I came up with the name Shake Shack, uh, which a bunch of people on my team said, that's a terrible name. And as a matter of fact, I got my own doubts because I was at home watching Grease one night, and in the background, there's an amusement ride called Shake Shack, and I go, oh God, this must have been in my mind in some way, you know, from watching that years and years ago. But fortunately, I have not heard from anyone at Grease all these years later.
All right, here's a question. What makes something last? A restaurant, a business, even a relationship? And how do you hold on to what makes something special as it grows? Well, my guest today is one of my favorites, legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer. He's spent more than 40 years wrestling with those questions through huge successes, painful failures, and plenty of lessons along the way. In his new memoir, What Could Possibly Go Right, Danny gets candid about what went wrong, how failure changed him, and what he has learned about creating a culture where people truly matter. This is a special edition of Making Space, an extended cut of my broadcast interview with Danny Meyer. Okay, Danny, congrats on the book. The title is so you. It's called What Could Possibly Go Right. Okay, is this like, is this the way you live your life? Is that where we got this title?
This is the way I live my life, and as I looked at the things that have worked out, every single one of them started with my asking that question: What could possibly go right?
So in what ways does that phrase play out in your life? Give me some, give me, give me a little of that.
My life, like your life, like everybody's life, has ups and downs, and I think it's important from time to time to wonder what could go wrong. But I just think that the good stuff, the joy, the real happiness in life, the best ideas have always come from imagining what could possibly go right.
Oh God, that's so good. It's funny, I just interviewed an actress, and she said every time I walk into an audition, and she got rejected like 70 times in a row, she said I started thinking I already have this job. I got this job. So you did too. I kind of played it out in my head, but she, I mean, she walked in and was like, this is mine. When you own something, it's all of that. I always tell my kids that too. It's like thoughts become things.
Well, I will share with you that, um, when I decided after three years of operating a hot dog cart that we should convert it into a full-time kiosk, the first thing I did, and I asked my team to do, was to close our eyes, imagine that kiosk, imagine it at eight o'clock at night, and imagine lines of people circling around Madison Square Park, and that's exactly what ended up happening.
Oh, that's so cool. So you like visualized success, right?
I've grown up as somebody who did, at the age of 16 years old, getting a driver's license. We didn't have the internet, so what did we do for independence? We got in our car, met friends, generally in the parking lot of a burger shack or a frozen custard place in St. Louis. And the burger and the custard was really good, but the real reason we went was to be with people. And so what occurred to me was that Madison Square Park was like a parking lot for New York City. Most New York kids don't drive cars around the city, and so it was the exact same reason, which is people want to be with people.
You believe that things are going to go well. However, the restaurant business, anyone who's been in it knows this, is riddled with potholes. It's a tough business, it's hard, there are belly flops. And I thought it was very interesting that you started this book with the idea that you at one point had to close one of your restaurants, which was something that killed you. And I thought, what an interesting way to start the book, that you had to close Tabla. Why did you start that way, and what did you learn from that?
My editor made me do it. No, the real answer is that for 20 years, ever since writing Setting the Table, which continues to do really, really well, it's taught in schools everywhere. But there's one thing I wrote in that book that I really regretted, and proudly in the first paragraph, I stated how amazing it was that in the first 25 years of my career, I had opened 12 restaurants and never closed one of them, as if that were the badge of success. And it's not a crowning achievement never to have closed something. And so I really wanted to set the record straight that sometimes bad stuff does happen, but also I really wanted to explore what does failure mean? In whose eyes is something a failure? Is it my eyes? Is it my imaginary teacher or parents' eyes, the critics? And yeah, and I learned over time that failure is really the greatest teacher.
So when you had to walk in to Tabla and have a difficult conversation, so whether you are running a business, owning a business, or just a regular person, we have to go in and have the conversation that you don't want to have. When you had that conversation with the staff that you loved so much, how did you go about that conversation, and what did you learn from that?
Well, the first thing I did was dawdle for two years, and the next thing I did, once I made the decision that it was just irresponsible to keep the restaurant open, we were losing money, nobody was getting raises or promotions. I took the longest walk I've ever taken from my apartment to the restaurant, but I just marched in and I told people, I said, guys, it's not responsible to keep this restaurant open any longer. This is after taking about five minutes in the bathroom crying so that nobody would see me doing that. But it was really the turning point in my entire career, and the reason was that I realized that it freed me up to take more risks. I had been holding on to something that I shouldn't have been holding on to, and it also really taught me that you can actually close a restaurant with as much distinction as you had opened it in the first place. And so my what could possibly go right mentality kicked in, and we figured out a way for a quarter of a year after we gave everybody notice to actually celebrate the restaurant, to have job training for the people who would go on to get new jobs, to bring in other, it was an Indian restaurant, bring in other Indian cooks to celebrate what they had gifted us.
I mean, they always say like the two most important days of anything, whether it's a business or a relationship or friendship, is how it starts and how it ends. And sometimes the ending, you can muff that, you can turn it into something, but to turn it into a beautiful celebration, it seems like the way to do it. You, you're unique in this space, and I've admired you because you are somebody who puts your employees, you know, how they feel and how they are and what they're about above your customer. Like how your employees feel matters more to you than almost anything. Please explain that.
All right, so I have to say it's not that we put them above our customer, but we really believe in what I call the virtuous cycle of enlightened hospitality. And as is the case with any virtuous cycle, one good thing keeps leading to something even better. Yes. And so I want the input to be how our employees feel, how they take care of each other, what are the thoughtful things they do for one another. That's their job. And when that happens, I almost don't even need to worry that they're going to take amazing care of our guests, and then they're going to take great care of our community. They know that that's really important, and then our suppliers, and then our investors. So we all have the same five stakeholders in our lives. Everybody who's in business or in life has those. I believe that the happiest investors are happiest because we first made sure that our employees felt great about their job.
How do you find people who are empathetic, who know how to help somebody, who aren't someone who, you know, someone is not without a short fuse? How do you find those specific workers?
Well, I think when anyone looks for a job, they're hoping that that job is a 100% job for them. And we hope that a prospective employee is a 100% employee. And the way we think about it, Hoda, is that 49 points of that 100 are how well they know how to do the job. It could be being a cook, could be being a maître d' or sommelier or bookkeeper, but 51 of those points are who they are while they're doing that job. And so we look for emotional skills that we call having a high hospitality quotient, high HQ. And someone with a really high HQ is somebody who's actually happier themselves when they're doing thoughtful things for somebody else. We're not all like that. I have great friends and relatives who probably don't have a high HQ. I just don't want to hire them. But for people who thrive here, no matter what their actual job, they all have to come in with a high HQ.
I was in one of your restaurants, Daily Provisions in New York, and I was sitting there, and I remember there was a woman who was coming to the door of the restaurant, and she had a walker, and she was having trouble, and I was trying to see what was going on, wrestling with the door. I was about to, you know, like, one of your employees practically hurtled over the counter and ran over to that door and opened it for her, invited her in. So I was watching this in slow motion, and I thought, I don't know what Danny's doing in this restaurant, but whatever it is, it's amazing and it's working. And it was as if it was nothing, and then right back to the regular job. It was nothing, and whoever that person was did it because that's who they are.
And I've always believed culture is what happens when I'm not in the room. And it didn't take me telling the person you saw to do that. It did take me to hopefully help fuel the kind of culture where that's the kind of person we would want to hire.
When anybody comes into a restaurant, and you cover this in your book too, it's like they're going to enjoy a meal, but there's something more that matters to you, um, as opposed to whether or not the steak was cooked perfectly.
Invariably, if you come to our restaurants often enough, the steak won't be cooked perfectly. I hate to say that, but what people remember more than anything, and Maya Angelou said it best when she said, long after you forget what someone said or what they did, you're going to remember how they made you feel. Same thing holds true in restaurants. Restaurants are just our laboratory, but it could be in any business. It could be in anything. You're going to hopefully enjoy your steak, but the thing that's going to linger is how we made you feel.
I, there was one anecdote in the book that just struck me. It was a story of, I think, a waitress who accidentally dribbled some olive oil on a suede dress of this person, and this person came up, you were there, and she said to you, look what happened, and you're like, oh, we'll make it right, we'll make it right. Now, some people might have done something to the bill or sent a bottle of wine and sorry or whatever, but you guys did something, or your employee did something way beyond that.
Yeah, well, the first thing we did was we said she doesn't want to sit here feeling embarrassed in front of her guests, so we got her a pashmina shawl, and then our general manager learned where she had just bought that dress that morning. It was a Calvin Klein dress, Calvin Klein suede dress. They are not inexpensive, I'll tell you that. Spoke to the general manager of the Calvin Klein store, who of course remembered making the sale. They had one more in the size. The next day, we had a package delivered to her home with a brand new dress, three bottles of wine, some salami, a $500 gift certificate to come back, and of course a big bottle of olive oil that said sorry. Like sometimes you just got to have a sense of humor about it, but also we believe in what we call the five A's of mistake making, which is mistakes are the greatest natural human recurring resource. That's all we do all day is make mistakes. But what if you could actually end up in a better position because of how you handled the mistake? And that gets back to what could possibly go right.
What happened in your childhood that made you, there must be something that turned you into this optimist, this person who believed in the best of people, this person who believes that we can make someone's day by doing something small. What, what happened back then?
A lot. I was the middle child of three growing up in the middle state in the country. I was from St. Louis, Missouri. And I had a Republican dad and a Democratic mom, and we had, shall we say, discussions every breakfast, watching the Today Show, every night watching the nightly news. And food was the thing that brought us all together. We all, it was really hard to sustain an argument when you had a good barbecued rib in your hand or a good piece of fried chicken, but I was the guy that just wanted people to feel better.
I wanted peace in my own family, and the fact that the stage for that happened to be the dinner table or the breakfast table is a pretty good predictor of why I made that my career, doing the same thing in restaurants.
Who was the optimist in your house other than you? Your mom, your dad?
Probably my mom. Yeah, she lived in six places by the time she was 18, and I went to five schools by the time I was 18, and you learn some social skills along the way because you want to try to find your place. But look, I feel like the greatest human longing is to belong, and that's what I spent my youth doing was hoping to belong. And I found that I was never the smartest in my class. I was never the best athlete. I was never the best, but not the best. And I found that, you know, how I made people feel was a pretty good currency.
How did you, um, you know, you go and your book, by the way, is so interesting because sometimes when someone writes a book about their career, it has a whole bunch of happy, beautiful, everything was good. You really get in it. You kind of, you talk about the words, you talk about how hard, you talk about difficult conversations. You talk about times when you had to, you know, kind of break up with someone who you were, for Gramercy Tavern, I'm thinking about how you guys had to like go your separate ways. And you don't sugarcoat any of it.
I don't think that would be interesting. I mean, that would be like, you know, sometimes you see on Instagram everybody's perfect day. I don't think that that would be a particularly interesting book to read. And I think it's important for people to understand that there is no such thing as a straight line between point A and point B, whether you're in a sailing regatta or you're in life or you're a family or you're a business. I think that there's lots and lots of ups and downs, and I just will never stop believing that if you bring an attitude of what could possibly go right, even to those tough moments, which there are many of, that ultimately your downs will go up a little bit further the next time.
I love how you carved that title out. Um, you'd given a commencement address at your college, and it's, isn't it funny how things come to you? So tell me about what your commencement address and how that title came.
Well, as you know, because you've done this before, you, it's a high responsibility to give a commencement address. And I just kept thinking about all the things in my life that I had not necessarily planned, but that by taking the risk and imagining what could possibly go right, the good stuff happened. And so, yeah, I was rejected from three different schools, finally got off the waitlist at Trinity College. For some reason, took it upon myself to go to a softball game on night one that I did not want to go to. Met a guy who became one of my best friends, who many years later would introduce me to a restaurant where I would many years after that meet my wife, meet the general manager and chef of Union Square Cafe, meet the neighborhood, meet a career. And I just one day, but that's all because if you imagine what could possibly go right, it sometimes happens.
The Shake Shack story to me is one of my favorites. I've relayed it at other speaking events and probably can't get every part of it right, but will you, that story to me, the organic nature of Shake Shack's beginning and what happened, will you tell me that story?
Sure. Um, this was all the way back in 1998. I was imagining two new restaurants from Madison Square Park, 11 Madison Park and Tabla, and everything was great except that the park itself was in disrepair. So I helped to lead an organization called the Madison Square Park Conservancy, and one of the things that I knew was that we can go raise a bunch of money and make the park safe and beautiful, but you got to give people a reason to use it. So the first idea that occurred to me was, let's have art in the park, and we got a piece of art in the park that happened to be made by a Thai sculptor, and he had four taxi cabs in the sky, and he wanted a working hot dog cart beneath it. And I said, what could possibly go right if we operated his hot dog cart out of the kitchen of 11 Madison Park? Um, my team looked at me like I was crazy. They said, we can't do this. We have guests to focus on. Well, the hot dog cart ended up having lines of 150 people every day.
What was unique about it?
I wanted to put my theory of hospitality to work, and I wanted to see, could you take something as common as a hot dog cart and make people fall in love with it? Based on remembering their favorite toppings, we did Chicago-style hot dogs, which have eight toppings. And I, Hoda is the woman who likes everything except pickle relish. Danny's the guy that absolutely loves sport peppers. Give them double. And it became people's favorite, and we did this for three consecutive years, even after the art moved away. And then I said, let's turn this into a permanent.
I love one of the ideas you had was you said, let's put a camera on the hot dog cart so that people in neighboring buildings could see whether there was a line or not.
Yeah, we called it the Shack Cam. So we opened Shake Shack, uh, four years after the hot dog cart started, and the only real complaint we got was the line is too long. And so we said, we've got an idea. We put a live webcam on the top, we call it the Shack Cam, and people would sit there waving to their friends in their office. But they could then decide whether it was worth their time to go there and remember that this is before we had social media. Yes, yes, we didn't even have smartphones until two years after Shake Shack opened.
