My new favourite book

’Unreasonable hospitality’: the practise of going beyond what can reasonably be expected in the pursuit of creating deep human connections that create a sense of value and belonging.

Unreasonable Hospitality is a hospitality book, but it is really much more than that. It is a book about culture, leadership, human connection, turning transactional interactions into unforgettable experiences and helping the people you serve and work with to feel valued.

Will Guidara, former co-owner of Eleven Maddison Park with Chef Daniel Humm, led Eleven Maddison Park’s transformation from struggling brasserie to a restaurant with three Michelin stars, ranked #1 by one thousand renowned restaurant critics in the 50 best restaurants in the world list.

Guidara’s team achieved this transformation by ’offering hospitality that was so memorable, so over the top, it can only be described as unreasonable’.

For as long as restaurants have existed, the best among them have always been uncompromising in creating the most delicious food, employing the best chefs, using the best equipment and cooking with the purest ingredients. Few have used the same uncompromising approach in the human-to human interactions that happen in the dining room. Guidara changed that at Eleven Maddison Park.

Guidara’s story of innovation, creativity and transformation is packed with stories and insights that can help any organisation that cares about human-to-human connection and anyone whose role involves human-to-human connections (everyone) to unleash the incredible power of unreasonable hospitality.

Chef Daniel Humm (left) and Will Guidara (right)

’Unreasonable hospitality’ is the practise of going beyond what can reasonably be expected in the pursuit of creating deep human connections that create a sense of value and belonging.

One day a family arrived at Eleven Madison Park. It was their first trip to the US, and it was snowing. The family had never seen snow before. The children gazed in wonderment as thick snow fell past the large glass windows. The team noticed and at the end of the meal, they led the family out of the restaurant to an SUV that was parked up waiting with four sleds that the team had bought for them from a nearby store. The family were whisked up the road to Central Park where they spent the rest of the evening playing in the snow.

That is unreasonable hospitality. But it doesn’t have to be so exuberant.

When one table spent most of their evening talking about a film they loved and had forgotten about, the team went out and found a DVD of it and dropped it off with their bill. When a table of parents were overheard debating the ethics of the tooth fairy, their server hid a penny under their folded napkins each time one of them went to the toilet.

The team became addicted to thinking up the most creative little gestures that created amazing moments. Guests loved it. And the team at Eleven Maddison Park loved it. The problem was that there wasn’t the personnel to maintain this level of hospitality. So Guidara created a new post, the Dreamweaver.

Before long, there were multiple dreamweavers working in their own little side-studio equipped with all the tools they needed to create special moments. When one guest was overheard talking about how he hadn’t got his daughter the stuffed animal he’d promised her, the dreamweavers fashioned a little teddy bear out of kitchen towels.

It is extravagant. And employing staff to do this is expensive. But you don’t need to employ people specifically to offer unreasonable hospitality, and you don’t need to be the best restaurant in the world before you have the excuse to go the extra mile. ’It is not the lavishness of the gift that counts, but its pricelessness… luxury means giving more; hospitality means being more toughtful’.

Opportunities for unreasonable hospitality exist in every organisation, because interactions happen in every organisation. In every interaction there is the opportunity to care, to leave someone with a thoughtful gift. Gifts transform interactions from being ’transactional to relational’. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to be thoughtful.

As the world becomes more datafied, digitised and mechanised, it becomes all too easy to lose the human-to-human relationships upon which all the best bits about life on Earth depend. We have an intensifying challenge of people feeling like numbers on a spreadsheet or dots on a graph and it needs actively fighting against.

One way leaders and people at any level of an organisation can forge and restore relationships is by going that little bit further to show you care and that you value the people around you.

’People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel’ (attributed probably incorrectly to Maya Angelou).

This is just a snapshot of what unreasonable hospitality looks like in practice. But there is so much more to it. For example, it matters internally as much as it does externally. For a team to give unreasonable hospitality to the people they serve (customers, communities, stakeholders) leaders need to lead their teams with unreasonable hospitality too; ’great service cannot exist without great leadership’. And therein lies a way of thinking about leadership that is so often overlooked, especially in our managerial and datafied age. To get the picture in all its colour, give Unreasonable Hospitality a read. I loved it.