[Upbeat whimsical music] KATE SULLIVAN: East Nashville, Tennessee: home to a lot of hot and trendy restaurants, but today we're heading into one with history and heart.

I'm dining with famed restaurateur Will Guidara.

WILL GUIDARA: Come here.

KATE: It is so good to see you.

KATE: A man who knows about the magic of great hospitality.

WILL: I want to create a culture of unreasonable hospitality.

KATE: A man who had no formal dining experience, took 11 Madison Park to the number one restaurant in the world.

KATE: Two people walk into your restaurant, and you want to give them an unforgettable experience.

WILL: You have to be present.

KATE: Will shares the secrets to unreasonable hospitality.

No matter what job you have or what business you're in.

KATE: I want to cry.

WILL: We give them a gift that no one else could have given them.

KATE: Will shares how the service industry has the power to change a life every single day, and it's up to every individual to embrace this power and privilege.

WILL: It is the most selfish pleasure.

KATE: Mm.

WILL: It feels really good to make other people feel good.

♪♪ KATE: What's better in life than a bottle of wine, great food, and an amazing conversation?

My name is Kate Sullivan, and I am the host of To Dine For .

I'm a journalist, a foodie, a traveler with an appetite for the stories of people who are hungry for more: dreamers, visionaries, artists: those who hustle hard in the direction they love.

I travel with them to their favorite restaurant to hear how they did it.

This show is a toast to them and their American Dream.

To Dine For with Kate Sullivan is made possible by... ♪♪ FEMALE ANNOUNCER: We support the doers and dreamers.

Those working today toward a more secure tomorrow.

At American National, we're proud to help you make that future possible.

[Wine dribbling into glass] KATE: Hi everyone.

Today I'm in East Nashville, Tennessee on my way into a restaurant called The Butcher & Bee.

The person who chose this as their favorite restaurant is an acclaimed restauranteur and the author of the book Unreasonable Hospitality .

I can't wait for you to meet Will Guidara.

KATE: Will, how are you?

WILL: Come here.

KATE: It is so good to see you.

WILL: I'm really, really happy to be here with you.

Welcome to Nashville.

KATE: Thank you.

WILL: Thanks for coming.

KATE: I'm so excited to enjoy this meal with you at one of your favorite spots.

WILL: Yeah.

This is- I mean, I can't wait for you to try the food.

KATE: I can't either.

I've been kind of salivating.

KATE: When I'm meeting a guest who is one of the world's top restauranteurs, I know it's going to be top-notch.

Will Guidara discovered Butcher & Bee during COVID, when he connected with co-owner Michael Shemtov during their efforts to keep the hospitality industry alive during the shutdown.

MICHAEL SHEMTOV: When I moved here from from Israel, I was ten, only had one relative from the Israeli-Iraqi side of our family that was here in the States; and he was in the restaurant business in Los Angeles.

Growing up, I didn't do summer camp, but every summer I'd go visit him and we'd tour his restaurants and tour other restaurants, and that just inspired me to, to pursue it.

KATE: This East Nashville staple has stood the test of time; in a city with an ever-changing hot restaurant scene, Butcher & Bee emphasizes locally sourced ingredients, blending Middle Eastern flavors with southern cooking.

KATE: Much of the menu is vegetable centric, with dishes like avocado crispy rice and seared wild mushroom and turnip cacio e pepe, all of it designed to be shared.

MICHAEL: I think that's even more important the- than the cuisine is the connection that we hope people have.

We serve pita with a lot of our dips and we don't cut it.

We want people to be like slightly uncomfortable, like rip a piece, hand you piece.

We love it, we're seeing people say, like, 'here, let me serve you.'

KATE: It's a lot like some of the strategies Will Guidara used when he owned some of the top restaurants in the world, like 11 Madison Park and the Nomad restaurants in New York, L.A., and Vegas.

KATE: [Exhales] I love sitting down to a restaurant.

WILL: Can I tell you; also, this restaurant is a restaurant that you should love sitting down to.

It's one of my favorites in Nashville.

The food is incredible, and I'm so excited to share a meal here with you.

KATE: I knew you were going to take me someplace with amazing food.

But why specifically did you choose this restaurant?

WILL: So A: I love a restaurant where they create the conditions for connection.

KATE: Mm.

WILL: I have always believed that in a restaurant, the service, the design, the food, the beverages, they're merely ingredients in the recipe of human connection.

This, especially with everything that's happening right now, this is like a sacred place.

Every time I've been here, I just kind of lose myself in the moment.

The world feels like it disappears.

MICHAEL: All right.

We have our first course.

So uh, we're quite known for our dips here.

This is hummus.

The green is zhug, Yemenite condiment.

I grew up eating it.

I used to put it on pizza when I was a kid.

And our famous whipped feta.

KATE: That looks amazing.

So delicious.

WILL: If you haven't had this- KATE: I haven't.

WILL: It... KATE: Mind blowing?

WILL: It's, like, really good.

KATE: Ooooo!

KATE: Thank you so much.

Thank you, Michael.

WILL: That's my professional take on the food.

It's like really good.

KATE: Today we're having their famous whipped feta topped with house-made spicy lamb sausage, the hummus dip with grilled shawarma chicken served with fresh vegetables and fluffy grilled pita.

Plus: the star of the show: rigatoni with pork, lamb and beef ragu.

KATE: I'm really curious about sort of the roots of your love of hospitality.

Your mother was a stewardess.

WILL: Yeah.

KATE: Your father worked in restaurants, including the Ground Round.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: And he worked his way up.

KATE: So I'm just wondering like, what were your- what were those early seeds of hospitality in your family?

You must have felt them.

And then when did you know you wanted to be in hospitality?

WILL: So my dad... was my hero growing up.

And I really do mean that.

He is my best friend to this day.

He is obviously my dad, my greatest mentor, but when I was a kid like four years old, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer.

She got radiation treatment after they removed the tumor from her brain, which ultimately rendered her into a quadriplegic.

KATE: Wow.

WILL: But what I'm grateful for is the closeness that it brought between me and my dad.

But he was my hero because I'd watch him work restaurant hours.

I'd watch him take care of her on a daily basis.

I mean, and like, get her out of bed, wash her, put her in the wheelchair, feed her, and also still manage to be a really good dad to me.

In the beginning it was watching him care for her.

And how he never once felt bad for himself.

In fact, to the contrary.

KATE: There was no resentment, there was no sadness.

He did it with honor and integrity.

WILL: There was joy in caring for her.

KATE: Wow.

WILL: And then when I got a little bit older, I was a part of the team.

So I started caring for her as well.

KATE: This is to dine for, wow that is so good.

WILL: It is so good.

KATE: Yes.

KATE: Will began his dining room career as a busboy at the iconic Beverly Hills restaurant Spago, before moving up to work at Tabla and the cafe at MoMA.

In 2006, Danny Meyer, another titan of modern hospitality, offered 26-year-old Will the top job at 11 Madison Park, located in the heart of Manhattan.

At the time, it was a struggling two-star brasserie.

KATE: At one point, you get offered to, be the general manager of 11 Madison Park.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: Okay.

KATE: Your first inclination is I'm not a fine dining guy.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: Right?

WILL: Yeah.

KATE: You say to Danny Meyer, I'll do it if I can in one year, work for Shake Shack.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: And he says yes.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: Okay.

Take me through this.

Which is- sounds crazy, but this is so- I think this is such an amazing lesson.

WILL: By this point in my career, the pendulum had swung entirely to the other side, where restaurants were about the chef, they were about the food.

And everything that happened here was in service of that.

And I almost felt the thing that I had spent my entire life caring about, didn't matter.

And so I had like a couple of hard interactions with chefs, or I was like, I can't find joy in a world where I'm trying to convince the person I work with that that I matter, what I care about, matters.

KATE: Mmmm.

WILL: So I was like, all right, Shake Shack, that's what I want to do.

KATE: So what was that one year like?

Those first few months, that transition from really kind of diving into the world of fine dining that you really weren't familiar with all of the- there's a lot of do's and don'ts.

WILL: Obviously by the end of the year, extraordinarily fun, which is why I decided to keep doing it.

But in the very beginning, I was leading people who had more experience than I did doing that thing.

I think one of the first things that I did well, you know, if you can, athletes always go to the tapes when they've had a bad game to see what they did wrong, to make sure they don't repeat that mistake.

KATE: Yes.

WILL: But I think we could all stand to get better at is going to the tapes when we've had a good game to see what we did well.

It's interesting to me how often we'll correct our mistakes, but inadvertently stop doing the things we already did well.

KATE: Oh that's good.

WILL: I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't like, go to the restaurant and start trying to change it.

I went to the restaurant, started trying to get to know everyone there to understand who they were as people, understand their differing perspectives on what was happening in the restaurant.

But then, what became funny was me realizing, like, people that worked for me were almost getting mad at me for doing certain things in the dining room.

Like one night in the restaurant, a guy was dining with us, and he had been a regular at Tabla, so I knew him quite well.

And I went to his to his table and I said, I have to do this like this.

And I was like, "Hey, Bill, it's so good to see you."

And I'm talking to him like this, and we're having a great conversation.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: We went I went back into the service station and my service director at the time he comes up to me, you know, the energy one has when they're about to try to yell at their boss.

KATE: Right.

WILL: He's like trying to contain it.

And he's like, "You can't put your hands on the table."

KATE: Because it's fine dining and that's not allowed?

WILL: I was like, "Why is that?"

"It's a rule.

We do not touch the table."

And I said, "But why is it a rule?"

KATE: Mm.

WILL: And there was no answer to that question that I actually thought was, good enough.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: I never, ever think, no matter what the culture, that we should change for the sake of change.

KATE: Yes, there is a decorum to fine dining that has always been, right?

So, there are rules that have always been.

We don't know why.

WILL: But no, but if...if the answer to 'Why do we do something this way' is only because we've always done it that way, then it, at the very least deserves a second look.

KATE: A second look.

Exactly.

KATE: Just as Will was changing the way the front of the house was run, things at 11 Madison Park were changing in the kitchen.

The same year Will started, Chef Daniel Humm, a European trained chef, joined the team and began shifting the restaurant from a brasserie to fine dining.

In 2011, they bought the restaurant from Danny Meyer.

The next year, they won three Michelin stars that the restaurant still holds today, but that was just the beginning.

In 2017, 11 Madison Park became the number one restaurant in the world.

KATE: Talk to me about what it took to become a team between the celebrated chef and what you were trying to do in the front of the house.

WILL: Something that we made a central part of our culture was this idea of embracing tension.

KATE: Embracing tension?

WILL: Yeah.

KATE: Huh.

WILL: If you've ever been lucky enough to work alongside a group of like-minded people who want to be the best as much as you do.

KATE: Right.

WILL: There will be tension.

Because well, everyone might agree on where they're trying to go.

We're human beings, it's inevitable that we're going to disagree on the right way to get there.

And then more often than not, in moments of tension, people respond in one of a few ways: A: they're shy away from it... KATE: Avoid.

WILL: Because it's uncomfortable.

They want nothing to do with it.

KATE: RIGHT.

WILL: Or B: they just try to bulldoze their way through it and get the other person to just agree with their perspective.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: Either approach is is, is a lost opportunity.

Because when you can navigate it, navigate through the tension thoughtfully with your colleague, not only do we grow closer together, but together, we can figure out what is the right best next step for the the organization as a whole.

KATE: I love that.

MICHAEL: Alright.

So this is our uh ragu and lamachi here.

WILL: Mmmm.

KATE: Wow, this looks so good.

Wow.

When you were a part of 11 Madison Park, you brought a totally different approach to elevating the importance of the work of the front of the house.

And I feel like your story, is so remarkable because of what you did to put that emphasis on the service and the hospitality and the cult-ture.

Right?

WILL: Yes.

Thank you for- [laughs] that's a good grab.

KATE: Yeah.

Did you know that right off the bat when you took the job or did that develop?

WILL: That developed for sure.

The longer I was there, it's like anything, you try something, and you see, "Is this allowed?

Is this going to feel right?

Will this work?"

KATE: Right.

WILL: What made it really work was that it was in that level of fine dining.

And so like, either the amount of time we had serving someone or the resources at our disposal, or the fact that there's just a general level of intensity within a culture like that, we were able to focus all of that intensity, not on the product we were serving, but on how we made people feel when we served it to them.

KATE: What are some of the tenets and what are some of the unwritten rules that when you walk into an organization and you want to affect culture, you do or should be thought of?

WILL: Listen, I think people need to, on their own, just decide what their culture wants to be.

What does it stand for?

What are the non-negotiables?

I think what's more important is how you then, once you know what those things are... create it, maintain it, pursue it.

Inspire others to want to be a part of it.

I wanted to create a culture of excellence.

I wanted to create a culture of unreasonable hospitality.

KATE: And when you say unreasonable, what do you mean by that?

WILL: Being creative, intentional, relentless, willing to do whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.

KATE: If unreasonable hospitality worked in restaurants, Will knew it could take off in other industries.

So he wrote about it and it became a New York Times' bestseller.

His first book, Unreasonable Hospitality , is the "why" his techniques worked at the restaurant.

Will's second book, The Field Guide , focuses on the "how" to implement unreasonable hospitality in every field.

Will has taken his expertise to the small screen, co-producing and consulting on the hit show The Bear , a fictional story based on a fine dining restaurant in Chicago with high stakes hospitality.

KATE: I love your concept of assuming the best about someone when you are offering perhaps negative feedback.

Like for example, if someone's late.

WILL: Yes.

KATE: Assuming that maybe maybe they had a really bad day or something terrible happened on the way.

Start there, instead of going in on them.

WILL: If someone comes into the restaurant... and they're just kind of acting like a jerk, it happens.

It's, it's going to happen.

We get to make a choice.

Do we no longer give them our best hospitality?

Which, by the way, that's a very human choice to make.

So he's definitely a jerk.

Why should you give him your best hospitality?

Or do you give them the charitable assumption and say, maybe they're acting this way because on their way to the restaurant, they get a call that someone that they love passed away, or their spouse had just filed for divorce.

Maybe the person acting like a jerk is the person in this room that needs our love more than anyone else?

KATE: Mmm.

Wow, that is so powerful.

WILL: Now, sometimes that person might actually just be a jerk.

KATE: A jerk [laughs].

WILL: But I'd always rather err on the side of assuming the best and be proven wrong.

KATE: Yes.

WILL: Then assuming the worst.

KATE: It's just an amazing and I would imagine, when you're having to give feedback, if you come from that, that feedback, even if it's a harsh criticism it's going to be gentler.

It's going to land more gently.

WILL: For sure.

But that all brings us to the final culture within hospitality, which is a culture of repair.

KATE: Hm.

WILL: I believe in the charitable assumption.

I'm going to make a mistake and not give it to someone.

I believe in praise and criticism.

I'm going to make the mistake of just calling out the things that were done wrong, and not focusing on the things that were done right.

I believe in collaboration.

I'm going to make the mistake when someone comes to me with an idea, I'm going to be too busy to receive it, right?

Like, but every day I'm going to wake up and try to be great at all these things.

When I fail, that's when repair matters most of all.

KATE: Two people walk into your restaurant, and you want to give them an unforgettable experience.

Take me through how you do that.

WILL: A: You have to be present.

Um which is kind of annoyingly overused these days, but when it comes to people, to relationships, to hospitality, I believe it's, almost everything.

I define being present as just making the choice to care so much about the one person in front of you, you stop caring about everything else you need to do.

And these days with cell phones, it's really hard, even for the best of us, to do that well.

To take what you do seriously.

Obviously, if you want to be successful, you better, but don't take yourself so seriously.

Some of the things that I'm the most famous for having done back in the day, are so off brand for a four-star restaurant.

But when you look at how it made people feel, who actually cares?

KATE: Can you give me- first of all, can you define what a legend is that happened at 11 Madison Park and give me an example?

WILL: So a legend is, when we hear someone say something and we go totally off book and just try to do something amazing with what they said.

An example: there's a couple dining with us.

They just got married at City Hall.

Um, turned out they had a big wedding planned, but there was drama between the two families.

For whatever reason, they've decided to cancel it.

The server on her own, and that's an important caveat, because this kind of culture only exists if it's embraced by everyone in it.

Committed herself to, before their meal was over, having figured out what their wedding song would have been.

And we slowed down their meal just enough where they were one of the last tables in the room, which meant most of my team was off the clock.

Rather, they were up in the private dining room having a little impromptu staff party, but it was not their staff party.

It was that couple's wedding reception.

When they were done with the meal, we walked them up to the room.

The moment they set foot over the threshold, we played their song "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers.

We had given them the gift of a first dance.

KATE: I want to cry.

WILL: It didn't cost us anything!

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: We gave them a gift that no one else could have given them in that moment.

Three: it felt really good for them because, by the way, that server had earned informality so that it was a gesture that happened for them, not to them.

It wasn't weird.

Because she spent time getting to the point where it would be well received.

But, most fundamentally, we felt good doing it.

I think that's the thing about hospitality.

It is the most selfish pleasure.

It feels really good to make other people feel good.

Table of four shows up as a table of three because someone's home sick in bed.

Okay so, once you identify that as a recurring moment, you get to decide what is the most awesome way to respond to every time that happens.

What we did, just the most delicious chicken soup ever.

That was always ready to go.

KATE: I was just thinking chicken soup.

WILL: So we can just send them home and that person still got to "eat" at my restaurant that night.

KATE: It's almost like the person who's signing up to be one of your staffers, servers is also signing up to create magic.

WILL: The people that sign up to work with me, they get to make magic.

That's like part of the benefits package.

KATE: Right, this isn't... WILL: It's not an additional responsibility.

KATE: Right.

It's not a list of what to do.

WILL: It requires work.

Some work is depleting.

Some work is energizing.

I put this squarely into the list of work that's energizing.

KATE: Energizing.

Yes.

As somebody who's hiring, how do you identify the people who want to get to make magic, the people who want to work harder because those are the people you want on your team, right?

WILL: Is this someone I want to spend time with?

KATE: Mm!

WILL: Do I think I can trust them?

KATE: There's no answer to any question.

It's not about the resumé.

It's simply, it's almost a feeling.

WILL: Mm hmm.

And that's what you go by.

WILL: For certain roles, some people needed to have done- had some level of experience.

And so you'd vet that.

But I never brought a resumé to an interview.

KATE: What was it like when 11 Madison Park was named the number one restaurant in the world?

WILL: Like a feeling that is absolutely, impossible to articulate.

One of the best feelings in the entire world.

When you work, so hard, for so long, alongside so many amazing people.

I don't know how... it feels to achieve a goal, if you're the kind of person that feels like you did it alone.

But I do know how good it feels to achieve a goal when you know that it was an army of people that achieved it together.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: And gosh it is so much sweeter.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: The goal was to, create a culture of unreasonable hospitality, to try to redefine what, how far you could take the idea of hospitality.

And that was, simply, albeit a very important one, an affirmation along the way.

KATE: Yeah, I can't- would you want to do it again?

WILL: I love restaurants, I miss restaurants, I love what I do now.

KATE: Yeah, you're working on something different?

WILL: I have an awesome company where there's like ten of us and I have an... I went to college with one, and three of them have worked with me for 20 or more years.

We have like a very close-knit crew, you know, and we do kind of four things.

I'm working on books, do some speaking.

There's two people in my team.

I just travel around the country and do training workshops for NFL football teams, car companies, hospital systems and kind of everything in between.

No restaurants or hotels.

Honestly, it's almost 95 percent other industries.

We have a couple of gatherings we host.

We do the Welcome Conference in New York, which is our big hospitality symposium.

KATE: Yep.

WILL: We did an Unreasonable Hospitality Summit here in Nashville, which is a two-day practical workshop around the ideas.

And then the last piece, which is a really fun one, is we have a creative studio; where we bring ideas to life in unlikely places.

I like to describe it as like, imagine a world that we wish existed, and then one day get to invite people into our imaginations.

KATE: Love that.

WILL: It's like we're designing a baseball stadium or, we designed a card game more recently, or we're just like going into adjacent industries and I love the word "awesome."

So we're like, "What would be awesome?"

Let's just do that.

KATE: Yeah.

WILL: I think that's a pretty cool way to do it.

KATE: I do too, I'd like to make a toast.

Um, to magic and to making memories and great hospitality.

Thank you for this conversation.

I've enjoyed it so much.

WILL: Thank you.

KATE: Yeah.

Cheers.

Wow.

Wow, what a meal with Will Guidara.

He's achieved more success than the top 1 percent of restauranteurs.

The accolades and the awards tell one story, but it's his care for others that tells the real story.

His love of serving people, making them feel good, no, making them feel wowed.

He calls it unreasonable hospitality.

But for Will, it's part of who he is, being a good human, mixed with the ambition to create magic in a world that so desperately needs more of it.

[Bright pop guitar music plays] KATE: If you would like to know more about the guests, the restaurants, and the inspiring stories of success, please visit ToDineForTV.com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram @ToDineForTV.

We also have a podcast.

To Dine For , The Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To Dine For with Kate Sullivan is made possible by... FEMALE ANNOUNCER: We support the doers and dreamers.

Those working today toward a more secure tomorrow.

At American National, we're proud to help you make that future possible.

[Wine dribbling into glass]