A lot of stuff that I wrote was not fun to write about. There's a lot of chapters in there that I struggled with and struggled with because I frankly didn't want to go there. But I did and I'm glad I did. I'm hopeful that a lot of the stuff, a lot of the tough things that have happened are also transferable opportunities for other people to make different mistakes instead of the same stupid ones I've made.
Dear listener, joining me now is none other than Danny Meyer, founder and executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality Group. Danny is the restaurateur behind Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, Daily Provisions, and many, many more, as well as the founder of a little thing called Shake Shack. His new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, comes out September 29th, and he'll be in Los Angeles on October 5th for the LA Chef Conference, where he'll be in conversation with Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison. Danny, welcome to the LA Food Podcast.
Grazie, Luca, benvenuto. We were just connecting before the podcast. Danny loves Rome. I'm of course from Rome. I'll ask you a Rome-coded question later, but before we do that, you're famously a baseball fan, a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan. This is an LA podcast, so I have to ask, are the Dodgers ruining baseball?
They're not ruining baseball if you're from Los Angeles, that's for sure. I think that in the long run, it's going to be good for baseball because everybody's got to get better or they're not going to ever be able to compete with the Dodgers.
Wow, that's a great... So, it's like a rising tide lifts all boats situation.
That's right. It's a 'what could possibly go right' kind of answer.
Absolutely. Always on brand.
But the Cardinals, my Cardinals have had three really, really awful years. This year will go down as being a really important building year and I predict very good things for 2027 for the Cardinals.
All right, if anybody's looking to make some call, she bets, you heard it from Danny Meyer himself. As I said in the intro, Danny, you'll be in LA for LA Chef Con, where Bill Addison gets a full hour to interrogate you. What's your personal relationship with LA?
Wait a second. Is he going to interview me or interrogate me? I'm not sure I want to go if he's going to be interrogated. No, my relationship with LA is great. I love the city. I think it's one of the, if not the most exciting food cities in the world right now. And part of it is something that in our world we don't talk about enough, but the role that real estate plays in restaurants. And so if you think about Manhattan, almost not all, but probably 80% of all restaurants that open in Manhattan have to be like Broadway productions because the real estate is not only expensive but it's large. As you get out into the boroughs of New York, you see smaller spaces that are less expensive and it gives chefs a greater opportunity to experiment because they don't have to be all things to all people. Kind of like how off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway can be a little bit more cutting edge. Los Angeles, because it's not an island, because it can just keep sprawling, seems to me to have just an infinite number of places, stages that restaurants, chefs can actually experiment there. Some of the scales are not as large as they are in Manhattan. And I just love how they can really sharpen their point of view. And I just think that there's so many exciting things going on in Los Angeles, and I cannot wait to be there.
Well, we can't wait to have you. That's a really interesting answer. We're going to get to some of those real estate questions in a little bit here, but one thing I've, one refrain I've heard a lot recently is people saying that New York is a better restaurant town than LA, but LA might be a better food town than New York. Does that ring true to you?
I don't have any idea what that means. And I think it's almost an irrelevant question because I think that if you love restaurants and you love food and you tell me that you're bored with either of those two cities, I'd say good luck. I don't know where else you're going to eat better than those two cities.
I couldn't agree more. You know, you obviously have some Shake Shack locations out here, but I don't believe you've ever opened a full-service restaurant in LA.
If you did, what would you build?
It's not something we've thought about really because if you can believe it, as of right now, all of our full-service restaurants are in New York. In fact, they're all in Manhattan. So, we do have plans in, I think early 2028, we're going to open one in Brooklyn, which will be the first non-Shake Shack, first non-Daily Provisions restaurant that we'll have outside of Manhattan, excuse me, in New York. We're also opening in Boston our first full-service restaurant outside of the city. That's going to be Ciccio Mimo and that's opening later this year. But I'll tell you what, going west of the Hudson River has just not been in our plans for full-service. Part of it is that I think that when you have a business that is really systems-driven like Shake Shack, and I don't want to take anything away from our people because it's always going to be a people-driven business, but Shake Shack, I don't have to wonder if we remembered Luca's favorite table or if we remembered that it's Luca's anniversary or who his favorite server is or who his favorite bartender is. So there's a lot of that complexity that you don't have when you have something like Shake Shack. And I just, you know, have so far been pretty successful in my career of not opening a full-service restaurant anywhere west of the Hudson River.
Yeah. No, it makes sense. Well, interested to see how Boston goes. You obviously in the book, your new book, get into how Chicago went. So...
Oh, actually, you know what? I'm so glad you just said that because I was completely inaccurate with what I just said. We did open a full-service restaurant that lasted about a year and a half, maybe more than a year and a half. Got a Michelin star in Chicago called Green River.
But I guess I must have some selective memory because that would have been a big miss on my part.
Yeah. Well, that's all right. That's what I'm here for. I'm here for the fact-checking. So, when you are in LA, what are two or three restaurants you make a point to visit?
Always restaurants that are just very different from what we have here in New York City. And even that I think you can test me on. But I had a fantastic dinner at Anjack last time I was there.
I just don't know of a restaurant like that in New York City where you've got not only really wonderful Thai cooking, but it's a party. The wine list is spectacular. So I love that. I also loved going to Antico.
In some respects, it reminded me of a mini version of our restaurant, Ciccio Mimo, which is a larger restaurant, but just fantastic cooking there. I'm always at home at AOC.
I love Felix, Evan Funke's first restaurant. Last time I was in LA, I had a really good meal at Funke, his more developed restaurant. Yeah.
And I need to go back to Republique. I hope that people still love it. It was a restaurant that when it was new was for me such a revelation that they could do so many things so well, but so many meal periods, and I can't imagine they've lost a step and I just haven't been there for a while.
I'm really glad you mentioned Republique. I feel like restaurants in that age range, the 5 to 10 year range, often don't get enough love. And I took my wife there for our anniversary just last December, and I'm telling you, it's as good as ever.
Well, that's going to be on my list when I go back. I also, there's one other restaurant that I've never been to that if I just can get one extra day in my schedule, I definitely want to go. It's out near, I think it's much further east, which is Dunore.
Oh yeah, that is right by my house actually. Literally a stone's throw away. You should 100% make time to check it out.
Okay. Well, let's talk about your new book, Danny. What Could Possibly Go Right? arrives 20 years after Setting the Table. Setting the Table, of course, became a seminal text not just in hospitality but really for anyone trying to start and run a business. What happened that made you feel Setting the Table no longer told the whole story and it was time for a new book?
Setting the Table did tell the whole story if the story was what is the power of hospitality to run a successful business. And that's, I feel as strongly about that today as I did 20 years ago. But what Setting the Table didn't help me with, and therefore I wasn't able to fall on my rear end so many times and therefore have some lessons to learn and stories to tell. Setting the Table didn't say anything about, okay, now that you've grown your company, how do you advance your culture? Because I hadn't, I had one Shake Shack when I wrote Setting the Table. Now there's over 700 in the world and not to mention all kinds of other restaurants we've opened here in the city. So I really wanted to think about what I've learned in these past 20 years about how can you actually use your growth to advance your culture. I didn't want to lose the something, even as we were growing, I didn't want to lose the something special that got us there in the first place. So I think while What Could Possibly Go Right? is in no way, you know, the next episode of Setting the Table, it's not a sequel in any way, I do think that without Setting the Table I never would have probably had the opportunity to grow and learn how hard it was to advance our culture as we scaled our company. So that's why I had to write it.
And I also think that I've spent a lot of time in these last 20 years thinking about why do we do restaurants in the first place? Why do I keep opening restaurants? And so I spent time thinking about meaning. And I spent a lot of time thinking about something that in the book I call essentiality, which is the world doesn't need another anything really. You know, someone's always going to come up with a new way to have a dry cleaner or a new way to have a grocery store, a new way to have a restaurant. We don't really need it. You know, things were okay the way they were. But I think that when you actually ask yourself before creating something, what could we do that would become essential in people's lives, where the job was essential for someone, that they got to work for a boss that was essential, that the restaurant actually made people's lives better. That's the kind of thing that I really want to think about.
Yeah, I really love that sentiment because something that we see a lot online these days is conversations around the best. Is this the best restaurant you've ever been to? Is this the best pizza you've ever had? But I love the word essential because it really shifts the entire parameter of the discussion and it makes you take into consideration so many more things. If I'm being 100% honest with you, Danny, I actually enjoyed this book even more than Setting the Table. And it's because to me it feels less neat than Setting the Table felt. Like even though there were plenty of challenges in Setting the Table, it felt like every time a challenge arose, there you were with the perfect maxim or solution. And this book on the other hand raises a lot of questions that I really had to sit with and wrestle with myself. And of course, you offer solutions in it as well, but it is a little bit more existential. Let me ask you, did you consciously want this book to puncture the image of the guy that has all the answers, or is it just an honest reflection of the ups and downs of life?
What a great question. Can you please hold up the book one more time?
Because the cover, and if you just move your fingers, the little baby blue icon that you see there is exactly what you just said, which is that every time I thought something was going well, it would come right back down again. And every time I thought it was going well, it would come back down again. And I didn't set out to do that, Luca. I hate to say it, but my editor made me do it. And I had absolutely the best editor I possibly could have had because he continuously would say, 'You know what, Danny, that's a really good story, but you got to tell people how you really felt. You got to get vulnerable because it's all well and good that we're in a day and age when everyone airbrushes themselves on Instagram, but that's a lot different than somebody who buys a book.'
Tell them how hard it was. Tell them how hard it is. And so it's a great question you're asking. It's intuitive on your part. Makes me feel good to know that a lot of stuff that I wrote was not fun to write about. There's a lot of chapters in there that I struggled with and struggled with because I frankly didn't want to go there. But I did and I'm glad I did. And if people can see themselves in some of the struggles, because you know, we all like to think that restaurants are such an incredibly special thing. They're not. You know, it's what we do. But any business in the world is full of challenges. Any business in the world has employees and customers and competitors and a community and suppliers and investors. So that's, restaurants happen to be my laboratory. But I'm hopeful that a lot of the stuff that I've learned and a lot of the tough things that have happened are also, you know, transferable opportunities for other people to make different mistakes instead of the same stupid ones I've made throughout my career.
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. There's just certain things that I detected while in your writing that were, you know, I've had a business for like three or four years, nothing compared to you. But even in my short time, I'm like, 'Oh my god, I've made that same mistake of maybe focusing on X when I should have been looking at Y.' And really, if you think you can't relate to this book, I promise you, you can. You mentioned that a lot of stuff in here was tough for you to write. Which story in the book were you most nervous to put down on the page?
So many that I can't. In the same way that you're rejecting the notion of what's best, and I replace what's best with what's essential. I like songs that are essential. I never say this song makes me feel better. I'm glad my life is better because it was written, but I don't care if it's the best song. And I don't care which was the hardest story to write. There were a lot of them. Look, I think you know revisiting the pandemic was a really, really hard chapter to write. That's a chapter called Crossing the Bridge. There were recordings I made, there were TV interviews I gave, and I actually couldn't go back and watch them. I just couldn't. There's also some chapters in there about during the pandemic and before that watching our whole industry and us experience the Me Too movement and then some of the racial comeuppance during the George Floyd experience that everybody watched on TV that was so horrifying to so many people. And we grew and improved as a business because of those struggles. And those were really hard memories to bring back up. There was a lot of deals we did that I wish we hadn't done that I wrote about. So, I don't even really know where to start, but I'm glad I went there because again, if you read the book and you can see yourself in any of them, you know, the book opens with the first time I ever closed a restaurant.
Which, you know, when I wrote Setting the Table I was already 25 years into my career or something like that and I had never closed a restaurant and I was so stupidly proud of that as if that's a big badge of honor. And it took closing Tabla for me to actually unleash a sense of optimism and willingness to take more entrepreneurial risks. It's like you can't play scared in this business.
And as ashamed as I was of closing a restaurant after 13 years, there's no shame in closing a restaurant after 13 years, especially one that changed so many people's lives for the better. But I was living under that cloud that, you know, god forbid a restaurant isn't immortal, which is obviously an insane thought. Nothing is immortal as much as we'd all love to think it is. So yeah, I just really used this book to explore some of the really tough but really important and ultimately uplifting lessons that I've had in the last 20 years. And that's why I called the book What Could Possibly Go Right? Because while you know I'm not unlike a lot of people I know where sometimes we focus more on the thorns than we do on the rose, mostly things have gone pretty well. And I think especially today when it seems like every story is doom and gloom and ain't it bad and pessimism and cynicism are running rampant, I have really been fueled by a sense of what could possibly go right. And it doesn't always go right as you've read in the book. But that doesn't mean that over time most things don't head in the right direction and I really believe they do.
Yeah. It's like that concept, the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. You know, one tiny degree at a time, things could possibly go right. Love that you bring up Tabla because yes, you're right. On the first page of Setting the Table, you write that you had never closed a restaurant. And even though that was the first page of Setting the Table, it felt like the happy ending as well. Like we knew when we finished Setting the Table, here's Danny Meyer, never closed a restaurant. And you know, I read it way after Shake Shack had taken off, so I knew how that story ended as well.
Or how that story progressed.
Progressed. Sorry. Story is still very much ongoing.
It hasn't ended, thankfully.
