What the book does
The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets (SelectBooks, 2016) is a short book with a large cast. Micah Solomon, a customer service consultant who had already written on service in other industries, set out to collect what the leaders he most admired in hotels and restaurants actually do. The foreword is by Herve Humler, then president and chief operating officer of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, who also appears inside the book on what the luxury guest now expects.
The cast is the point. Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons speaks about a culture that holds through a crisis. Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group covers hiring, onboarding and training. Tom Colicchio explains how a restaurant built around a chef still serves the guest first. Raul Leal of Virgin Hotels describes a hotel company designed from scratch for a new kind of traveler. Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington talks about connection, David Rockwell about designing rooms and dining rooms that people want to be in, Traci Des Jardins about a culture with no room for ego, and Eric Ripert about producing a complete guest experience inside a single dining room at Le Bernardin.
Solomon’s own argument runs through the interviews. A hospitality business has to serve guests of every generation at once, and the younger guest arriving with a phone in hand has changed what a welcome, a room and a meal are expected to be. The book treats technology as part of the service, and it keeps returning to the conclusion the leaders reach from their own experience: the systems only work when the people running them care.
The book suits a reader who wants the industry’s best known names in one sitting, and a manager who wants a short, well sourced argument to put in front of a team.
What readers tend to want next
Readers who loved The Heart of Hospitality often want more of what drew them to it, which is several leaders answering the same question. Nine voices in a book of under two hundred pages leave each one a few pages, and a reader finishes wanting to hear Sharp or Ripert at length.
A second wish is for the view from outside the United States. Solomon’s leaders run some of the finest houses in America. A reader who runs a hotel in Dubai or a kitchen in San Sebastián wants to know whether the same priorities hold where the guest, the staff and the regulations are different.
A third is depth on the leaders themselves. Solomon writes about guest experience, and his interviews are organized around the guest. Readers tend to want the earlier part of the story, which is how each of these people was trained, who corrected them and what it took to earn the room they now run.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book, and of the books on this list it is the closest to Solomon’s in method. It is built from eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, conducted across five continents, and it puts hotels and kitchens in a single conversation. Two of Solomon’s leaders are among my interviewees, and their profiles are on this site: Eric Ripert and Patrick O’Connell.
The Human Touch is the chapter a reader of Solomon should start with. Aaron Kaupp of Raffles, Philip Barnes of The Savoy and Ripert each say that the capacity to care cannot be taught, which makes hiring for it and protecting it the whole of a leader’s job. O’Connell describes the kitchen and the floor calibrating together so that the diner who arrives exhausted gets a different evening from the one who arrives celebrating. The question page on what the human touch in hospitality is collects the chapter’s main ideas. Knowing Your Guest takes up anticipation, which is the practical form of everything Solomon’s leaders say about guest experience. Krister Svensson, then of The St. Regis Bangkok, explains how a global brand tracks preferences across properties, Nicholas Yarnell of Six Senses describes a handwritten card for a guest with a severe allergy, and the chapter asks where personalization starts to feel like surveillance. The Digital Discipline is where Solomon’s interest in the younger guest and the phone in hand meets the hoteliers and chefs who have to decide, daily, where a machine serves and where it only imitates.
Readers who want the training years that Solomon’s format leaves out will find them in The Apprenticeship, and in the collection of the mentors and the people they trained.
A reading order
- The Heart of Hospitality, Micah Solomon (2016), for nine leaders on the guest experience in one short volume.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for eighty hoteliers and chefs on the same questions, in their own words.
- Setting the Table, Danny Meyer (2006), for the fullest account of one of Solomon’s leaders in his own voice.
- Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy, Isadore Sharp (2009), for the founder’s version of the culture Solomon describes.