THE TAO OF DANNY
By Steve Marsh
On the Cover: Danny Meyer photographed by Peter Yang. Suit, belt and tie by Ermenegildo Zegna; Shirt by Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Wardrobe styling by Don Sumada, Bernstein & Andruli; Grooming by Birgitte, ABTP.
On a rainy New York workday, at table 47 of the Union Square Cafe, Danny Meyer’s 29-year-old East 16th Street institution, his people warn me about him. The waiter notices that I’m carrying a slightly dampened, very dog-eared copy of the little blue book Meyer wrote in 2006, in which he first elucidated his Theory of Everything. The philosophy he refers to in Setting the Table (and adhers to as the CEO and founder of Union Square Hospitality Group) is “The Virtuous Cycle of Enlightened Hospitality.” “I see you brought The Bible,” Meyer’s employee teases, using obvious capital T, capital B air quotes. When I tell him that I’m interviewing the big man himself, the server’s premonition quickly follows: “Watch out!” he tells me, as I gorge myself on jewel-like slices of heirloom tomatoes. “Danny is very charming. You’re probably gonna really like him.”
And after a powerfully delicious lunch in his restaurant, I’m already predisposed to liking Danny Meyer. Any skepticism I had is now buried under delicately formed gnocchi and soulfully charred lamb chops scotta dita. And as Max the server winks and reminds me not to forget my Union Square umbrella (which I’d never seen before), I struggle to keep up my guard. Sure, The Union Square Cafe has helped transform this neighborhood, making it friendlier in equal measure to yuppies, hipsters and straight-up suits—a neighborhood that’s become so attractive that in 2015, when Meyer’s lease expires, his landlord plans to triple the rent.
Yes, the boy from St. Louis made it big in the big city, helping to remake neighborhood cornerstones and giving New York some of her most beloved restaurants. Meyer helped redefine authentic American fine dining and service at both Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, he raised his game to glorious heights at 11 Madison Park and The Modern at MoMA, and he brought Southern barbecue to Manhattan with Blue Smoke.
Since writing his book in 2006, Union Square Hospitality Group has grown from 1,000 employees to 3,500. Meyer is now known primarily for his addictive and aggressively expanding burger chain, Shake Shack, which has 48 locations around the world. In 2011, he sold 11 Madison Park, arguably the best restaurant in North America, seemingly to concentrate on operations such as his massive catering, event and hospitality outfit, Union Square Events. Meyer now has Blue Smoke outposts in airports and ballparks. (Full disclosure: Blue Smoke just started offering meals on Delta flights from New York to London.) There’s a Union Square Cafe in Tokyo. But, yeah, we’ve all seen Ratatouille: As a restaurateur expands his brand, the first casualties are usually passion and attention. And despite Meyer’s nice-guy attempts to elevate hospitality into some kind of belief system, this is New York: Nice guys finish last, they’re not supposed to lap the field.
All of this is running through my mind as I prepare to meet Meyer for a photo shoot and interview at the Conrad Hotel, a former Embassy Suites across from Battery Park that the financial giant Goldman Sachs has renovated into a four-star hotel with a huge Sol Lewitt mural in the lobby. Beforehand, I’d be dropping in on one of Danny’s semimonthly training meetings at his second Blue Smoke location, which opened in Lower Manhattan in 2011. When I get there, Meyer is giving a PowerPoint presentation to a group of about 25 well-groomed 20-somethings.
Whenever Meyer is on a food show such as Top Chef or getting interviewed on CBS This Morning, he’s impeccably suited. In front of his team, he’s jacketless but still professional. He’s going through Blue Smoke’s service procedure step by step with a clicker in his right hand, like he is Jets head coach Rex Ryan commanding the film room in front of his defensive personnel. I half expect him to break down dining-room footage from the night before. Meyer is throwing around “Enlightened Hospitality” jargon straight out of Setting the Table—how to “identify The Boss at the table” and why he hires “51 percenters,” the Union Hospitality Group’s ideal 51-to-49 percent heart-to- proficiency employee ratio. When he gets to the step in his presentation called “Reading the Table,” he launches into a long story about a recent business trip to Florida.
“I got to my hotel room,” he says, “and all I wanted to do was kick my shoes off, order a cheeseburger from room service and watch my beloved Cardinals take on the Giants in the National League Championship.” When he discovered that the hotel didn’t carry Fox Sports 1 in the room and the game was blacked out on his iPad, he went down to the bar. The TV was tuned into the Jets-Patriots pre-game show, but nobody was in the bar, and the waiter switched the channel over to the baseball game for him. “Later, the bar started to fill up a bit, and the television magically switched over to the Jets game.” When the waiter came over to check on him, he noticed somebody had changed the channel. “Not a big deal,” Meyer told him. “I’ll just take my cheeseburger over to the other lobby bar, nobody is over there.” But the waiter insisted. “No, that’s not right. You were here first. Let me take care of this for you.” The waiter returned with the remote control, switched the channel back to the baseball game, removed the batteries from the remote and handed them to Danny. “I’m getting shivers just telling you this,” Meyer tells his charges. “The burger was OK—not great—but I’ll never forget that he handed me the batteries.”
I’m a sucker for a romantic remote control story as much as the next guy, but Meyer’s anecdote actually gives me shivers, too. And I realize that these stories are what he’s going for—like Wes Anderson, Meyer is another guy from Middle America with romantic ideals about a European/Mid-Atlantic Golden Age polite society that never really existed, who nevertheless has gone on to forge a career and a style by recreating these imaginary scenes with a warm obsequiousness. Danny Meyer knows what looks good in the movie in his head.
After he’s finished going through the service progression, he opens it up to questions. A woman in the back inquires about dealing with the truly unhappy guests of New York. “There’s a different attitude here,” she says. “Look,” Meyer responds. “New York doesn’t have a monopoly on unhappiness. But forget ‘the customer is always right.’ Nobody is always right. And it’s not relevant that they’re right or wrong. The customer must always feel heard.”
We’re in the conference room at the Conrad and Meyer is dressed in a sleek blue suit, posing for the camera in gesture and manner appropriate to a CEO. He’s requested Steely Dan on Spotify—he just caught the band in Port Chester—and he’s threatening to play air guitar. When “Reelin’ in the Years” comes on, he drops some Steely Dan 101: “Supposedly the guitar solo coming up is the most technically advanced guitar solo ever recorded.” He explains that what he loves most about Steely Dan is their unique combination of jazz and rock and the “thinly veiled underlying anger in their lyrics.” He sings along to “Bodhisattva”—“Bodhisattva/ would you take me by the hand/can you show me/ the shine of your Japan/the sparkle of your China”—and pauses to muse, “We just saw some beautiful golden Bodhisattvas in Kyoto.”
Meyer grew up as an upper-middle-class Jewish kid in St. Louis—his dad was a Princeton man, his grandfather went to Yale—but was “very, very Reform Jewish,” he says. “I didn’t have the benefit of a bar mitzvah,” he says, “but I did have the benefit of having my Jewish grandmother serve barbecued pork ribs every year for my birthday.” Now he’s married to a nice Catholic woman and they have four children. “I think every chef I’ve hired up until this past year, in a 29-year career, was Catholic,” he says. “I think there’s something to that.” He wonders why so much of the food that he’s been fascinated with has been from Catholic places such as Italy, France, even the American South—New Orleans. “Why is there so much good food in Italy and France?” he asks. “There could be a work ethic involved. There could be a ritual of putting yourself second. It could be a sense of you get your greatest gratitude when you give to others.”
But Meyer’s true religion has always been travel and food. He worked as a guide for his father and uncle’s European travel company after graduating from college. He says he “would pick up these cranky, jet-lagged groups at Fiumicino airport [in Rome],” and would first conduct them to their welcome cocktail and piece of cake. Within 40 minutes, he’d focus in on the moodiest person in the group of 20, “and I’d be damned if I was not going to make that person the happiest person by the end of their six-day tour,” earning the big tips that would prove it. “I learned right then and there at the age of 20 that I had a gift,” he says.
When I ask Meyer how he developed his gift, he acknowledges that he was a classic middle child, “always caught between my parents, between my father and my grandfather, between my siblings and the dog.” It took him a while to figure that out, though. “It was just how I was wired, and I had developed that skill set obviously, as a kid.”
Meyer says that when he was 36 years old, he found a name for his philosophy: “It was truly the opening of Gramercy Tavern in 1994, 20 years ago. I think for the first time I was able to name what we now call “The Virtuous Cycle of Enlightened Hospitality.” Until you can name something, you can’t teach it; and until you can name something, you can do it, but it won’t be intentional.”
I bring up the woman at the training session who prompted his “New York doesn’t have a monopoly on unhappiness” response. Did this dark side to New York’s personality help him identify his code? When he first opened Union Square Cafe, he didn’t hire native New Yorkers, he hired expats. In his book, he says this policy sprang from ignorance, but I wonder if these first steps led him someplace new.
“I don’t think hospitality is unique to any city.”
But his hospitality code was born here.
“Or maybe it was born in St. Louis,” he says. “The sense of belonging and that the restaurant was on my side, that this was my place, was truly born in St. Louis. Because truth be told, the food scene in St. Louis wasn’t that great when I was growing up.”
If everything is attention to detail, if hospitality is truly, as he says, “not one size fits all but one size fits one,” how do you scale that up? How do you scale up openheartedness and optimism and generosity as a business strategy?
Meyer thinks success—certainly in restaurants and probably in any business—is about culture. “Every company has a culture, every family has a culture. How intentional are you about that culture?” Growth often threatens culture, but it doesn’t have to. “The world is littered with companies where growth equaled a dilution of their culture. Were you there when I told the remote control story?”
Yes.
“That kind of storytelling supports the culture that we have.” These stories could be about any business, he says, we just have an emotional relationship with food, so everybody can relate. But the stories and the culture are intentional. “You probably also would notice there were five or six senior leaders from our team in the audience,” he says. “Because if I’m the only guy telling the stories, there’s no way we can scale this. And that’s how we’ve gotten to 3,500 people. We have a chief culture officer. How many restaurant companies have a chief culture officer?”
I wonder how he competes against companies that are so driven to look out for No. 1? “I think enlightened hospitality is the greediest system on earth,” he proclaims. “But it’s long-term greedy, and it’s sustainably greedy.”
He offers up his appearance on Jim Cramer’s show, Mad Money. “I learned a lesson, never go on a TV show without asking what they’re intending to do.” Meyer has me Google his appearance on YouTube. On the show, Cramer’s producer surprised him by wheeling out a tray from various public restaurant companies. A lobster from Red Lobster, a bowl of spaghetti from the Olive Garden, a Big Mac from McDonalds, a steak from Ruth’s Chris Steak House and a burrito from Chipotle.
“Cameras are on me,” he says. “And [Cramer] says, ‘You’re a great restaurateur . . . tell our viewers based on the flavors of these foods what restaurant company to invest in.’ I was completely unprepared for that—the CEO of Darden had just eaten in our restaurant the day before, so I wasn’t going to say anything bad about Red Lobster or Olive Garden. And god knows when they had gone out to get all this stuff. It did not look like something you wanted to eat! Any of it! So I said, ‘I don’t even have to taste the food, I can tell you which one to invest in right now. I would invest in Chipotle, the burrito. Because I know they care for their employees, they care deeply for their supply chain, they care about the impact of their food on the community, that’s the most sustainable long-term way to be greedy.’” Now Cramer has an index called “Danny Meyer’s Hospitality Index,” a stock index of companies Meyer believes live this hospitality culture. “It’s outperformed Standard and Poor,” he says.
Meyer takes my book and toward the end finds a circular diagram of the five stakeholders: Employees → Customers → Community → Suppliers → Investors.
“The reason it’s called a virtuous cycle is if you break it at any point, you’ll break the whole thing. If your employees don’t love coming to work, who in the world are you to think your customers will be having a great time? And if you’re not rooting for your community, why would your community be rooting for you?”
“Capitalism works,” he says. “And there’s no rule in capitalism that says you have to be an idiot about the way you do it.”
(ORIGINAL ARTICLE)
DANNY MEYER PROFILE
