Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer draws on his St. Louis roots in new book

Where in the world could I have launched this book other than in St. Louis?

Don't believe everything you read in the New York Times. No, I'm very, I was very proud and grateful to hear that. But I want to turn the lights on St. Louis because everything I know about hospitality I learned by growing up here.

Well, I'll start by saying that I was really fortunate that my parents spent the first two years of their marriage living in France. My dad was stationed, my dad who grew up here in St. Louis, was stationed as a counter intelligence officer in the US Army. He had a penchant for languages and they put him on the border of France and Germany. And there were apparently no altercations during those first two years of their marriage. I like it.

And so they spent their time in a little car traveling through the countryside of France meeting the innkeepers of these small, small hotels that had restaurants. And my dad and mom fell in love with that. He came back here to St. Louis, started a travel agency that was really about creating driving tours through the French countryside. The next thing is that after my older sister was born and I was born, we had French, young French people living in our home who were translating for my dad's business by day and then they would be our babysitters at night. And so I was getting this education in food and language. There was always a bottle of wine on the table. We got to touch a drop to our lips. So none of it ever made me say, 'Oh, you should go into the restaurant business.' Because that's just not what people did back then. But I'll tell you something.

I will never ever get out of my bones the lessons in hospitality that St. Louis restaurants gave me as I grew up. They remembered, you know, I would go to Chris's on Lindbergh as a kid. They had a cuckoo clock up on the wall and every time I went there, which is probably twice a year, the maitre d' would say, 'I bet you want to have your usual seat.' Now, I mean, they don't even know how to do that in a big league restaurant in New York City.

Really what compelled me to open a restaurant was my uncle. My uncle who lives in New York City had taken me and my aunt and my grandmother out for dinner one night the night before I was taking my LSAT because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn't really want to be a lawyer, but I was a political science major and so I was doing the thing that I thought you're supposed to do as opposed to the thing that I really should have done. And the night before that LSAT, they're all having a great time at dinner. And I was in a horrible mood. And my uncle asked me what was bothering me. And I told him and he said, 'Well, of course you're taking your LSAT because you want to be a lawyer.' And I said, 'Actually, I don't.' And he got really, really mad at me. And he said, 'You're going to be dead for a lot longer than you're going to be alive. Why would you do something you have no passion for?' And I said, 'Because I don't know what else I could do.' And it took me having him that night say, 'You got to be kidding. All I've ever heard you talk about your whole life is how much you love food and restaurants.' And so I said, 'Should I just go eat in restaurants for my whole life?' He said, 'No, you fool. You should open one.' And at this point, I'm like 25 years old, 26 maybe. It had never ever dawned on me to open a restaurant. But I took the LSAT, never applied to one law school. And on that Monday, right after that, I applied to go to the New York Restaurant School management class. And the application meant simply that your check didn't bounce and I was off to the races.

Well, after he did say that and after I took that restaurant management class, I got a job working as an assistant lunch manager at an Italian seafood restaurant in New York City. That was in 1984. And so my preparation for opening the restaurant besides all my life experiences and I did have the privilege of a lot of travel because of my dad's travel business. But that restaurant really taught me how much I love this business. And I spent eight months there and then I spent four months cooking in Italy and France after that and after that year of preparation I came back to the city and starting in January of 1985 I started looking for a space by October 21st I opened my restaurant Union Square Cafe.

What I had seen in New York City during the years that I had lived there starting in 1981 actually was the food was really really good there. But the restaurants weren't nearly as nice as the ones I had grown up with in St. Louis. And when I say they weren't nice, they were fancy nice, but they weren't nice to you. And they were the kind of restaurants where almost like an outgrowth of the Studio 54 era in New York City where people wanted to go to a restaurant even more because it was hard to get in and like the meaner they were to you, the more you wanted to go. That wasn't me. And I just asked this question. I said, I actually think that the cooking at that point was better in New York than it was when I grew up in St. Louis. The restaurant scene today in St. Louis is stupendous. I'm really really excited by it. But back then, you know, outside of a small handful of restaurants, it was much more about the hospitality here. And so I asked myself this question. And I said, 'Whoever wrote the rule that really good food would taste any worse if you applied some St. Louis hospitality?' And it has worked.

Well, a lot of things. They would judge you on the way in to decide whether you were going to get the best table or the table next to the restroom or the waiter station. And that actually was the real impetus for me to make sure that we had more corner tables in our restaurants than any other place and that we wouldn't have a bad table. But they also looked down there and I was often a solo diner in my 20s because I was learning about food. I just loved restaurants. And as a solo diner, there were a lot of restaurants in New York that automatically must have had this judgment. Well, that guy's going to spend half as much as everybody else, so we're not going to give him a reservation. And back then, most restaurants didn't serve food at the bar either, which is one of the reasons that in 1985, I wanted to break that rule in New York City and serve really good food at the bar and make the bar very welcoming to any diner, but especially solo diners. So, that was another way I think there was agism. You know, that kid can't possibly know anything. So, a lot of times what I would do, because they wouldn't even take a reservation half the time, if you said one person, is that I would make a reservation for two people, right? And I'd sit down and I'd order a bottle of wine while I was quote unquote waiting for my guest. I'd start looking at my watch. And at this point, they couldn't say I was cheap because I had a whole bottle that I was clearly was not going to finish by myself. But that's how passionate I was about learning about restaurants. And you know, I'd walk up and down the avenues of New York memorizing menus. This was before we had the internet. And little did I know this was going to really be the foundation for a career that I have been so fortunate and privileged to be in.

Yeah, there was not a cuckoo clock per se, but lots of pieces of art. Art was something really, really important to me. And everybody seemed to have a favorite table. I really wanted Union Square Cafe to be an inclusive club. Meaning, there was exclusive clubs where you're not good enough to get in, but I wanted it to be the kind of place that anybody could come. And if you were a first-time guest, we wanted an experience where if you came in coach class, we would upgrade you to the feeling you were in first class. And if you were already in first class, meaning you were a regular at the restaurant, you know, we would just know you in and out. We would know your family and you know, that was my one and only restaurant for the first 10 years of my career. And I was there practically every meal service. And that's where I really learned the business, but it's where I really learned the power of hospitality as well.

Enlightened hospitality is a priority system where you believe that life has vicious cycles where one bad thing keeps leading to something even worse and life has virtuous cycles where one good thing keeps leading to something even better. Enlightened hospitality believes that while food and beverage are really important for a restaurant, that's not what earns you a place in your guests' hearts. What earns you a place in people's hearts is hospitality. How do you prioritize that? The first people that get the priority are your staff. They get the hospitality first. They are the input to the virtuous cycle because the happier your staff feels, the greater the odds that they're going to do extraordinary things for your guests. So, we found out that unlike what I learned in St. Louis, we put the customer second and we put our own team first. And then the third stakeholder in that virtuous cycle would be our community. What were the things we could do for our community? In that case, it was the Union Square neighborhood. And then it became much larger to New York City and you know hopefully we do great things in whichever communities we open and then after that our suppliers and then our investors but remember it's not the investors at the bottom of a totem pole. It's a virtuous cycle and we think we can actually under enlightened hospitality do even better by our investors because they are the outcome of all those other inputs and furthermore the best way to take care of our staff it turns out is when they get raises and promotions. And when does that happen? That happens when our investors make money.

I reject that wholeheartedly because nobody's always right. Maybe my wife is, but outside of that, I think that I learned the hard way. Actually, very soon after becoming a restaurateur, there was a group of investment bankers out to dinner at Union Square Cafe. And I didn't even know what an investment banker did back then. But there was one guy who waved me over and he said, 'Bring me your best Chardonnay.' So I politely said yes. And I went to the bar and we had just put a Meursault, a white Burgundy from a white Burgundy from I forget which producer, but it doesn't even matter. The wine was probably $45 on our list. Today, that same wine would probably be $400 on the list, but $45 was a big sale in 1985. I bring it to the table. The investment banker waves me away in front of all of his guests and he said, 'That's not a Chardonnay.' And it is a Chardonnay. And I'm going, what do I do? I said, 'It is a Chardonnay, sir.' And then I had, you know, my parents on my shoulder going, 'The customer is always right.' And I'm going, 'But he's not. He's wrong.' And so I went back and forth probably three times before I finally said, 'Sounds like you'd like a California Chardonnay.' And he said, 'That's what I asked for.' Well, and I realized that day something that I take with me every single day of my life, which is not only is the customer not always right, but it's irrelevant who's right and who's wrong. All I needed to have done is to let the customer feel heard. And it wasn't until I said, 'Sounds like he wanted a California Chardonnay' that he melted. And then I brought him a $35 bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer and everybody was very happy. But no, the customer is not always right. And it just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. That doesn't stop us from doing extraordinary things for our guests. I'm not always right. My staff members are not always right. Who cares?

Well, I was not afraid of failing before opening Union Square Cafe. I had that passion in me that my uncle had unlocked and trying to deny myself opening my first restaurant would have been like when you tell a kid to stop scratching a mosquito bite. I didn't have a choice. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I've always seen what could possibly go right. What I was averse to was expanding and that's why it took me 10 years to open a second restaurant which would become Gramercy Tavern. That's in fact, you know, and then it was another four years and I opened Eleven Madison Park and four weeks after that Tabla and then Shake Shack. It took 5 years to open a second Shake Shack. So my risk aversion had much more to do with expanding something.

And the new book, What Could Possibly Go Right, builds on Setting the Table. Setting the Table was my exploration of the power of hospitality. But what Setting the Table did not do was tell me what do you do now that you're scaling your business? How do you make sure not to lose that special something which is culture that made you work so well in the first place? And so I've spent 20 years sometimes stumbling, learning about how to scale culture alongside the business. And they're not necessarily natural bedfellows growing your business and advancing your culture, but it can be done. I've learned lessons and I wanted to share those lessons.

It's kind of like the same reason a chef writes a cookbook of her recipes and without fearing that someone's all of a sudden going to open a competing restaurant. This is a cookbook for culture. And I want to share what we've learned because if I can say one of the things I'm proudest about my entire career, it's not necessarily any of the restaurants and I'm really really proud of our restaurants. I think when I wrote Setting the Table, that book over the last 20 years has had an impact on more people's careers and not just in the restaurant business. I hear from people in many many different fields that Setting the Table has really helped them to provide a compass for how they do business and I hope this will do the same thing for very different reasons.

Well, I don't regret most of what I wrote in Setting the Table except for one sentence and it's right in the first paragraph of Setting the Table and I really wish I hadn't written it. What I'd said in that first paragraph was because when I wrote Setting the Table I said in 25 years I've opened seven restaurants maybe more I forget and I've never had the experience of closing any of them as if it were the biggest badge of courage to never close a restaurant and as a result of writing that Tabla which was in fact in retrospect a very successful Indian restaurant it was a groundbreaking restaurant it was around for 13 years really launched the career of all kinds of really talented people, including James Beard award-winning chefs and restaurateurs, but I thought it was failure to close a restaurant, and I didn't want to have to go back and rewrite Setting the Table. And so, I kept Tabla open a good two years longer than I should have because of my own foolish pride and also because I was really upset. I had never laid off an employee in my entire career. And now I was going to be telling 120 people that they would not have a job in four months.

What I told as a story in the book, What Could Possibly Go Right is what if we could actually distinguish ourselves as much by the style with which we closed a restaurant as we had with how we had opened it. And so I was determined not to be the kind of restaurateur that goes out of business and the staff comes to a restaurant just to find the door padlocked one day, but to actually take those last four months and really do the best we could. We gave resume writing classes. We held a job fair in the restaurant, including with not just our other restaurants, but also chefs who had been alum of Tabla. We invited in Indian chefs to cook a benefit dinner for Madison Square Park. And at the end of the day, we've fortunately found a way to exit the restaurant where good things happened for our team members. And even our investors got, it's a paltry return, but everybody who invested got 18 cents back on their dollar. So, nobody lost money. Paid all of our taxes, paid the landlord. And so when I look back, those are kind of rudimentary ways of looking at success and failure. But the real success I think of any restaurant, whether it's open for 5 years or 15 years or in the case of Union Square Cafe, 41 years or Gramercy Tavern, 32 years. The real measure of success for me is did the restaurant make people's lives better while it was open? Did it make the community in which it did business better? Would people miss it if it were gone? And that's what I write about, which I call essentiality. And that's really what motivates me more than anything.

Culture is an intent. Or it can be an intent. Culture is a fancy word for how we do things around here. Culture is what happens when I'm not in the room. So, for example, the story you just told about Shake Shack, that makes me really happy because there's a whole lot of Shake Shacks I'm not in the room of, and there's a whole lot of restaurants in New York City that I'm not in the room of. How is the team behaving and treating one another and treating you, our guest, even when I'm not there? Culture is an intent. You can have a culture with no intent. I know families that just and businesses the way they do things is the way they do things. But having an uplifting culture that makes people feel better, that tries to make people's lives better, that has to be an intent. That does not happen by accident.

Yeah. I 100%. So to this day, and this will change, but to this day, we do not have a full-service fine dining restaurant outside of New York City. We have Shake Shacks all over the world. Shake Shack is more of a system-driven business. It doesn't have a maitre d' to remember your favorite table or a waiter to remember what you're allergic to. We don't have a florist. We don't have a, you know, a sommelier for wine. So, I obviously got over my fear of growing Shake Shack beyond New York City, but it's taken me this long in my career to get to the point where we will have a restaurant in Boston later in this calendar year. And we just opened a beautiful bar with food in Detroit. And so, it's taken me a long time to get to that point. I care deeply about having a high-touch experience. And I believe we have learned how to do it and I'm ready.

We really have been very taken with the urban reclamation of that city. It's been led by a business person by the name of Dan Gilbert who has done a spectacular job of doing something that I think St. Louis deserves, which is taking the downtown area, which may not have the tax base of metropolitan Detroit, and giving people a reason to want to live there, a reason for people not just to go to sporting events, and that's where they have all of their sports facilities just like St. Louis, but also to have arts, restaurants, hotels, and great new lofts that have been created out of beautiful building stock. St. Louis has just about all that. They just need their version or we need I say we because I'll always feel like a St. Louisan and we need our version of Dan Gilbert.