Unreasonable Hospitality

The Book

Influenced by the most recent season of The Bear, this month’s book is Unreasonable Hospitality. The book has a cameo appearance in the season, pictured above. And, for those who have watched it, the deep-dish pizza scene comes from this book.

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More than they Expect is about how the manager and the chef of Eleven Madison Park take the restaurant from being mediocre to one of the best restaurants in the world - mainly through radical acts of service.

You do not have to be interested in the world of restaurants to find what Will Guidara has to say interesting. Turns out, hospitality is universal, applicable to any career and to our personal lives, and is wildly influential.

The Reminder

While there are a multitude of life lessons, leadership principles, and interesting tidbits about the New York food scene in this book, what I am walking away with is the reminder that, how we make people feel changes everything.

This book reminded me that making a lasting impact on someone won’t happen by accident. It requires intentionality. Will describes the experiences they created as, “seemingly magical, and yet no detail was left to chance.” What he spends the book describing is an illusive combination of extreme excellence and a type of frivolity/irreverence that make human nature feel both worthy and at home at the same time. These two are harder to marry than they might seem.

Will shares story after story of how the fine dining industry is excellent at making insane food and treating people with respect (aka traditional white tablecloth service). But what tends to be hard, and a bit messier, he argues is excellent food and service alongside that “take a seat and stay a while” frivolity that you get in a close friend’s home or in the presence of family. Creating that type of feeling in a restaurant that runs like a well-oiled machine is hard. Both the machine and the living room are part of the cocktail of hospitality.

I’ve started to pay attention to people who do both (excellence and frivolity) really well in life and I’ve noticed that it takes a lot of work. It’s an art form that takes practice to hone.

But, the results of true hospitality change peoples lives simply because “fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.” Will opens the book with a story about his mom who was dying of brain cancer when he was in junior high. He writes:

Eventually, home health aides came in to help with her care. Every single day, my mom would ask the aide on duty to push her wheelchair to the end of the road to wait for me. She could no longer speak or get up to give me a hug, but she could be there with a huge smile on her face when I got home from school. That smile was all I needed and it taught me an invaluable lesson — what it’s like to be truly welcomed.

After reading this book I have a new appreciation for the word “thoughtful”. I trivialize that word a lot but at the end of the day, I think that’s what it means to show hospitality - to be truly thoughtful means to think through an experience in every way. It doesn’t take luxury or money or grandiosity but it often does take an ability to suspend reasonableness a bit as well as consistent intention.

I’ve noticed I can often be so reasonable and practical about relationships. They take too much money, time, conflict, etc. But at the end of the day humans are our best investment and learning to be a person who truly welcomes another might just be the most important skill to practice. Interactions are opportunities.

“In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything”. — Thomas Merton

The Prompt

The journal prompt is a natural follow up.

• What area of your life could benefit from exploring more unreasonable acts of hospitality or thoughtfulness

• How do you give the people you come in contact with a sense of belonging?

P.S. While reading this book I learned that the potato chip was invented in New York. Very important.

P.P.S If you are a person of faith, I had to make the point that while reading this book I had the shocking realization that the earth is God’s unreasonable hospitality towards us. It’s totally unreasonable. The millions of creatures that live in the bottom of the ocean that we never see. Rainbows. Thunder and lightning. It’s very lavish. And if we are modeling what is good, I think being a little unreasonable falls in that bucket.