with perhaps a million readers. For me personally, the person could be my mother or one of my siblings—after all these years, they know how to push my buttons (and I know how to push theirs). It could also be a frequent guest who always tells me exactly how he or she feels about a meal—and is loyal enough to return no matter how the last meal turned out.
So, imagine that this person with an especially weighty opinion drops in unannounced to dine, and there is only one table left in the restaurant—a table that will be served by
the person you are considering hiring. Is your reaction “Great!”—or is it “Oh, no!”
When all three situations leave you feeling positive about the prospect, you’re on the right track. If any one of them doesn’t, it’s time to fold the hand. I rarely interview a candidate until two or three other managers have first had an interview with him or her. Since our restaurants thrive on a team spirit, I prefer to hire by consensus. I ask our managers to pursue a candidate’s relevant job references; I ask them to take personal notes and then rank the strength of each one of the candidate’s five emotional skills on a scale of zero to five; and I ask them to consider and react to the three hypothetical situations and then listen with their guts.
Finally, I ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top three performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves.
Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And because you either can’t or don’t fire them, you and they conspire to send a dangerous
message to your staff and guests that “average” is acceptable.
There are a lot of jobs to fill in the restaurant business, and it can be frustrating, especially in a tight labor market, to impose our own stringent limitations on whom we can and can’t hire. When a chef has been short a line cook for three weeks and finally finds a technically outstanding cook who isn’t quite a 51 percenter, should we really pass on the candidate? Absolutely. I’m not impressed by a candidate’s technical prowess if the meaningful emotional skills aren’t already in place. Each of our restaurants is created with its own distinct cuisine and its own distinct décor, but caring hospitality must be a common trait that flows clearly through all of them. I tell new employees right off the bat that for their salary review, 51 percent of any raise or bonus is set by how they’re faring at the emotional skills necessary to do their job well, and 49 percent is tied to technical performance. That’s the perfect balance for us, and it’s the currency of our company.
IN THE EARLY DAYS at Union Square Cafe, long before I had codified any of this for my managers, I knew instinctively what kind of employee I wanted. I had a simple formula: I knew I would be spending many, many hours working in the restaurant business, so I’d need to surround myself with employees who were fun, smart, and interested in learning, not to mention dedicated to excellence and eager to play on a winning team. I grew foolishly confident that I could recognize a good hire in a roomful of applicants even without an interview. (Back when I was dating, that may have been an OK strategy at a bar, but it was sorely defective as a way to make meaningful hires.) In building my first team for Union Square Cafe in 1985, I also did
something that now sounds insane: I decided not to hire anyone from New York City. I applied affirmative action to anyone who hadn’t grown up in the city, believing that any native of New York would bring a New York attitude to the place. Of course, back then, I viewed New York as a scary, crime-ridden city, and its population as cynical, unfriendly, and tough. Today, I understand that my opening strategy was remarkably ignorant and narrow-minded. But it was motivated by my wish to hire only nice, optimistic people to help me create a restaurant with a fresh feeling.
My biased perception of New York has long since disappeared, and some of our greatest servers and cooks have been from the city. Yet today whenever I ask at the monthly meeting I conduct for new hires how many of them were born in New York, no more than 10 percent raise their hands. We have hired a lot of people who, at the time, were also pursuing careers in fields like writing, theater, art, comedy, jazz, and even midwifery. But the common thread is that most 51 percenters, regardless of their birthplace, are driven by a personal pursuit of being the best they can be in whichever field they choose.
My hiring methods began to evolve by necessity, shortly before Gramercy Tavern opened in 1994. Following the recession of 1991–1992, a new bull market led to a spike in restaurant openings throughout New York City. Until then, we could run a single ad in the Village Voice and count on attracting so many applicants that there would be a long line outside the door for just two waiter positions. But suddenly we were no longer just in the business of competing to serve the best food; we were engaged in the blood sport of competing to hire the strongest staff. The real battle among restaurants in New York was taking place not in dining rooms but rather in the classified section of the Sunday New York Times. In restaurants, as in any other
business, you stand a much better chance of ending up with the most customers when first you have the best employees.
Through the years I have thought a lot about where to place want ads and have honed my ability to write them. I was clearly no longer free to hire people simply because I imagined we would have been good friends had we met while I was growing up in St. Louis. I had gotten by to some extent by relying on that instinct, but it was becoming irresponsible and self-limiting. I had to adapt to a fast- changing industry.
However, classified ads are expensive, and one tough year, after several had yielded no returns, I resorted to some unorthodox approaches. I asked readers of Union Square Cafe’s newsletter—among them hundreds of guests who had written to praise our staff—to act as recruiters for us. If they ever came across people at other restaurants whom they’d love to see serve them at Union Square Cafe, I wrote, “I would really appreciate if you would refer them to us.” (I usually offered a free meal or a bottle of wine for successful referrals.) We were able to hire a few cooks and waiters, and even a top manager with that method. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. I did incur the wrath of at least one restaurateur who had read the newsletter and called to cry foul and accuse me of poaching, even though we hadn’t hired or even met anyone from his restaurant. The classified “fishing hole” was drying up, and I was just tying a different piece of bait on my line, and casting it into a new pond.
I also ran ads in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles (all great restaurant towns); in Atlanta (a big restaurant city during the heady buildup to the 1996 Olympics); and in Boston and Washington, D.C. (easy cities from which to transfer to New York). I figured that at any given time there
were at least fifty people in the restaurant business in those cities considering a move to New York. If just two of those fifty were terrific, why wouldn’t they want to come work for us if they knew we had an opening? During this lean, competitive period, I also learned what a powerful recruiting tool the Zagat Survey could be. When a restaurant ranks among Zagat’s top-forty or top-fifty most popular places, diners aren’t the only people who notice. Restaurant employees looking for work immediately read through the top-ranked places and check them off one by one while job hunting. Zagat’s top-rated restaurants tend to be the busiest, and that’s exactly what top job candidates want.
Our ability to remain as good as we have been has always depended on our ability to attract great people. To the degree that we can do this a “virtuous cycle” of hiring spins on. Sustaining peak performance helps us to attract other highly talented people, who in turn help keep our performance at a peak. Earning high rankings from critical sources, such as the New York Times and the Zagat Survey, not only increases business; it improves our chance of fielding better and better teams. These teams further perpetuate our ability to perform with excellence and they polish our public image.
But I always caution against complacency. I instruct our managers to recruit new staff “blood” as if we’re behind. In fact, we’ll even create a job that wouldn’t otherwise exist when we meet someone we just know belongs on our team.
In addition to instituting an athletic hiring strategy, it’s critical to be a champion at retaining top staff members. A business owner can too easily squander the winning edge that comes from fielding a great team by not treating its members with respect and trust, teaching them new skills, and offering clear challenges. Part of what I’m doing when I
make my rounds visiting our restaurants is tuning in to my team to feel, see, and hear what’s truly going on. I’m watching to gauge their approach to their work, and I want to see 49 percent technical prowess and feel 51 percent emotional mastery. The ability to derive enjoyment from the pursuit of excellence is the best way to measure the team’s 51-49 ratio, and it allows me to feel assured that we’re doing our job as well as we can.
A good sense of humor—about oneself, one’s business, and life in general—goes a long way toward fostering good feelings to accompany excellent performance. Somehow in our society a mind-set took hold many years ago, whereby the only way for a restaurant (or any business, for that matter) to be taken seriously was to act serious. But if you go to many fancy restaurants you’ll sense that something’s missing. There’s a facade of refinement—guests are leaning forward while speaking in hushed tones; tuxedoed servers are calling a woman madame and a man monsieur when everyone knows they’re both American. Everything is delivered perfectly, cleared perfectly, decanted perfectly, and yet it’s not fun. It’s not sincere. There’s no soul. It’s a perfectly executed but imperfect experience.
I encourage my staff to express and reveal their humanness, learn from their mistakes, lighten up, and relax. This is a contribution to the dialogue on hospitality that we work at quite consciously. But it, too, requires the optimal 51-49 mix. The idea is to attain a balance: hiring people who are naturally upbeat and genuine but who are also high- level achievers capable of delivering excellence.
We make it clear to our employees that we’re going to give them a great troupe of positive, hopeful colleagues to work with, with whom they can feel mutual respect and
trust, and with whom they will be asked to achieve lofty goals.
We are not a constellation of individual “star” employees: that idea would work against my core belief that hospitality is a team sport. I had a challenging experience early on in my career that served as a cautionary tale about how individual ambition can threaten team-building. In 1987, less than two years after Union Square Cafe had opened, an organization called the Society for American Cuisine, based in Louisville, sponsored a nationwide competition to promote and celebrate the newly recognized importance of ser vice as a component of dining in America. Entrants were asked to write an essay in which they defined the virtues of the perfect waiter. The grand prize would be an all- expenses-paid trip to dine at the best “new American” restaurants, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Chicago, and several other cities. Participating in this competition struck me as an interesting way to build pride among my servers and foster a sense that what they did day in and day out not only was valid but demonstrated their gift for caring. Back then, I had always noticed how many servers seemed to apologize for their work, with remarks like: “I’m actually an actor. I’m just waiting tables until I land a real job.” I knew that instilling pride in our ser vice staff was a monumentally important concern if we were ever to take steps toward excellence. That would be impossible if the people executing our ser vice felt in any way ashamed about being in the restaurant business.
I was still in my twenties, and this was years before I had begun to think about enlightened hospitality as a coherent management philosophy. In fact, my style of managing back then had barely evolved since my sophomore year at Trinity College, when I was the news director for WRTC, the campus FM radio station. I gave people the schedules they wanted,
subbed for them myself if they couldn’t make a shift, and wrote all the news copy rather than asking anyone for help. I had an overdeveloped desire to please, and to have everybody like me. Now, as a young restaurateur, I would clear and reset tables, check coats, mop up spills, pick up olive pits off the floor, and reset tables along with everyone else. To this day, I can’t and won’t walk past something dropped on the floor without picking it up. I wanted people to know that this job was neither beneath them nor beneath me. I also wanted to embody the same team spirit and caring for others that I expected from the staff.
To encourage interest in the national contest, I offered
$50 to anyone who wrote an essay of at least 1,000 words— no matter how good or poor it was. I offered $100 to the writers of the five essays I felt were our strongest. And I’d pay $250 to the writer of the essay I thought was the best.
A dozen wonderful pieces were submitted, and I had each writer read his or her essay aloud. This process alone was effective team-building, and it sent a powerful message that waiting tables need not be something to be ashamed of.
Remarkably, the waitress who won our own contest at Union Square Cafe (and the top cash prize) also went on to win the grand prize in the national competition. Her recipe for the perfect waitress was, “two parts Walter Cronkite to one part Mae West, carefully blended with a cup of Mikhail Baryshnikov and a liberal sprinkling of Mother Teresa.”
But my experiment soon began to backfire. Our winning waitress began dubbing herself “waitress of the year,” and our staff snidely began calling her “WOTY.” She had confused winning this writing contest with being the nation’s leading waitress. She then made a remarkable request of me. “I really think you should pay me extra money,” she told me, “for all the publicity I’m going to generate for Union Square Cafe when I go on the national
tour.” I was stunned, and told her that she should just enjoy her trip and needn’t conduct any interviews or mention Union Square Cafe the entire time.
Before long, the food writer Marian Burros of the New York Times picked up on WOTY story and wrote a “De Gustibus” column for the paper on September 26, 1987, titled, “Aspiring Actress Finds Stardom Waiting on Tables.” This put the whole situation over the top. Marian had come for lunch and, without identifying herself, asked to be seated in WOTY’s station. The next day she called to interview WOTY. The piece was accompanied by a staged and undignified photograph of WOTY holding a stack of eight dirty plates in each hand. That is certainly one aspect of waiting tables, but it was not the image I had intended to convey, and it did not suggest that waiting tables was an enriching way to bestow hospitality. Waitress of the Year looked more like Bus Girl of the Month. Understandably, the photo and the story’s unfortunate spin left WOTY feeling embarrassed and angry.
That fueled even more resentment, which was directed toward me, and I began to wonder how I had somehow created this monster. I was tormented because what had initially seemed like such an uplifting idea was backfiring. The story took on an even more bizarre turn when the grand prize trip was delayed, then postponed indefinitely, purportedly for scheduling reasons, but actually because the organizers had gone bankrupt. Just when it appeared that WOTY would never get the trip she had earned, the society found a way to make good on its obligation. WOTY returned from her trip not enormously impressed with what she had seen or tasted, and soon thereafter gave her notice at Union Square Cafe. Some eight or nine years later, when I had practically expunged the anguishing episode from my mind, out of nowhere, I received a long, beautifully handwritten
letter from her, in which she apologized for her behavior during what she described as an enormously trying personal episode. Above all, she had felt guilty about her behavior’s impact on her colleagues. It was a brave thing for her to do, and it reaffirmed my belief in the power of the team over that of the individual. I also learned how critical it is to manage expectations—and to plan for success, not just for failure. Too often, we’ve made mistakes by not anticipating what the consequences would be if we were to win.
I have no problem if employees use the fame of our restaurants to advance their careers. For example, celebrity chefs, who add as much to a restaurant’s renown as it adds to theirs, are clearly here to stay, and that’s not a bad thing for our industry. But individual victories have to register for the whole team or they can be more disruptive than helpful.
Indeed, many exciting career opportunities have derived from team-building leaders. Our chefs have all been invited to perform cooking demonstrations, appear on television, cook for charity benefits, and conduct interviews in the media. Several of them have written cookbooks. As of May 8, 2006, our team members had collectively won sixteen awards from the James Beard Foundation, the “Oscars” of our industry. I have a gut-wrenching concern only when any employee, no matter why or how they’ve been recognized, feels entitled to special privileges and opportunities and forgets that we are all servers who come to work for the simple purpose of creating pleasure for others. On occasion, we’ve hired someone who is more interested in currying favor with a certain regular guest (sometimes to land another job) than in the overall welfare of the team.
Similarly, a “star” chef who has already launched a line of brand-name food might well turn out to be a poor fit for us. Promoting his or her own “brand” would probably be more important than promoting ours.
The team can be weakened or divided by conflicting loyalties if any one member feels or acts more important than everybody else. I have found that the people most likely to thrive in our organization are individuals who also enjoy playing team sports. And that’s true for any organization in which people depend on others for their ability to succeed.
Punctuality is nonnegotiable. Yet any number of people seem to have a habit of using a broken alarm clock; they’re chronically late for their shifts, and it’s always seemingly due to some extenuating circumstance. They’re the ones stuck on a “late” subway or bus even though everyone else managed to commute to work on time. The first time someone on our staff is late, we’ll make a charitable assumption that maybe there was a foul-up on the subway. The second time we might start to wonder. The third time we’ll realize that our colleague may just have a poor work ethic. Chronic lateness (whether it’s showing up late for appointments or not returning phone calls or e-mails promptly) is a form of arrogance—“I’m important enough to make others wait for me”—and it puts other team members in a bind because they have to cover for the tardy person or just wonder what’s going on. We’re looking for the kind of people whose internal alarm clock is always working and who always make adjustments for occasions when subway and bus lines don’t roll on schedule.
Ever since my first experience as a boss, when I worked for John Anderson’s presidential campaign in 1980, I have continued to view people who work for me as volunteers. It isn’t that they’ve agreed to work without pay. “I’m aware that you’re all here, on the most basic level, to pay the rent,” I tell new hires. “Just as you need a job, I need people to take orders accurately, and to cook wonderful food.”
Then I remind them that if they’re as talented at what they do as we believe they are, they could have gotten a job at any of 200 other very good restaurants for the same pay. “You could all be doing what you do anywhere else,” I say. “But you chose to be with us. You have volunteered to be on our team, and we owe it to you to provide you with much more than just a paycheck in return. We want you to feel certain you have made a wise choice in joining our company.” It’s a chance to work at a company where respect and trust are mutual between management and workers, where you can enjoy working alongside and learning from excellent colleagues, and where you can know that your contributions can make every day truly matter.
Meeting with all our new hires—as I continue to do once every four weeks—often makes me think of the way champagne houses make nonvintage, or multivintage, champagne. All the major houses strive to produce a very good nonvintage champagne that tastes virtually the same every single year. They know exactly what the taste profile is and how to achieve it. They also know that the grapes vary from year to year—each vintage produces grapes with varying degrees of acid, alcohol, or fruit—and so they keep aside wine from previous vintages, so that in successive years wine makers can blend together various vintages until all the elements balance perfectly and they’ve achieved the same consistent flavor they had the year before. That’s called house style.
Building our team is not unlike creating nonvintage champagne. Hundreds of employees have worked at our restaurants over the course of many years. And yet our guests, like expert wine tasters, should be able to identify a sense of continuity in the way they feel and experience our dining rooms. This continuity is based on our own carefully
selected blend of the most caring, intelligent, and talented people in the hospitality business. That’s our house style.
