Our next guest is a best-selling author and award-winning restaurateur behind restaurants like Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack. His book, "What Could Possibly Go Right? The Essential Journey to Scale and Enduring Culture," is on sale today. Please welcome to the show Danny Meyer, everybody.
Oh, I'm so happy you're here.
Well, how do you think I feel about it? This is great.
All right, so you wrote your first book 20 years ago, which was "Setting the Table." You waited 20 years to write this book. You were busy. I don't blame you. But the restaurant business has changed so much in 20 years. Was that something — I mean, you must have been acutely aware of that. But in writing the book, did it really come home to you? Like how much your business has changed in the last 20 years?
In many ways, yes. And in many ways, no. So 20 years ago, what I really learned was the power of just being kind to people, and that that was a great driver for — it was a great driver for people falling in love with the restaurant. That has not changed whatsoever.
Right, so hospitality is as important today as it was 20 years ago.
I don't know one human being who would rather have you not be on their side. And that's what hospitality is. So what I learned in the last 20 years was that you can actually take that kindness and scale those values so that you can have more restaurants and people still appreciate when you're nice to them.
And you talk, you know — so Shake Shack, for example, this is a restaurant that there's now 700 worldwide. And you were hesitant to open a second one. Was that because at the time you didn't appreciate that you could scale what it is that's so important to you in your restaurants?
I was afraid that if we grew it, we would lose what had made us special in the first place. And so what this book is about is really my journey. And there's lots of stumbles in this book, but it's my journey where I learned that you can, and you'll stumble a few times. I've closed some restaurants, but when I wrote "Setting the Table," we had one Shake Shack. 20 years later, there's over 700 of them.
And the goal is that, yeah, I want the burger to taste consistently well everywhere, but what I really want is for people to kind of sense our thumbprint and that it feels the same way — that the way it feels to work there is similar, the way it feels to dine there is similar.
I also feel, you know, one of the things that's consistent across all your restaurants is it does seem like obviously the people who work there have to believe that as well, right? You can only hire people who care as much about hospitality and making people who walk through the door feel good as you do. And I would imagine those people are probably pretty easy to find because they like being treated that way when they go to a restaurant.
You know, people ask me the question all the time. They say generationally, can you still find people who care about being kind? Yes, yes, you can. You just have to care about it and look for it. And we really do focus on that. We hire people who we think have a high HQ. You've got a much higher IQ than I have.
I've got a pretty good HQ.
That's a hospitality quotient.
And that is someone who's actually happier themselves in the service of others.
That's fantastic. I want to talk one thing that has changed. And as a restaurateur, I'm curious to know. Obviously phones have changed the dining experience. Like people want to bring them into restaurants, they want to take pictures of their food. I think a lot of times they want to do this because they are having a great experience, right? Which you want them to have. How do you feel about phones in restaurants?
I think they are the postcard of our day. 20 years ago we did not have smartphones. That means we didn't have apps. That means we didn't have social media. So in the old days, we would give everybody a postcard with a stamp on it, and the purpose was, go tell your friends how much you loved it here. Today on social media, it's like, "Don't you wish you were here with me eating?" And they make their food look really pretty. I think it's great. The only thing I don't really appreciate, and I don't think guests appreciate, is when somebody is flashing their food all night.
Or if I'm out to dinner with someone and no one's allowed to start eating until this person's taken a picture of all the plates.
Yeah. My dad does a thing that's cool, which is he turns on his flashlight to read the menu, and then he leaves it on for the rest of the night. And then he'll just kind of wave it around. And I think a lot of the diners think he might be in peril.
Funny. I kind of think your dad eats in my restaurant every night.
