What the book does
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect (Optimism Press, 2022) is Will Guidara’s account of the eleven years in which he and chef Daniel Humm took Eleven Madison Park from a brasserie with two stars from the New York Times to the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2017. Service, in Guidara’s telling, is doing the job well. Hospitality is how the job makes people feel, and the restaurants that are remembered are the ones willing to be unreasonable about it.
The book is a memoir with instructions attached. Guidara tells how a table of tourists was served a street hot dog as a course because he had overheard them say it was the one thing they had missed, how the restaurant created a role for people whose whole job was to notice what a table cared about and act on it, and how a private room became a beach for a couple whose holiday had been cancelled. Around these stories he builds practical ideas: ownership programs that hand a junior employee a real piece of the operation, a rule for spending most of a budget carefully so that a small share can be spent extravagantly on moments guests will talk about, and a way of giving praise and criticism that keeps a team honest without humiliating anyone.
It is a book for anyone who runs something that other people walk into. Restaurant operators will recognize every detail, and readers from well outside the industry have taken from it the permission to treat generosity as a strategy. It is also a good story, told by a co-owner who was in the room for all of it.
What readers tend to want next
The most common reaction to the book is a wish to see the idea at a different scale. Guidara writes about one restaurant with one dining room, led by two people who could change course in an afternoon. Readers who run a hotel with four hundred staff across a 24 hour cycle, or a kitchen with forty cooks, finish the book asking how the same generosity is held in place when the founder is not there to catch the moment.
A second reaction is the wish for more voices. The book is one operator’s testimony, persuasive because it is personal. Readers tend to want to know whether the people running The Savoy, or a three Michelin star kitchen in Girona, or a desert resort in Abu Dhabi, would say the same things.
A third is a quieter question about cost. Guidara is candid about the hours, and readers want to know what a career of unreasonable hospitality does to the people who practice it for thirty years.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book, and I place it here because it answers those three questions from the inside. It draws on eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs, and it treats the two crafts as a single discipline: attention, paid to the guest and to the team, as the thing the best operators actually produce.
Three chapters speak most directly to a reader of Guidara’s book. Giving the Keys takes empowerment apart into four kinds of authority, including the latitude to speak to a guest in your own words, which is the practice Guidara built at Eleven Madison Park and which the chapter cites. Alexander Pichel, then of Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta, Aaron Kaupp of Raffles, and Horst Schulze’s spending rule at Ritz-Carlton give the hotel version. Knowing Your Guest is the chapter on anticipation, and it is full of the gestures Guidara’s readers love: Nicholas Yarnell of Six Senses on a handwritten card that let a guest with a peanut allergy eat anywhere in the Douro Valley, Pinar Kartal Timer of Pera Palace on building a welcome gift from what a guest has said in public, and a frank discussion of where personalization starts to feel like surveillance. The Human Touch is the chapter in which Kaupp, Philip Barnes of The Savoy, and Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin say the same thing from different rooms: the capacity to care cannot be taught, so the whole of leadership is hiring for it, protecting it and passing it on. Susanne Hatje of Mandarin Oriental tells the story there of a couple who decided on a whim to marry in Central Park, and of a hotel that produced an officiant, a photographer, a carriage and a witness on very short notice.
For the question of cost, The Long Game lets general managers and chefs in their fourth and fifth decades describe what the work takes and returns.
A reading order
- Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara (2022), for the idea and the story.
- Setting the Table, Danny Meyer (2006), for the culture Guidara was trained in, and the ordering of priorities behind it.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for the same discipline across eighty hotels and kitchens.
- Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze (2019), for the systems that keep the standard in place at a chain.