What the book does
Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business (HarperCollins, 2006) is the book that gave the industry a vocabulary it still uses. Danny Meyer wrote it twenty years after opening Union Square Cafe in 1985, by which point his company also ran Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, The Modern and the first Shake Shack. The book is part memoir and part operating manual, and the two halves support each other. The stories explain where the principles came from, and the principles explain why the stories ended the way they did.
The central idea is what Meyer calls enlightened hospitality. He draws a sharp line between service, which is the technical delivery of what a guest asked for, and hospitality, which is how the delivery makes the guest feel. Then he sets out an order of priorities that surprised many readers at the time: employees first, then guests, then the community, then suppliers, and investors last. His claim is that a business which takes care of its people in that order ends up taking better care of its investors than one that starts with them. The book’s other durable ideas follow from this. Hiring should weigh emotional skills more heavily than technical ones. Mistakes are inevitable, and what distinguishes a great operator is how generously and quickly the mistake is handled. A leader’s job is to apply steady, gentle pressure toward the standard, every day, without drama.
The book suits founders, general managers and anyone building a culture from scratch. It has been read far outside restaurants because its argument is about any organization that depends on how people are treated.
What readers tend to want next
Readers who loved Setting the Table often want to see the same philosophy tested in a different kind of house. Meyer writes from the dining room, and most of his examples are from restaurants he could walk into on any given night. A reader running a hotel wants the version that works across hundreds of staff, a 24 hour cycle and no single point at which the leader can inspect the work.
A second wish is for other witnesses. The book is one operator’s philosophy, carefully reasoned. Readers tend to wonder how far it is shared, and whether chefs holding three Michelin stars in Lima or Girona, or general managers in Sydney and Jakarta, would describe their priorities the same way.
A third is the question Meyer himself took up two decades later: what happens to enlightened hospitality when a company grows from eleven restaurants to several hundred businesses. His 2026 book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, is the direct answer, and it has its own companion page on this site.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book. It is built from eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, and it treats hotels and kitchens as two rooms in which the same discipline is practiced. For a reader of Meyer, it works as a second opinion from eighty people who, in most cases, have never met him or each other.
First the Team, the longest chapter in the book, is where Meyer’s priorities meet their widest test. Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca describes the team as the restaurant’s most important capital. Tom Roelens, then of Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi, explains why the most beautiful property in the world produces no loyalty on its own. Marc von Arnim of Park Hyatt Sydney, Graham Ledger of Singita and Matthew Orlando of Amass each describe how they hire for character and train for everything else, which readers of Meyer’s chapter on emotional skills will recognize at once. The Recovery is the hotel and kitchen version of Meyer’s argument about mistakes. Alexander Pichel sets out the order of operations, listening before apologizing and apologizing before solving. Anneke Brown of COMO explains why a note and a bottle of wine is the worst possible response to a failure. Mariano Silvestri of Park Hyatt describes the complaint a hotel never hears and reads about online instead. Staying True takes up the pressure to compromise, with Virgilio Martínez of Central and Albert Adrià on how a house evolves without losing itself.
Readers who want the chef side of the service and hospitality distinction will find it in The Human Touch, where Eric Ripert’s rebuilding of the culture at Le Bernardin is the central case.
A reading order
- Setting the Table, Danny Meyer (2006), for the philosophy and its origins.
- What Could Possibly Go Right?, Danny Meyer (2026), for what twenty more years of growth taught him.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for the same questions answered by eighty hoteliers and chefs.
- Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, Isadore Sharp (2009), for a founder who put culture first in hotels a generation earlier.