Hospitality

Imagine, though, that instead of resorting to one of these fallback positions, you asked yourself: What is the hospitality solution? What if you forced yourself to be creative, to develop a solution that worked because of—not in spite of—your dedication to generosity and extraordinary service? These are almost always harder to execute, and coming u... See more

This is a hospitality solution: a problem that we solved not by sneakily chipping away at the service we were offering but by blowing it out in the opposite direction—by giving more, not less.

People often confuse hospitality with luxury, but I could have given that table a bottle of vintage Krug and a kilo of caviar, and it wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.

I hear this a lot: “Well, of course you could afford to pull those tricks at an expensive restaurant.” And I always think: Are you sure you can afford not to? It’s true—these gifts cost money, in labor if nothing else. But I’m my dad’s son, and I reviewed the Dreamweaver line item in the P&L every month with an eagle eye. There was never any qu... See more

the qualities required of hosts: confidence, joviality, risk tolerance. It takes a lot of self-possession to put yourself in charge of other people’s time for a while