The World's No. 1 Restaurateur Will Guidara Knows How To Make People Feel Truly Seen and It's Something We All Can Do

Whether you’re a foodie or not, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of New York City’s Eleven Madison Park, a restaurant that was named best in the world. Yet when Will Guidara took the helm of what would become one of the city’s toughest spots to score a dinner reservation, it was a struggling two-star brasserie.

So, how did Guidara transform the place? It wasn’t the food (though that was exquisite) or even the historic dining room (which was majestic). Rather, it was Guidara’s guiding principle about the service: fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.

Guidara and his team became famous for enchanting their guests—doing things that many deemed unreasonable. (Think filling a private dining room with sand, beach chairs, and mai-tais in an attempt to console a couple whose beach vacation had been canceled.) Even more remarkable, Guidara extended that same hospitality mindset to his team, creating a culture of pride and ownership—“a culture where it was cool to care,” says Guidara.

And while Guidara’s new book, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, is filled with juicy, behind-the-scenes stories about what it’s like to run one of the world’s hottest dining spots, it’s also a playbook for all of us wanting to transform ordinary moments into extraordinary ones.

This week, The Sunday Paper sat down with Guidara to ask him about the power of finding magic and meaning in what we do—for ourselves, for our loved ones, and even for strangers.

A Conversation with Will Guidara

I love the part in your book where you say we have an opportunity and responsibility to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it. What are some ways we can all start to do this right away?

When I was a kid, my dad and I went to the Four Seasons for dinner. There were so many details, intentionally pursued, that created a space where everything fell away except for the world at that table, where my dad and I were able to connect.

In restaurants—the lighting, the design of the room, the music that’s being played, the volume at which that music is being played—it’s all there to create conditions for connection. And if pandemic times taught us anything, it’s that people want connection. We crave genuine moments of heartfelt connection where we feel a sense of belonging, in community with others.

I think all of us can be intentional in our pursuit of relationships—at work, with the people you live with, and in life, with everyone around you.

I think every one of us can create magic in the next 10 minutes if we just sit down and say, “Who in my life do I want to pursue with intention? How can I give myself the grace and the space to invest in someone?” The reason it’s magical is when you do that, you’re giving and receiving a gift at the same time.

You heard a lot of “that’s unreasonable!” throughout your career and you say that while it was meant to shut you down, it became a call to arms. Any secrets to pushing back against the naysayers?

It’s like anything: You need to psych yourself up just once and have it work.

My dad was a big part of helping me do this. When I was a kid and I got to the age when I started being overwhelmed with self-doubt, he hated when I said, “I can’t.” He filled our entire home with fortune cookie-size notes that said things like: “Success comes in cans, failures come in can’ts.”

And he was right. You can’t do the thing you never tried to do. You should never determine you can’t do something unless you give it your all. And you should never decide you can’t do something if someone else tells you you can’t.

My mom was a quadriplegic; she literally couldn’t do most things. And my dad’s whole thing was, “You better not waste the fact that you can do most things.” He’s this invisible guy on my shoulder reminding me of that.

If you were to summarize the concept of “unreasonable hospitality”—the title of your new book—what would it be?

There are three things that go into unreasonable hospitality, which is essentially doing whatever it takes to make someone feel good.

No. 1: You need to be present. That’s an overused word these days. But for me, being present means you care so much about the person you’re with in that moment that you don’t care about everything else you have to do. Too often, we’re moving so fast we don’t slow down enough to really hear what other people are saying.

No. 2: Take what you do seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. Whether it’s as a company, with your brand, or as an individual, we let these self-imposed standards get in the way of the people around us giving us the things they want.

No. 3: Try to give someone a sense of genuine belonging; make them feel truly seen. I call this “one size fits one”. The most beautiful gestures of pursuit are ones that only make sense to the person receiving them. What you do for someone else needs to be specific. When you’re present, you get to know someone well enough that you’ll pick up on something specific—and then don’t take yourself so seriously that how you give is about you instead of them.

You say all of us can create a culture of hospitality in our workplaces and in our lives—that whatever we do for a living, we can choose to be in the hospitality business. What do you mean by that?

The difference between being in the service industry and the hospitality industry is simply deciding to prioritize how you make people feel, and that that’s as important as the product you’re serving.

More than three quarters of our GDP is driven by service industries. If even half of them decided to start caring about how they make us feel versus just caring about the product itself—now that’s a world I want to live in.

I believe the companies who’ll succeed are the ones who don’t just focus on the product they’re making or how efficiently they make it, but prioritize how every stake holder will feel at the end of it. And it’s not that hard! It just requires caring a little more and trying a little harder.

You talk about the ways language creates culture. How are you intentional about your language both at work and at home to create the kind of culture you want to work and live in?

I don’t think people take nearly as much time as they should to articulate as clearly as they can not only what they want to accomplish, but what they want to embody. At the restaurant, all 150 employees spent 8 hours over the course of one day to come up with four words that served as our non-negotiables: hospitality, excellence, education, and passion. And we decided that that’s what we would embody simultaneously. Those words represented our core values—they became our mission statement.

What are your words? If someone asked your friends or significant other how you treated them, what would they say? You can ask yourself, “How do I want to navigate through the world?”

Why do big companies have mission statements, but individuals don’t? Write your own mission statement.

How do we stick to this personal mission statement we write for ourselves, even as life gets busy and what’s happening in the world feels utterly overwhelming?

We can’t control how our days are going to go, or what is going to happen in the world. We can do our best by hiring great people, creating a great culture, staying organized, putting out good vibes. But some days will be better than others.

Each of us can make the decision, however, to prioritize the things and rituals that really matter. I know that every day at 6 p.m. no matter what is happening, I shut off my computer to be with my daughter. I think as long as we decide the things that really matter, and we’re disciplined in not letting the world interfere with those things, that’s how you create magic.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not terrible stuff happening in the world, and it doesn’t mean you ignore all of that. You still want to be a part of helping people and fighting the good fight. But no matter what is going on, we can be present to others and do what we can to make them feel good.

My wife and I have been really busy lately, and just last night was our only time together before she took off on a business trip. On my drive home from the city, I got Taco Bell takeout—we both love this guilty pleasure—and once our daughter was asleep, I lit a candle, opened a bottle of wine, and we had Taco Bell. It was this little magical moment.

If you seize on these magical moments, life can slow down even if for only a couple hours. These moments recenter your world and remind you of all the things you love about it.

Will Guidara is a former owner of Make it Nice, the hospitality group with restaurants covering the entire spectrum from fine dining to fast casual, including: the acclaimed Eleven Madison Park, NoMad in New York, London, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Davies and Brook at Claridge's hotel in London, and counter-service restaurant Made Nice.

Question from the editor: How do you seize on the magical moments that happen in your life and make both the people you love and complete strangers feel truly seen? Drop a note in the comments section below!