I have a feeling you've done this before, Danny. Why? Because you have some really good answers. I have a feeling you've done it before.
New York City has its own rhythm. Alive in every sense of the word. Sidewalks and a constant cycle pumping with the flow of people. The lifeblood that constantly courses through a tangled network of streets, each punctuated by restaurants, shops, bodegas, and all the madness essential to a big city. But there is no big city quite like NYC. And I'm here to talk to someone who has his finger on the pulse of it all. Someone whose approach to hospitality has influenced an entire industry and inspired restaurant tours around the world. I'm here in the Big Apple to spend the day with hospitality god Danny Meyer.
As a chef, I need to stay curious in order to evolve. For me, that means looking beyond a good meal to learn more about who made it and what inspires them to cook. Every great city has great food. I'm going on a journey around the world. I'm on a quest to find passionate chefs who cook from the heart to prove that food is love. Got to be delicious.
Food is love. Love your food.
Dear audience, the following is a disclaimer about this episode. If you're expecting a heartfelt story or the typical deep dive into the food scene, this isn't going to be it. What you're about to watch can best be described as a complete and total exploitation of my position as host of this show. A self-serving effort to spend time with someone who I look up to as a hospitality deity. A mortal attempt to touch the garment of the hospitality prophet himself. My goal is to pick the brain of and rub elbows with one of my heroes. A wildly successful restaurateur, Danny Meyer's restaurants stretch around the world from St. Louis to Korea. His work and philosophy on hospitality set the standard and Danny chose New York for a long list of successful concepts and the proving ground for a forward-thinking approach to hospitality.
Daily Provisions in West Manhattan is where we're meeting. A local favorite and even despite its position in the middle of the home, it has the feel of a small cafe. That feeling is by design.
Welcome to Daily Provisions. Your day does that start here? Is this what you do? You check in in one of your breakfast restaurants first thing.
Often, my day always starts with reading all of our dining reports from the night before. So every one of our restaurants, the maître d' or the manager writes a full report. Everyone who dined there last night, where they sat, what they ate, if anything good or not good came up, how many covers did we serve, what were our revenues at every single restaurant. So that's always first thing. And then I often go to the gym as I did today because I have an eating habit.
And then I'll often check into one of the Daily Provisions which are open for breakfast, phone calls, meetings with my colleagues. It can be meetings with our chefs. We talk about food all the time. You just never know what each day is going to hold. Well, I mean, you know, that's what makes us different as restaurateurs, right? We don't know what the day is going to bring. And we're that one group of people that can pivot.
Yeah. And of course, there are days when I look at myself and I go, 'What the heck are you doing anyway?' And then I go, 'You know exactly what you're doing and you love it.'
Yeah. You have that crazy gene. You know, that's why we're restaurateurs.
It's kind of funny you say that because without my knowing it, it had been a lifelong dream of mine to open a restaurant. I didn't really know it until I was in my early 20s. And then I opened Union Square Cafe when I was 27 years old. And literally as I opened the door for the opening night party at the age of 27, I just burst into tears. I think in retrospect, I must have known that this was going to be something I couldn't get out of. While I had realized a dream, it was the starting point to something that I could never imagine.
Did you grow up in a family where food was like the center?
Yeah, very much so. I grew up in St. Louis and my dad was in a travel business. His business was to design tours for people to go to Europe. Started off in France. As a matter of fact, when I was like six, seven years old, we had the sons and daughters of French innkeepers living in our home. We had a little dog named Ratatouille, which was my dad's favorite dish to cook. In fact, I can still smell the olive oil before he would sauté the eggplant. Man, those were some special days. But we always had food around the house. There was always a bottle of French wine on the dinner table. I got to cook at an early age with my dad. It was usually barbecuing or grilling. And he was not a very careful griller. In fact, often the flames would lick up on the fat of whatever it was he was grilling. And he would take a bottle of Beaujolais and pour it on top of the meat to put out the flames. I guess the Beaujolais was pretty inexpensive back then.
I would wake up early in the morning before anyone was awake and go in the refrigerator. Sometimes I would cook something first thing in the morning and I don't know why the smell didn't wake them up, but I would hide all the evidence before everybody woke up. And you know even though the restaurants in retrospect were not great in St. Louis in terms of the food back in the 60s and 70s when I grew up. There was something I was picking up there. And I think it was hospitality. I think that invariably they were places that were happy to see you. And they were nice and I remember a lot of those meals. I really do.
Hey Claudia, thank you. Now we got to try a little bit of love from Daily Provisions first thing this morning. Thank you. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.
I'm going to urge you to do something before we start. Before we do the bacon, egg, and cheese, you're going to do the maple one last because there's no going back after you've done that. So, my dad was a pastry chef.
Well, I want your dad to weigh in on that bite.
So, I grew up with Danish pastries, which are really light and airy, too.
It's not a bad donut, right?
I've never had this before.
Isn't that good? It's almost like juicy on the inside. So, we always have these two on the menu, the cinnamon and the maple. And then each month we do a cruller of the month. And this is chai tea. Why don't we try this one? I think if you can take something that everyone already has a benchmark for and make that an elevated version. And so the goal of Daily Provisions, it's a pretty small restaurant. We're open all day. We serve different things all day. But if you're going to get on the menu, the license to get on our little menu is we have to believe that you're a top three version of whatever that thing is. So that's why the menu is not very big because we haven't figured out how to make a top three version of that many things. But that should be one of your three favorite donuts of all time. If you get our roast chicken at night, it should be one of your top three roast chickens. So it's fun but it's also hard.
Who made those amazing bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches? It was delicious.
Really no surprise that Daily Provisions hit a high mark, but I was sold when I got a taste of that cruller. All crullers are donuts, but not all donuts are crullers. Next, we're on to check on Danny's Italian concept. Just upstairs, CeCe is helmed in the kitchen by acclaimed chef Hillary Sterling. Beat Hillary Sterling is what I want to see. With house-made pastas and live fire cooking complementing a well-curated wine list. An open, spacious kitchen buzzing with movement, busy hands prepping for a busy evening. Just the kind of environment to trigger a chef's PTSD. And if I'm honest, maybe a little FOMO, too. Perhaps a quieter location and some hospitality philosophy is in order.
Everybody considers you the hospitality guru, right? What makes a great restaurateur?
They all have a few things in common. One is that they have what I call a combination of ADD and OCD. They can't keep track of all the things they're obsessing about. It's just because restaurants are one detail after the next. And we love that. You got to love caring about the details. You got to love that. Oh my gosh, there's a little bit of water on the table right there. And that picture is not exactly level. And why isn't that table smiling when their food arrives? It's just caring deeply about a lot of things. So, there's that. I also think that great restaurateurs love food. And more than anything, they love watching other people enjoy what they've cooked. I've actually stood behind a wall of wine that is a glass and watched our diners through that wall. Not to be nosy, but because it just makes me so happy to see people smiling when they eat it. And if they're not, I want to do something about it. I think great restaurateurs care that however people felt when they first came into your restaurant that they leave feeling even better.
Do you think that the basics is still the same today as it was when you started?
Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that we now do because we have to do. People are much more interested in convenience. You can have all the convenience you want and sometimes we want that of a food delivered to your home, but you're not going to get the experience of a real restaurant there. And I just don't think that's ever going to go away. Restaurateurs especially. I mean, we are a great format for how you should treat each other, right? Because we don't get into politics because we love everybody that comes to our restaurants. We have such a diverse group of people we work with in the kitchen and we always get things done because we have to. So maybe everybody that's in politics should be working in a restaurant for at least a year. I think everyone in this country should.
Really, I think what you just said is so true. There is something a little bit like the military that people from all different walks of life come together as one team with one goal that we all have in common and that's to make people feel good. The whole notion of serving someone else and believing that if I can make you happy that's the best reward I can get. It's like giving a hug. If I really want to get a hug, best thing I do is give one.
And I think that people in this industry learn how to do that. And they learn how to do that with all kinds of people. Sometimes tough customers. But if you can kind of put your own ego aside and be part of a team that has that goal, it's a pretty beautiful thing and it serves you in life.
Somebody pinch me. It's almost like anything that comes out of Danny's mouth is a sacred piece of wisdom that I should be writing down and studying. Food insecurity. Do you think we carry some responsibility in helping with food insecurity? You know, you hear a lot about chefs today. They talk about organic produce, carbon footprint. Should we be leaders when it comes to all of those things?
I think we have a platform and not every restaurant is responsible for using their platform or can be responsible for using their platform. Believe me, you know this business as well as I do. For a lot of people, it's enough just to get the doors open and serve people and close the doors at night, call it a day. But I think that for whatever reason, our society has shined a light on restaurants and it's become part of the social fabric of our country. And so I think that if a chef or a restaurateur has the light shine on them, I think there is a responsibility to use your platform. It's a good thing. We want to be held to a higher standard and then we want to show the way and if we do it responsibly we can make societal change pretty quickly. Hospitality doesn't stop at the four walls of our restaurants. So we do whatever we can do to care for the people who are inside of our restaurants. But if it's genuine caring, it needs to happen outside the four walls as well. That gives us an opportunity to use a gift that we have which is caring for people and help people outside of our restaurants as well.
When you come up with these different concepts, where do you get your inspirations from? Is it from your travels or how did you cross over into the hamburger industry?
Almost every single restaurant we open is a combination of five or six different experiences that I've had that I've loved that I want to share with other people. Sometimes more than five or six different experiences. As far as Shake Shack is concerned, I can draw a straight line to St. Louis. That's where I learned Smashburgers, Steak 'n Shake, Fitz's, Carl's. I can think about Crinkle Cut Fries. So many places in St. Louis. What's the place that makes the great milkshakes and the Mile High BLT sandwich?
