He said, "What's the biggest complaint we get today at Shake Shack with one?" And I said, "The biggest complaint is the line is too damn long." Keep in mind this is before there were order apps, right, where you could pre-order ahead.
And by the way, all this is making me hungry. I wish you had brought me a coffee.
And he said, "What if we... why didn't we do that?" Um, he said, "What if we, uh, what if we cannibalize that line and make the line more manageable? Isn't that a good reason to open a second one?" And blah blah blah. So, I finally succumbed to Randy. It wasn't my idea. We opened the second Shake Shack. The line at the first Shake Shack gets twice as long.
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Danny Meyer, great to see you, Danny. Katie, I am so excited to talk with you about so many things because this book, I think, has so many different aspects to it. Life lessons, fun anecdotes, um, everything under the sun. Your last book, Setting the Table, came out, as I mentioned, in 2006. So, here you are 20 years later, two decades of life experiences. What took you so damn long, Danny?
I'm a really slow writer, apparently. Yeah. No, I had to actually live this next book. I wasn't ready to write about stuff I had already written about. And when I write books, it's really to teach myself. I have a lot of feelings about a lot of things, but I'm not necessarily great at taking stuff that was intuitive and making it intentional. And so, the act of writing about it helps me learn myself.
Was it fun writing it? Was it difficult? How did you do it? I'm fascinated by the process of writing books because I interview so many different authors. Some of them wake up and write from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Others wish, you know. Yeah. So, how do you do it and when do you do it?
I take a lot of airplane trips because the only time I'm ever alone in my life basically is when I'm on an airplane. So, that was a big part of it. But I do have a style. I never wanted to have a ghostwriter because I really love writing. I don't like fighting to find time to write, but I love writing. But I do have a collaborator and I had a fantastic collaborator named Brett Warshaw. And the story that I would tell to kind of describe the process, it may be apocryphal, I'm not sure if it's true or not, but the story goes that someone went up to Michelangelo after seeing the David in Florence and they said, "How in the world did you make something so beautiful?" And apparently Michelangelo says, "I just got the best piece of marble I could find and chipped away everything that wasn't David." And that's how I worked with Brett on this book, which is basically for four years we would sit in a room and she had the microphone going and I just told stories. And then when I told a story, she would push me to tell more about the story and push me to tell more about the story. And that process gave me the tools so that I could sit down, organize the book, write the book, try to decide, should this be chronological, should it be more thematically organized. Um, but I promise you, Katie, that if I had just sat down at a computer, I wouldn't have gone to some of the places that I ended up going when I wrote the book.
And a collaborator really kind of keeps you on track, too. I find that when I wrote my book, uh, I had a collaborator, Lucy Kalin, who I love to this day. And I think it's also just having someone honestly say, "You got to do this. You've got to finish this. This has to be done."
It's like having a personal trainer, but as a writer.
It is. It is. That's so true. Well, let's talk about the title. What Could Possibly Go Right. How did you land on that, Danny?
Two different ways. Um, I had given a fireside chat at Wharton with Adam Grant a few years ago. And one of Adam's questions was about entrepreneurial spirit and how do I come up with all these ideas? You know, he listed all these different restaurants. Where does it come from? And my answer without thinking about it was I kind of start by thinking about a problem that exists, a solution that I think I have. And then the next question I always ask is what could possibly go right if we tried it? And his jaw dropped because it obviously turns the age-old expression, what could possibly go wrong, on its head. And we're in a taxi cab on the way to dinner after the talk and he said, you are writing a new book, aren't you? And I said, yeah. He said, "You should really consider that as the title of the book because I think it's the way you think." And then the year after that, I was invited to give the commencement address at Trinity College. I know you've done many of these, but Trinity is my alma mater.
I know. And my husband John's.
I know that. And you take it really seriously when it's your own place. And you really distill what matters to you when you give a commencement. It's, you know, it's just like 18 minutes long or whatever, which is probably 16 minutes longer than the graduates want to hear you, but I kept coming back to this theme and I kept thinking about all the things that had gone right in my life that I had not intended except that I had brought that spirit of optimism and that's when all the good stuff happens. And by the way, you know as well as anyone on earth that things don't always go right. And this is not a book that's Pollyanna-ish in any way. You know, you read What Could Possibly Go Right. I put the warts out there, the mistakes, all the stuff. But that doesn't mean that that approach doesn't make the good stuff even better.
In the first paragraph of Setting the Table, you wrote, "Over the course of the past 21 years, I've opened and operated five white tablecloth restaurants, an urban barbecue joint, a feel-good jazz club, a neo-roadside standing frozen custard, burgers, and hot dogs, three modern museum cafes, an off-premises restaurant-quality catering company. So far, I haven't had the experience of closing any of them, and I pray I never will." In retrospect, were you being a little too optimistic when you wrote that?
Well, that was 20 years ago. And while I stand by everything else I wrote in Setting the Table, I deeply regret that because implicit in that, you know, hubristic statement about how proud I was never to have closed a restaurant in 25 years was that there's something about restaurants that should be immortal. And that's not the case. And I had a shame and a fear of failing. And so I opened What Could Possibly Go Right. The opening paragraph in that is about closing my first restaurant, Tabla.
And it really helped me to explore that within what one sees as failure at that time are really the greatest lessons that can be liberating. And closing Tabla was one of the hardest things I ever did in my career. And yet we did it the right way and we did it in a way that brought that same ethos of what could possibly go right. What could go right if we could distinguish ourselves as well by the style with which we closed a restaurant as we had by how well we had opened it.
And you didn't always think that way, Danny. In fact, you tell a story about being at a Mets game and you find out that Union Square Cafe has lost a star in the New York Times review, my friend Frank Bruni. I hope you don't hate Frank because I love him.
I think Frank is an amazing writer and I hope Frank enjoys reading this book.
All right. This was back in 2009. And I think it really illustrates, Danny, how you evolved and how your view of failure, your view of setbacks changed because back then you kind of freaked out about it. Talk about what happened when you left the Mets game.
I didn't kind of freak out about it. We had never, at that point, we had never lost a star. And you may say, well, what difference does a star make for a restaurant? It means everything to the morale of the team working there. And Union Square Cafe had had three stars from the New York Times with three different critics since 1988. And the thing that really took us by surprise is that when Frank was writing this review of Union Square Cafe, we were asleep at the wheel. Why were we asleep at the wheel? Because at the same time he was reviewing Eleven Madison Park and he was in the process of upgrading Eleven Madison Park from three to four stars and we were all over every single one of those visits. And while we were all over every single one of those visits, unbeknownst to us, he had snuck into Union Square Cafe. I had never once been in the restaurant. The maître d's never once recognized him, which should be malpractice. You should recognize and understand every critic. And so number one, we were completely taken aback that he had reviewed the place. Well, I'm at the Mets game watching my St. Louis Cardinals play the Mets. Cardinals had a big lead. I was enjoying the game. We had just opened Shake Shack in Citi Field at that point. So there was, I was having a great night and back then I had a BlackBerry because they didn't even have iPhones. Or at least I didn't have one. And I get a text from our PR person on our team, Michelle, saying, "Great news. We just got our third star." And she sends me the review with three stars on the top of Union Square Cafe, not Eleven Madison Park. And I start reading the review. As I'm reading it, the review didn't really read like a three-star review. This could be better, that they've lost a step here. Meanwhile, the Mets take the lead over the Cardinals. Everything's now going wrong. And she texts me five minutes later saying, "The Times made a mistake. It's actually a two-star review." And with that, my heart sank. We had never lost a star. And I'm going to myself, "Oh my god, I've got to get back to the restaurant. I've got to somehow let these people cry on my shoulder. The chef, the general manager, the rest of the team." I didn't want to go there, but I had to. So, I'm in such an out-of-body experience at this moment. I can't even find my car in the parking lot of Citi Field. So, I start like beeping on the key fob to get my car horn to start so I can figure out where it was. Find my car, get in my car to go back to Union Square Cafe. Somehow I was in such a surreal space that the next moment I find myself conscious. I'm on the departures ramp at LaGuardia airport. My car drives itself to LaGuardia. Talk about fleeing the city. I wanted to get the hell out of town, but I ended up going to Union Square Cafe. It felt like walking into a funeral. And I knew, you know, the Times doesn't come back and re-review you very often at all. I mean, we have restaurants like The Modern has not been reviewed for 10 years. So, which is crazy. I mean, I'm happy to have our three stars, but I think, you know, so it was a tough moment and it took us really five more years to earn back our third star at Union Square Cafe after that.
I think people listening to this or watching it, Danny, have no idea like what a big friggin' deal one little star is.
And it doesn't matter as much for business. You know, in the old days, a good review could take a, you know, a modestly successful restaurant and make it majorly successful. Or a good review, you know, could make the chef ask for a raise. But a bad review doesn't really put you out of business anymore. What it does is it just means that the whole team feels horrible and the stars on your team want to work. If they came to work at a three-star restaurant, they want a three-star restaurant on their resume and so you potentially can lose people.
So that's the real tough thing about a bad review.
But Eleven Madison Park got three stars.
Eleven Madison Park got raised to four stars.
Four stars. So, the New York Times giveth, the New York Times taketh away.
Exactly. Now, I will say in retrospect, as my grandfather once taught me, you're never quite as good as the great things they say, and you're never quite as bad as the bad things. You just really have to know who you are. I will say though that mostly in retrospect, the New York Times reviews have been pretty accurate. And Union Square Cafe did deserve to get demoted that year. We got it back, but we deserved it.
I hope you send an autographed copy of this book to Frank. [laughter] If not, I will if you give it to me. Um, you know, it's so true, Danny. You are very honest about failure in this book. You talk about restaurants that close like Tabla, people you held on to for too long, even when you knew they weren't the right fit, decisions that didn't go the way you hoped. Um, here in addition to closing Tabla, which I know was so near and dear to your heart, you loved the chef there, was Creative Juice, the juice bar in Equinox Gyms, Martina, the fine casual Roman-style pizza restaurant, Cafe Marquio, whose location proved less than ideal. Um, what did you learn from all of those failures?
Most of the time that our restaurants have not succeeded. And by the way, I'm not sure what a failure is. The late restaurateur Joe Baum used to talk about a classic restaurant. And he described a classic restaurant as one that lives longer than its original lease. That's a pretty good way to look at it. And we've actually done that with many of our restaurants. We've actually not done that with several of our restaurants. And I think the ones that have not outlived their original lease, most of them had one thing in common. I had not listened to my gut. And when I open a restaurant that is based on something I'm really excited about, um, it tends to work. When I open a restaurant because it seems opportunistic, because the deal was really good, you know, this developer gave us a great deal, or in some of those cases, I really wanted to give an opportunity to someone on our team to show some of their entrepreneurial spirit, but it wasn't really mine. And I'm not saying people on our team don't have great ideas. But if I look back, the restaurants that did not work were the ones that really did not have my thumbprint on them.
Gosh. But your gut must be pretty darn good, Danny, because... [laughter] No, it's not. But I was thinking about the failure rate of restaurants is obscenely high, isn't it? What is... do you know off the top of your head the percentages?
I don't know. But I know that the good thing for one of us who is a restaurant lover, I'm a consumer as much as I am a restaurateur, is that there's always someone ready to open a new restaurant in the one that closes. And it seems like, you know, we all eat three meals a day and there's always someone who's got an idea for how we should eat our next meal and where. So, it's a fun business to be in because you know what we're in the business of is trying to make people feel better. And we're not rocket scientists. We're not flying airplanes. We just, however you felt when you came into the restaurant, our job is for the next two hours, what can we do to help you feel better?
Restaurant culture is so interesting to me just hearing you talk. You and I are contemporaries. We're about the same age. I think about growing up now. Some of it could have been because my parents didn't have a lot of money and everything my dad earned or any like $5 check I got from my grandmother for my birthday went into our college fund. So, we never went out to restaurants when I was growing up. I remember we decided to go out once a month to a restaurant. It was like a really big deal in our family and that lasted maybe three months. But it's so interesting to me that restaurants have become such centers of community and culture and entertainment and social life. But it wasn't always like that, was it?
No, it wasn't. And you know, even growing up in St. Louis, um, we didn't go out that often. And in fact, while the restaurants really taught me a lot about hospitality because people were really nice, the food really, outside of, you know, loving Smashburgers and frozen custard, um, Ted Drews frozen custard, um, Crown Candy Kitchen, Fitz's concrete, right? You called it the concrete.
Called it the concrete because you could turn it upside down and it didn't pour. I had a concrete when I was in St. Louis and I had a friend from college, Joe Switzer, who was Switzer Licorice.
Not many people know about Switzer's Licorice, you know.
I don't think it's still around, is it? But I heard that the factory where they made it, you would walk around it and the whole block would smell like licorice. Well, I'm launching What Could Possibly Go Right in St. Louis because I just thought it was fitting. That place, that town gave me my love for hospitality because what I was going to say is that despite the fact that we didn't go out that much because the food was not really remarkable back then, today, by the way, St. Louis has a fantastic restaurant community, but it didn't. So, by very few, a very few places did, right?
I think you're right. And now almost every city in the country has a food culture, which is very exciting to your earlier point. I also thought, Danny, a good title for your book might have been, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.
That was in the parking lot of ideas. You know, when you go to a hotel, they always put the best cars right in the front. And you think, never mind. You think, "Oh my gosh, everybody must drive a Ferrari or an Aston Martin." There were four titles in the parking lot that I was considering. The first one was Gut Check because so much of this book is about you get to these crossroads in life all the time about should I do this or should I do that. Then I decided not a great title for a guy in the restaurant business. Gut Check. But another one that was right up there in the front was It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Um, I'm glad that I landed on What Could Possibly Go Right because it's just been the underlying ethos for every single thing that's worked, even in really tough situations. The pandemic, right? There's a whole chapter called Crossing the Bridge and I don't think there was any challenge we had greater than the pandemic. We had to lay off 90% of our staff. And for a business that has been built on putting its own people first, how do you reconcile that with laying people off? And the metaphor I came up with was the rickety bridge that you may remember from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And I said, "Guys, here we are on this bank. We can't take all of us across that bridge, but we are going across that bridge. Does anyone think that the pandemic is the thing that's going to end the world?" We were doing Zoom calls with hundreds of people from our team and no one raised their hand. Everyone said, "No, this won't be the end of the world." Okay. Then I said, "Does anyone think they know when this is going to end?" No one raised their hand. I said, "I don't either, but I'll tell you one thing. If it is going to end, the one thing we can be in somewhat control of is who were we while it was happening and who do we want to be when we get to the other side?" And I said, "The only way we can get to the other side is to have less of us. We're going to actually have to close some of our businesses and then we have to say, who do we want to be on the other side?" And that really helped. A good friend, Ricky Elias, um, who you should all watch his TED talk. He was one of the survivors on the Sully flight over the Hudson.
Gosh. Well, I covered that story very closely.
I know you did. And he has a five-minute TED talk about the three things he learned during that moment. And it's well worth watching. But Rick gave me a great lesson. He came into my office. We were socially distanced like 12 feet apart and I was complaining about how hard it is. We couldn't open our restaurants for five months. It was against the law to open restaurants. We couldn't give hope to our people, to our guests. And he said, 'Look,' he said, 'this is the only time in your entire career where you are going to have the luxury of taking your boat, your business out of the water, putting it into dry dock, inspecting all the barnacles on the bottom, cleaning them off, patching all the holes, and making sure that when you put that boat back into the water, it's more seaworthy than it ever was when you put it in.' And that really helped me to think about how we could imagine what could possibly go right even with all the sadness of losing friends and neighbors, like people dying in this city. What could we find positive about this? And so I get back to the title of the book that wasn't about Gut Check. That wasn't about It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. That was about how can we take something this painful and make it end up being better for us. And we got much better as a company.
And I should add you continued to care about your staff during that time. You raised how much? $2.1 million for a fund.
We started a fund called the Hugs Fund, which is an anagram for USHG, Union Square Hospitality Group. But it was also something important to us, which is to partner with our guests. We sold gift cards. We said we will be open again. We sold gift cards. 100% of the proceeds of the gift cards went to the Hugs Fund. So we weren't banking money ourselves. We got friends to donate experiences, whether it was a wine tasting with a sommelier on Zoom or whether it was, you know, people digging into their wine cellars and contributing wines that people bought at auction. And by partnering with our team, by the way, our entire senior leadership team starting with me either took serious pay cuts, I gave all of my salary to the Hugs Fund, and we said, look, we have to end up being the best unemployer. Um, if we can't be an employer right now, we have to be the best unemployer. And the good news is that probably 60% of the people who had been on our team ended up coming back. But it was a really hard time, Katie, because a lot of people just left the industry, right? And or left the city altogether because they didn't trust that it was going to come back.
Well, that's interesting. You know, talking about closing a restaurant humanely and being an unemployer. I think it's sort of how can you be positive and caring during the worst of times, which is a great philosophy.
It is. It's so important because again, I'm not Pollyanna. And you know, the subtitle of this book was almost... so the subtitle is The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture.
It's a mouthful. It was even worse at a certain point. The Essential and Elusive Journey. Um, the reason that line on the front goes up and down is that that's what life is. But there was going to be a moment where it was going to be What Could Possibly Go Right in a World Where Things Often Don't. I'm really, really clear that things don't often go right. But I'm also very, very clear that having that real mindset and heartset is the thing that has mostly helped me when things don't go right.
Have you always been an optimist? You know, my late husband used to say I was born on a sunny day, which I thought was such a nice compliment. And I am sort of hardwired, I think, to be happy. Do you feel like you have always been an optimistic person from the time you were a little kid?
I do. And I think I've always...
You're lucky, by the way.
I am lucky. You know, there's a quote that I wrote in What Could Possibly Go Right from Shimon Peres.
I love that quote. And he... Do you want me to read it because it's right in front of me?
I really do because it's...
I loved it too. Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist.
And it's hard to convince someone who is wired to be a pessimist not to be pessimistic. But there is scientific data that shows that being optimistic actually prolongs your life and probably makes you even happier while you're living your life. So to the degree that it's a choice for anybody, um, look, there is more than enough skepticism and cynicism and negativity in the world to go around and...
Especially right now. And you and I have talked about this before, but you know, with social media, the algorithms are stacked to really propel bad news and it's sad. I feel so badly and I just think that especially now if everyone only did one thing and they started their day, don't even be in the business world for this. If you just start your day by asking what could possibly go right today, I really think the odds are greater that something might.
I know you've said you are someone for whom the wine glass is half full, even before I pull the cork on the bottle. [laughter] Um, but at the same time, I thought it was interesting to read, you know, you've gone through your life at times feeling deeply insecure, admitting you have suffered from impostor syndrome, which I think almost every successful person has at one time or another. You seem so self-confident, but you write this, Danny: "At my core, my motivation in opening new restaurants was not to grow for growth's sake, but to challenge myself to surpass my own past performances. I wanted to prove that the success of each preceding restaurant hadn't been a fluke, that I wasn't the impostor that deep down I feared I was." I was surprised to read that.
There it is. That's, you know, what I have learned that in all of our lives, maybe not all of our lives, I'll talk about my life, I won't generalize this, but there are things that happen early on in your life that have a deep imprint on you and there's a chip and the chip leads to feeling like you have to prove something. In my life, I was the underachiever in a family that were a bunch of overachievers. Um, not that there's anything so right about Ivy League schools, but my dad and his father had gone to Princeton. My other grandfather had gone to Yale. My sister went to Harvard. And I didn't get into any college. I was 0 for 3. I was rejected from Princeton, rejected from Brown, and waitlisted at Trinity. And I kind of spent my entire childhood saying, "You're the one that didn't make it." I got off the waitlist at Trinity. And that was the biggest ass-kicking I needed that day that those three thin envelopes came to my house.
I remember them well, Danny. I got you myself. Oh, my sisters both went to Smith College and they love sisters apparently, but I didn't even get waitlisted. I got rejected and so I know how that feels like you are the family disappointment.
And do you also know the feeling that you then are... and you know that's at the age of what is it, 18 years old? Um, but the feeling started before that because my older sister had always been a rockstar student and you know I had been good enough but I was probably at the 50th percentile in my class and it just didn't matter to me that much to be a good student and I knew I could never do what she did so I just went out and played sports and did other stuff like that. But here's the thing. When I did get into Trinity, that was kind of like the moment when I kicked into fifth gear and I said, I'm going to show them. I'm going to show them. They should have taken me in the first place, but I was really talking to myself. I'm going to show myself that I can do this. And then, you know, I had one of my early jobs when I first moved to New York was as a salesman. And I was 22 years old. And I was determined to be the top salesman in the company. And I did that.
I was selling electronic tags to stop shoplifters. Don't you love those things when you go into a store? Those white tags.
Oh. That are stuck, that are like stapled on the item.
Yep. I sold those. But I also, our company had come up with a pressure-sensitive sticker that had a printed circuit on the back. So, I got Pathmark, ShopRite, the New York Public Library system, things you had to put a sticker on. And I was making a lot of money and I had so much fun winning. I can't even tell you. And it was just like I had...
I am a very competitive person. I love to win. Um, but I really love to try to outdo myself. And that comes out in the book. I learned that there's really three kinds of competition amongst people who are deeply competitive. There are people who absolutely are motivated because they can't stand to lose and then there are some who are absolutely motivated because they love beating someone else. And what I learned about myself is I started off hating to lose. I never really cared that much about who else I beat. But today I am very motivated by saying, you know, that last thing maybe that was just lucky. So I got to jump a little further or a little bit higher and do a little bit better.
So funny because at this point I know in the New York Times interview they were talking about how you could enjoy being a grandfather and hang out and yet you are still looking ahead at sort of what is the next hill to climb? What is the next thing you want to conquer?
