Setting the Table - A restauranteurs advice

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
By Danny Meyer
Harper Collins, 2006
$32.95 Hardcover (Cdn)


Motivational speakers will tell you that if you want to aim high in your profession it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. One of the smartest and most time efficient methods of sharpening up your game is to focus on individuals whose achievements you admire, and simply model yourself after them – study what they did to make their businesses successful and profit from their mistakes.

Fine in theory, but how often is your idol willing to share his secrets – those techniques, methods and policies that have lasting beneficial results, but were so often acquired through a long and expensive period of trial and error.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of opening a restaurant, Danny Meyer is their man. Not only is Meyer acknowledged to be one of the most powerful restaurateurs in the American food industry, he did so within the cutthroat environment of New York City. In an arena that sees some 300 new fine dining competitors arrive on the scene each season, Gramercy Tavern, one of Meyer’s restaurants, has held the number one spot in the Zagat Guide as New York’s top restaurant for a number of years running.

Meyers other restaurants are no slouches either, starting with his first project, the Union Square Café, which he started in 1985 when no one except pigeons and street people wanted to hang out in Union Square itself, to his 10 other restaurants of Eleven Madison Park (contemporary), Tabla (modern Indian), the aforementioned Gramercy Tavern (casual fine dining), Blue Smoke (barbecue), Jazz Standard (jazz bar), Shake Shack (old-fashioned, fast food concession stand), Hudson Yards (catering) and the three restaurant/bars at the refurnished Museum of Modern Art.

Despite intense competition and changing neighbourhood dynamics, all of the restaurants on this list are still operating successfully, although none of them found their feet without some degree of sweat, struggle and war stories. In the chapter on the early years at Union Square Café, Meyer tells about some of the more difficult moments involving personnel (catching the chef and his sous-chef enjoying a tryst in the walk-in refrigerator); décor (the day a heavy steel section of track lighting broke loose and came within a centimeter of decapitating a diner seated below it); customer relations (the belligerent drunk who punched him in the face , slammed his head into a door and was only subdued after Meyer managed to swing around and “kick him in the nuts�); not to mention media management (the previous mentioned altercation that next morning Meyer discovered was witnessed by the restaurant reviewer from the New York Daily News.

Obviously a restaurateur's life isn’t all popping Champagne corks with glamourous celebrities, and Meyer is refreshingly honest and open about the problems, the mistakes he has made, and the minefields he has had to tiptoe across (including the accusations that his first restaurant received a privileged leg up when it was favourably reviewed at a crucial moment by then New York Times restaurant critic Brian Miller, who also just happened to be a longtime personal friend of Meyer's).

Meyer names names, he even reveals a lot of information about his finances, but his stated intent is not to write an autobiography that is "all about Danny". His claimed sole purpose is to record his theories on hospitality – principles that he believes is responsible for keeping his ship on course through all kinds of challenges, for building customer loyalty, and to make those guidelines available to a new generation of restaurant owners.

Some Meyerisms:

- Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you.

- Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel.

- I instruct my staff members to figure out whatever it takes to make the guests feel and understand that we are in their corner. .. I cringe when a waiter asks, “How is everything?� That’s an empty question that will get an empty response. Also, I can’t stand the use of we to mean you, as in, “How are we doing so far?� I abhor the question, “Are you still working on that lamb?� If the guest has been working on the lamb, it probably wasn’t very tender or very good in the first place.� …

Meyer tells how a waiter can determine the right moment to approach a table just by observing where a diner’s eyes are focused on the table top, and he give a lot of similar service tips, but his advice is not limited to just how to keep the customer happy. There is a lot of sound business advice included his book as well. For example …

- A vibrant lunch service can help a restaurant to meet fixed costs, and furthermore that the kind of business clientele attracted by lunch could give the place an added identity.

- I was determined to go against the grain [ of the prevailing maxim: location, location, location ]…I understood on a gut level that if I handicapped a location correctly, and could successfully play a role in transforming a [down at heel] neighbourhood, my restaurant, with its long-term lease locked in at a low rent, could offer excellence and value. This combination would attract smart, adventurous, loyal customers, in turn giving other restaurants and businesses the confidence to move into the neighbourhood until a critical mass had been reached and the neighbourhood itself changed for the better. Moreover, were I to go belly-up after a few years in such a neighbourhood, I was confident that I could find someone else who would be eager to pay my below-market rent on the remaining years of my lease. I sensed a lot of upside and felt protected against the downside.


Much of all this reads as true for idealism as much as for actual practice. And there is no doubt that with this book, Meyer sets a high standard for his employees to make good on, something that countless bloggers in the city will be itching to test. I myself having dined at almost all of Meyer’s restaurants over the past 10 years raised an eyebrow or two over some of his claims, especially his policies on cosseting and appreciating the patronage of single diners. As a single woman diner who frequently eats at the tables or at the bars of Meyers restaurants, I have been at best pleasantly tolerated and at worst almost ignored as much as at any other restaurant. Nor do I recall anyone at the restaurants ever taking a special interest in my person or why I chose to eat with them that night. But then again, never have I had a bad meal at a Danny Meyer owned restaurant that was due to the service (the table companionship was a trial sometimes but that could hardly be the fault of the restaurant.) In fact, I do not ever recall a situation when I did not thoroughly enjoy my actual meal, which is really what I was there for in the first place.