Unreasonable Hospitality
Will Guidara · 2022
Unreasonable Hospitality (2022) is a book by Will Guidara on Hospitality & Customer Experience. How Will Guidara turned Eleven Madison Park from a good restaurant into the world's best by treating hospitality, not the food, as the real product, and why the gesture nobody asked for is what people remember.
The man who took Eleven Madison Park to the top of the world's best restaurants argues the unasked-for gesture, not the food, is the whole business model.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Unreasonable Hospitality pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- **Service versus hospitality**: service is delivering what you promised correctly and on time; hospitality is how the experience makes someone feel, and it's the second one people actually remember and pay loyalty for.
- The **95/5 rule**: 95 percent of a business has to be standardized and reliable so it becomes invisible, freeing energy for the last 5 percent, the unscripted human gesture, which is what guests actually tell stories about.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- Service Gets You Competent, Hospitality Gets You Loved
- Setting the Table: What Danny Meyer Taught Him
- A Restaurant That Wasn't Great Yet
- The Ninety-Five/Five Rule
- The Hot Dog and Other Unreasonable Gestures
- The Dare to Be Great Fund
- Hiring and Building the Dream Team
- Knowing the Guest Before They Arrive
- Hospitality After the Restaurant
Finish Unreasonable Hospitality tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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