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• Move your body: Even one minute every hour helps

• Mute notifications during deep work periods

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• Use the PTO you’re given

Would you add anything to the list? What works for you?

Below, we share our incredible conversation with Will Guidara, the renowned restaurateur and author of the bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. It’s full of lessons for delivering excellence to your customers, colleagues, friends, and family.

All this, and more, in just 6 minutes to read.

— Matthew

Quote of the Day

"Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel."

— Danny Meyer

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Trivia

Unreasonable Hospitality With Will Guidara

A life of service

Will Guidara has redefined the meaning of hospitality. His approach, which he calls "unreasonable hospitality," goes beyond the expected service norms to create unforgettable experiences that resonate with guests long after their meal ends. Through remarkable gestures and innovative practices, Guidara shows that true hospitality is about connecting with people on a deeper level. 

Once, a European family at his restaurant said they had regretted not trying a New York hot dog before their departure. Guidara sensed an opportunity to create a lasting memory. He dispatched a staff member to purchase a hot dog from a nearby cart, had his chef meticulously divide it into portions, and presented it to the family with the flourish typically reserved for haute cuisine. The act transformed a potential disappointment into a highlight of their trip.

Similarly, when a family from Spain mentioned their children had never seen snow, Guidara didn't just commiserate. He orchestrated an impromptu sledding expedition to Central Park with a limousine ride.

The examples illustrate a fundamental principle of Guidara's philosophy: Hospitality is about paying attention to the small details that can make a big difference, like when he invested in beautiful gelato spoons that elevate a simple dessert into a memorable experience.

“Hospitality is beautiful because you can make people feel so many beautiful things,” Guidara, 44, said in an interview last week. “Hospitality isn’t limited to restaurants and hotels. No matter what you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality industry.”

In this conversation, Guidara — the restaurateur and author of the bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality — discusses the art of hospitality and how we can all better deliver for others at home or in the office. 

This interview has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity. 

I heard an hourly gig at Baskin-Robbins was one of your first jobs. Do any lessons or memories stand out?

That was my first job not working with my dad, when I was about 14. The lesson that stood out was that kids should get jobs. You learn fundamental lessons around responsibility, earning a paycheck, showing up somewhere on time and getting in trouble if you don't, and learning how to work with people, not just your colleagues but people that you're there to serve.

I strongly believe in lemonade stands. There should be a national mandate that every kid have a lemonade stand where they learn about marketing, branding, pricing, customer service, hospitality, and responsibility. Too many parents are putting kids in clubs and camps, but I don’t think anything can replace a proper job. 

What did you learn from your mom about making people feel welcome?

She had quadriplegia, so she used a wheelchair and was incapable of speaking or moving for the most part. As her condition worsened, my dad moved us to a house that was a short bike ride from school because he was concerned about me being fully reliant on other people’s parents to get anywhere, given her condition. He was concerned about my confidence and the extent to which that would threaten it. So, our house became the hangout house. That’s probably why I fell in love with hospitality.

Every day when I rode my bike home, she’d be there with her nurse at the end of the road in her wheelchair with this big, bright smile. That was always a highlight of my day, the gift that she was giving me being there to welcome you. But it was a highlight of her day because it gave her something to look forward to.

She showed me that the most impactful emotions sometimes don't require a single word. She had this crazy big, toothy smile that absorbed her entire face without barely moving or uttering a word. I felt so profoundly loved by her every day when I turned to that corner on my bike. Once you feel something like that, that should be something you want to pay forward.

That’s beautiful. How about your dad’s influence?

My dad is unbelievably important to me. We talk almost every day on the phone. He’s intentional when he wants to accomplish something. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer later in life, and he survived mainly because he did every single thing that he ever read that could work in handling pancreatic cancer. 

My dad always says one of the secrets to happiness is always having something to look forward to. He’s also a man of integrity. He was a hard ass and yet unbelievably compassionate. 

I talk about the need to praise and criticize in leadership. When a great leader walks into a room, everyone is excited to see them, but they’re also a little nervous that they don’t have their shit together. He modeled that for me: You can be strict and compassionate, hold people to a high standard and still love them wherever they are, and inspire people to be better but embrace them for who they are right now. 

How do you define unreasonable hospitality?

Sometimes, it helps to define something by talking about what it’s not. Service and hospitality aren’t the same thing. Service is what you do. In my world, it’s getting the right plate of food to the right person on time. Hospitality is how you make people feel when you do that. Service is something you do for someone. Hospitality is whether you make them feel seen when you do it.

Unreasonable hospitality is just choosing to be as creative, intentional, innovative, and unreasonable as possible in pursuit of that. It's that simple, and it's that hard.

I wrote the book because when you look across disciplines, you see so many people who have created unbelievable things because they're willing to do whatever it takes to bring the most fully realized version of the product or idea to life. But they stop short when it comes to the people in the ecosystem within which that product exists. 

What do you see as the impact of AI on restaurants?

No business should not be taking advantage of what AI has to offer. It's about streamlining the things that don't require human beings such that you can reallocate your human beings to the things that they do best. The best use might be for AI to do all the busywork like accounting, logistics, and inventory management so your best people can get back on the floor with customers. I hope that restaurants use AI as a tool to make their human beings more human. 

What makes a great restaurant dining room in your view? I've heard someone say a great room is a place that kind of transports you to a place that's uniquely its own.

A great restaurant dining room also creates the conditions to genuinely connect with the people you're talking with. Everything from how big are your tables? Are they close enough to each other but not too close to other people? How’s the lighting? Can you see people without it feeling antiseptic? How loud is the music? Does it fill the silence before the room is full and not make you have to shout once it is? 

You have talked about turning ordinary transactions into just extraordinary experiences. What examples come to mind?

The other day, I saw a story where someone elevated a transaction. We were on an airplane, and we pulled out from the gate, but as we got ready to take off, the pilot said something was wrong with the plane, so we’d need to sit here for a bit. We’ve all experienced a flight delay, and there’s a collective groan. Then the pilot walks out and asks a family, hey, do you want to tour the cockpit? The kids were super excited. Then he did other families. Then he started taking adults toward the cockpit. I found out he always does this during delays. 

This pilot created a system to help people get excited during a frustrating moment. It changed the temperature of the entire plane, not just for those who received the tour but for everyone else on the plane who saw people receiving that tour.

So, if more of us have our eyes peeled, we will see these things and then be inspired by them, take those ideas, and make them our own.  And that's a beautiful thing when it happens.

That’s a great story. How often do you experiment? What role does experimenting and having fun play for you?

I experiment constantly. If you constantly change everything, you cannot figure out who you actually are.

That something might not work is a terrible reason not to try something. Too many people ruin good stories with facts. They rip ideas apart before they even give them the chance to grieve.

There are plenty of ideas that people quickly say won't work because maybe they've tried them before and failed, or there's a heap of evidence against why they could ever succeed.

All of the biggest changes emerge from things that, at the time, didn’t seem like they could work. We need people in organizations like the Wright brothers who are willing to just try. 

What common obstacles have you seen leaders encounter when implementing a culture of unreasonable hospitality?

A culture of unreasonable hospitality requires someone to get excited and believe in an idea and then give their team permission to proceed. But it can fall short. Leaders love the idea of empowering their team to run with an idea, but they're not ready to relinquish that much control.

The greatest gestures aren’t the most expensive. It’s not how much it costs. I always say people won’t really remember the thing you serve them. They’ll remember the way you make them feel.

How do you measure the results or ROI of hospitality? It seems so intangible.

Measuring them in the long term is easy but very hard in the short term. One challenge in society is that we’re programmed for instant gratification. If something requires time and energy for too long before we see the benefit, we’re quick to give up. 

But just because you can’t measure human emotion in the short term doesn’t mean the return isn’t there. The return is so vast it’s almost incalculable. You just need to believe in it.

You’ve said you love to gamify business and life. How?

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like to play more than they like to work. Look at how you raise kids: If you want them to do something good, make it more fun for them to do that thing. The more you attach positive feelings with effective action, the more successful you can become. My family does a countdown at the end of every dinner. And after that countdown, there's a game that happens.

The whole point is that you sit in your chair until the end because we believe our family eats around the table. Everyone stays seated until the end because we like to have thoughtful conversations, and we like to instill that in our kids from a very early age. 

Whether at work or having competitions to see who can clear dirty plates more quickly, you want to make seemingly mundane tasks more fun. This shows that anything about running or working in a business can be fun. The asterisk here is that we shouldn’t gamify things with sales competitions because that encourages the wrong behavior.

You’ve talked about presence, being where you are, and the dinner table being a sacred space. What does presence mean to you?

Being present means caring so much about the person you're with that you stop caring about everything else you need to do, which is easier said than done. It's about compartmentalizing the world so that you can be fully invested in the person in front of you. 

Are any new projects on the horizon for you?

My team leads training workshops for companies across industries, where they spend a day or two with their teams talking about unreasonable hospitality. I work on my biweekly newsletter, Premeal. I’m also working on new books and doing some TV stuff. I was just a producer on The Bear. 

Do you cook at home? What do you love about it?

My wife is a chef, so she does most of the cooking. But I do love to cook. I like the ceremony of cooking. I like cooking that enhances hang time. I love making my mom's bolognese recipe, which takes all day. I love doing it with my kids. I also love smoking a brisket on Saturday with some cheap beer and some good friends outside. I also love cooking the food my kids love because, well, I like to make them happy.

Dive deeper

For more, read Will’s book, Unreasonable Hospitality, follow him on Instagram, or sign up for his bi-weekly newsletter.

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