Danny Meyer: Hospitality and Humanity [The Knowledge Project Ep. #115] - Farnam Street

The difference between a good restaurant experience and a great one has very little to do with the food. Hospitality finds problems and turns them into opportunities—for connection, for joy, and for creating memories.

Can we maintain profit margins while also making experiences that put us in touch with the wondrous, the delightful, and the mysterious? Isn’t it time to bring our fullest selves to the job? What if we could find romance in and through business?

When the customers were kind and respectful, it was OK, but one “waiter as object” moment could tear me apart. Unfortunately, I now see those moments happening all of the time. I see adults who don’t even look at their waiters when they speak to them. I see parents who let their young children talk down to store clerks. I see people rage and scream

Putting both hospitality and excellence on our list was a way of recognizing that success was going to come from approaching the problem of hospitality vs. excellence in the most difficult way possible: in order to succeed, we needed to be good at both. This wasn’t an either/or—it was an and. Later, I would learn that the management guru Roger Mart

Danny’s big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth, and they would take great care of the customers—which is exactly what they did.