Encounters with unreasonable hospitality
The Will Guidara story
2017
“On the day of the awards,” writes restaurateur Will Guidara in his memoir Unreasonable Hospitality, “I took a long walk with Christina, trying not to let my anxiety get the best of me, before heading back to the hotel to change into my tux. Gary Obligacion of Alinea tied my bow tie; I’ve never learned how.”
It is 2017. Guidara is in Melbourne at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants award, representing Eleven Madison Park (EMP), a top-of-the-line fine-dining restaurant at the corner of East 24th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Christina is a renowned pastry chef, though in this vignette she’s a wife accompanying her new husband on what may be the biggest evening of his career. And Obligacion, who oversees operations for Chicago’s famed Alinea group of restaurants, is a friend and fellow professional.
Guidara is not a chef. He is not your average restaurateur. Over the last decade, Guidara has built a reputation for himself as a purveyor of dining room indulgences. He works in an industry that summarizes success down to a chef’s vision to the exclusion of almost everything else. Guidara’s job—mission—one that he has created for himself and by the gravity of which he has assembled a can-do team at EMP, is to provide diners with unforgettable memories.
Not long after being helped with his bow tie, Guidara finds the intersection of his life’s two most important trajectories—EMP’s consistently exceptional food and his own path-breaking vision for hospitality.
“It was not lost on me,” notes Guidara, “as I was handed the award, that I was the first dining room person ever to take part in accepting the award on behalf of their restaurant.”
A few months after returning from the World’s Best 50 as the owners of the best restaurant in the world, instead of cashing in on the privilege, Guidara and Humm will plan a total redesign of EMP—“It was time for it to become completely, entirely ours.”
Two years hence, the World’s Best 50 will effect a change in rule that will bar any previous winners from competing again.
Less than three years out, months before the pandemic, Guidara will walk away from EMP—the restaurant that he co-owned with his chef-partner Humm. Guidara will effect the split by selling his shares to Humm, making the chef the sole principal of Make It Nice, the hospitality group the two had co-founded.
In an email to their staff, Guidara and Humm will cite “different visions of the company long-term” as the reason for their split. They will sign off with “Given the chance, we would do it all again.”
2015
In March, restaurant critic for The New York Times Pete Wells returns to EMP after three years. In the review that follows, he tees off with a question: “Can a restaurant still succeed when it fails at what it says it wants to do?”
Like a headmaster whose previous encounter with a recalcitrant pupil ended in a rebuke and who remembers that all too well, Wells searches for signs of compliance. He reasons that EMP has dropped some of its gab, “but not all.”
Wells gripes about the la-di-da service, the glut of courses, and the fat check. Despite all of that, “under the restaurant’s relentless, skillful campaign to spread joy,” he concedes to the almost absurd brand of hospitality at EMP.
EMP holds on to its four stars, a sign that it is the upper crust in food and hospitality.
Come June and expectations run high at the World’s 50 Best in 2015 at London. EMP first featured on the 50 Best in 2010 before jumping places every year to fourth in 2014. Perhaps it is time for a new numero uno, rumors are rife.
For the first time since appearing on the 50 Best list, EMP falls back. It slips to fifth. It is a blow to Guidara and Humm. They are no more diligent employees of the two-star brasserie they had joined nearly a decade ago. For the last four compilations of the World’s Best 50 list, they have held the honor of being owners of the best restaurant in the United States. That is not enough. Their aspirations go further. The slip to fifth rattles.
The slip is perhaps the kind of tip-off that good investigators pay heed to. It sets Guidara and Daniel Humm crisscrossing the world on field trips. The two do this every year, only this time they carry with them a laser focus to find one last reinvention needed to push EMP all the way to the position of the best restaurant in the world.
What do they find? Guidara writes in his book:
…and we had begun to notice another feature—or perhaps “bug” is a better word—that most of those spectacular meals had in common.
They were just too much.
As inspired as we were by those incredible crescendos, as wowed as we were by course after course of faultless food paired with remarkable wines, it was also overwhelming.
Later that year, back in New York from their travels, Guidara and Humm are carrying the seed of an omen. They sit down for a meal at their restaurant to exchange notes.
It is not unusual for Guidara to start chatting over a degustation, slip into a deep dialog over several courses, and then hop across to the nearest Irish pub just so that he can close the conversation. Food and hospitality, for him, are circumstances for human connection. They best flow unimpeded. But he and Humm get up from their dinner before dessert is served, at the very restaurant they co-own, because their experience is impeded.
For every course, someone brings fresh silverware, places new wine glasses on crisply ironed tablecloth, serves the food and shares its story, and pours wine. As soon as Humm and him are done, someone clears the plates and crumbs the table. These actions, six in all, punctuate each course and are synchronized by a team of servers, runners, and bussers and overseen by a captain—all impeccably dressed and trained in service to a level of technical perfection. There are fifteen such courses before service is complete. Fifteen times six. Ninety actions. Or ninety interruptions, as Guidara comes to realize. It is time to change that.
To bring intimacy to grandeur has been Guidara’s life’s task. Within the high-ceiling art deco interiors of EMP, He wants to lower the stakes in fine dining. He wants, almost foolishly, people to be themselves while popping caviar and sipping Grand Cru Burgundy. He wants people to have as much fun receiving as he and his team have giving.
He wants to make diners at his restaurant feel like they are having dinner at a friend’s but he finds fifteen courses, a four-hour-long meal, and a service that is tied up in dining room splashiness. Pete Wells’ scrimping stars make sense to him.
“Serve only what you want to serve,” believes Guidara, “and you’re showing off. Serve only what you think other people want, and you’re pandering. Serve what you genuinely want to receive, and there will be authenticity to the experience.”
EMP is no longer serving what it wants to receive. It is, Guidara concedes after his own interrupted meal, trying too much.
Soon after the first decision to leave dinner midway at their own restaurant, Guidara and Humm make a second decision. It is now time to return to basics.
Over the next several months, they work out a turnaround.
Where service staff were instructed to stick to the script, the staff now is encouraged to pay attention to the diners’ needs. Where earlier their interventions followed a set choreography, now the staff is fully present for a dialog with diners, even if that means the table has to wait a minute longer for the dessert menu. And finally where before the staff were expected to have mastered the formula for service, down to every flourish and gesture, now Guidara trusts his team’s decision-making in the moment.
Guidara ditches a carefully calibrated system of excellence—one that he had laboriously made—for a kind of off-the-cuff and warm hospitality.
The tangibles are stripped down too. From a gluttonous fifteen courses to seven, from a gratuitous mission statement that belonged on a website to a simple mission that resonated for the people in service of it (“to be the most delicious and gracious restaurant in the world”), and from a four-hour guided tour of the history of food in New York to a conversation.
The decision to pare down traces back as much to Pete Wells’ review or Guidara and Humm’s globe-trotting experiences as it does from a quiet confidence that more isn’t better. After all the years, after all the iterations, Guidara has come to realize that “all its [EMP’s] excellence was in the service of Unreasonable Hospitality.”
2014
“What I wanted,” writes Alan Sytsma, food editor at New York Magazine, in a bylined piece dated April 9th, “was to actually see how he put together a staff where every person working the dining room can seem as charming as Sirio Maccioni in his prime. Guidara invited me to come in for a few hours before service one day last week.”
What does Sytsma find?
At 3:30 p.m., in the back office of Eleven Madison Park, maître d’ Justin Roller is Googling the names of every guest who will come in that night. It’s a well-known tactic of the restaurant, an effort to be as familiar as possible with the diners. But anyone can Google some names and faces, so Roller is going deeper. “I’m looking for chef’s whites and wine glasses,” he says. A shot of a guest wearing whites means a chef is probably coming to dinner. Wine glasses signify a potential sommelier (or at least a wine geek). This is just the beginning. If, for example, Roller discovers it’s a couple’s anniversary, he’ll then try to figure out which anniversary. If it’s a birthday, he’ll welcome a guest, as they walk in the door, with a “Happy Birthday.” (Or, if it seems to Roller that a guest prefers to keep a low profile, “I’ll let them introduce themselves to me,” he says.)
Sytsma finds a training manual 97 pages long. It has instructions for everything ranging from sock length and nail polish shade for staffers to how to fold chocolate bars and how to make dining room pillows look just the right kind of bouncy.
A kitchen server—a position at the bottom of the dining room pecking order—Sytsma meets at EMP was a captain at her last job. Used to overseeing a section of the dining room, typically comprising a clutch of tables, and having a team of runners, waiters, and bussers at her beck and call, she now scoops “granola into Mason jars to be handed out as gifts after dinner.” And when she’s done with that, she will do nothing other than polish silverware for a full three-hour shift.
“It will likely take at least a year before she can work her way up to captain at EMP,” Sytsma imagines.
EMP’s rigorous dining-room apprenticeship is evolutionary. Its point is to weed out. The training imparts precision and polish to those who (claim to) like taking care of people. It does so relentlessly, with everyone on the dining room floor doing everything in rotation. Sytsma reports:
The result of all this training, though, is that the restaurant has a 60-strong army of people prepared to disarm customers with their graciousness and care. As the service staff sees it, the dining room consists of four stations, broken into groups of seven or eight tables. (The entire dining room is 29 tables.) Each station gets its own dedicated four-person staff: A captain, a sommelier, a server, and an assistant server. Four people are assigned to the bar, and five get stationed at the front door.
[...]
An additional staffer is referred to as the “Dreamweaver” — like the song — and is tasked with handling special projects and requests from guests.
Few restaurants in the upper echelons of fine dining have such resources at their disposal. Fewer even are of such a persuasion. More from Sytsma.
At 5 p.m., a half-hour before service, Guidara gathers the FOH [front of the house] staff for their daily meeting, line-up. They quickly touch on notes for the night, such as menu tweaks and what beers are on tap (the printed notes handed out to servers even detail the types of flowers that are in the dining room that night). But the meeting is less about service changes and more about rallying the troops.
[...]
Today, when all the talk of new restaurants is about the food, why, Guidara asks his staff, would customers return to a restaurant specifically for the service, the same way they might return to eat an amazing steak?
Guidara exhorts his team to be so good that diners return, again and again, begging to be spoiled silly.
After making the point, Guidara looks around at his own staff: “There’s nothing wrong with us being the stars of the show.”
A few days after Sytsma’s account, EMP inches up to fourth on the list of the World’s Best 50. It now breathes rarefied air.
2013
In September of 2012, EMP received its most biting review yet. It was egregious enough for other outlets to put out think pieces. Pete Wells, restaurant critic for The New York Times and the author of the roast, was monikered “Pete ‘the Punisher’ Wells.” That review came on the heels of a New York-themed reinvention at EMP.
Prior to that redo, everybody agreed, EMP was doing swell. And now when the project has made an untimely splashdown—thanks to The New York Times’ unflattering appraisal—it falls to Guidara to pick up the pieces.
The experience doesn’t break Guidara’s nerves. It opens his eyes.
He grasps that he may have taken the idea of EMP as a New York restaurant too far. The misstep he rues is that he has veered away from placing the diner at the center of his brand of hospitality. By going for a straight tasting menu with a city theme he has made sure that “everyone who ate with us would experience all the things we were excited about.” He has assumed that diners were as keen to listen to stories about the food as he was to tell them, ignoring the possibility that some were there to have a cozy conversation with their partners or just to be left alone.
He has throttled the creativity of his staff by forcing them to learn his scripts. He has imposed on them the manner of an automaton, something that Pete Wells noticed and lamented.
Diners to savor the food and the service; staff to deliver his speeches. Every rill that feeds the river of his ambition he has bent for his convenience.
When Guidara looks within, he finds a telling juxtaposition: his superpower is his obsession to detail and his kryptonite is his desire to control even the minutiae in execution, and both blessing and curse sit next to each other, unseparated.
Shaken, he tries to balance his need for control and his lack of trust. He’s able to do that only in the manner of someone who’s made a habit of walking that fine line. There’s a helplessness mixed with acceptance. Guidara recognizes it in his memoir.
I like to think I gain awareness every time I make this mistake. I have surrounded myself with people I trust, who tell me when it’s time to back off. But I’m pretty sure managing the tension between these two is an issue I will struggle with for the rest of my career. All I can do is stay aware, so my superpower doesn’t turn into my villain origin story. And when I do (inevitably) screw up, I need to fix the mistake quickly and with as little ego as possible.
He owns up. He stands before his team and he owns up. He admits that he had tried to turn their service into a performance, “ruling out any possibility of a real, quality conversation between them and the guests.” He pulls back. He makes room for his servers and his captains to be themselves at the table.
What he retains is the indulgence—the magic trick, the sixteen courses, the sous-vide cooking.
If you don’t explore the outer perimeter, how else will you know where the line is? A lot of those ideas were good; if we hadn’t given ourselves the freedom to investigate them, we would never have known which of them to keep.
In April, Guidara steps down. Kirk Kelewae, who started five years ago as a kitchen server, becomes the new general manager of EMP.
Also in April, three years after coming in last on the World’s Best 50 list, for the first time, EMP cracks the Top 5.
2012
In a year, EMP has gone from number 24 to number 10 on the list of the world’s best restaurants. It has become one of just six restaurants in the city rated four stars by The New York Times. It is now owned by two of the finest generational talents in the fine-dining industry—Will Guidara and Daniel Humm.
For almost two years, EMP has not served a la carte. It has offered a limited grid menu: a prix fixe meal on a printed grid of 16 ingredients. Diners choose any four and in the dialogue that ensues, they can tell their servers what they feel or don’t feel like eating. A battalion of thirty of the best trained cooks in the kitchen will take their wish as command and prepare one course heroing each of the four chosen ingredients.
The message to the diners is clear. It is not our chefs who are the stars. It is not our wine list, not our magnificent art deco building, not our service either. It is you.
So, then, why? Why does EMP decide to retool itself?
Our restaurant was in New York—not only the birthplace of so much art and music and industry (and so many food traditions), but an important and underrecognized agricultural area. And while each of the best fine-dining restaurants in New York did have a strong sense of place, the places they were celebrating weren’t New York, but Japan, and Italy, and France.
Perhaps, as new owners, Guidara and Humm want to make EMP their own. Or, as the vanguard for a new brand of food and hospitality, they want to leave a legacy. Why do they put EMP through an overhaul? There’s as much truth in any of these statements as there is in the premise that when Guidara and Humm see an opportunity they maraud into it, if only to find out it’s fallow. To lie low, to wonder without giving in, is the only botch-up there can be.
On the 12th of September in 2012, EMP introduces a new menu. Four days later, Pete Wells, restaurant critic for The New York Times, steps in for lunch.
Wells wastes no time in declaring what the meal has made of him: a sourpuss. He questions the zealous dining room staff, the compulsion to tinker with classics, and the seemingly dire need for the restaurant to be about New York. He disapproves of the decision to eliminate the $125 prix fixe menu and impose on the diner “a $195 blowout” that lasts four hours.
He is most offended by the speeches that the staff automatically and freely launch into. There’s a speech for a bag of potato chips, another for a broth of clams and buckwheat, yet another for a course of savory black-and-white cookies. The restaurant, Wells complains, without naming the brains behind the change, “has made the explanatory text central to the meal.” He calls these interruptions “stilted and earnest”; he scoffs at them “homilies.”
Time and again, Wells acknowledges the invention behind the dishes. Time and again, that doff of the hat is accompanied by a tightening of the jaw, like when trapped in traffic with a New York cabbie who insists on playing the radio because that’s his idea of a good time for you.
Wells calls his epic takedown piece “Talking All Around the Food: At the Reinvented Eleven Madison Park, the Words Fail the Dishes.”
So it stands: Guidara’s grand reinvention has fallen face first. There’s a saving grace. Wells’ scorching piece is not a formal review. It is published under Critic’s Notebook, which Guidara reckons is Wells firing a warning shot that he and his team better pay heed to.
2011
On an average night, the waiting list at EMP runs into a couple of hundreds. It is, to put it mildly, not easy to get a table at EMP. But once a guest does, the effort should end, the payoff should begin. Making your way into EMP should feel special.
Typically, a maitre d’ stands behind a podium with an iPad to check the guest in as she arrives. They ask the guest her name and run it on the list on their screen.
“Everything about that is transactional,” says Guidara, “—the screen, the fact that you’re being transported around the restaurant like cargo, the table number.”
He throws out the conventional exchange. To replicate for the guest the experience of going to a friend’s house for dinner, the maitre d’ makes a cheat sheet for the guest list for the night, Googling every name on the list to a level of certainty that allows them to greet the guest by name upon arrival.
Guidara next re-scripts the relationship between the kitchen and the dining room. The service staff is generally the go-between, keeping the kitchen under wraps from the diner. At EMP, first the line cooks join the servers in bringing out the first few courses, deconstructing the cooking and adding a touch of theater for guests. Next, Guidara takes the idea further by offering a chef’s table for a single course to any diner. Guests are offered a “nook in our kitchen with an expansive view of the thirty precision-trained cooks working with laser focus and in near silence….”
Guidara asks his team to imagine a bubble around each table they serve. In that space, guests would be “fully engaged in the experience. Time would cease to exist.”
Guidara doesn’t want diners to have to hold a thing in their heads other than the memory of their delicious meal. He dares his front-door team to come up with a ticketless coat check. The team devises a system where upon spotting a table paying the check, the host sends someone into the cloakroom, organized by table position and number, to get the coats and appear magically by the front door as the guests approach it.
You’d watch guests approaching the door start to hunt in their pockets or bags for their coat check tags—where did I put that? Then they’d look up and recognize their own coat. It was amazing to pull off a magic trick right at the end, blowing the guests’ minds one last time; I never got tired of seeing it.
Can we give everyone in the restaurant their own unique experience?—Guidara throws down the gauntlet. The young staff, both in the kitchen and the dining room, is enthused by such ambition. They feel invited into the moonshot.
Under Guidara’s goading, the menu lets the diner take charge of the core ingredient in a dish (…on a given night, say, your choice of entrée might be between beef, duck, lobster, or cauliflower) and in exchange asked for the opportunity to surprise the diner (how the ingredient was prepared and served when it was delivered). As contrarian turns go, it is thought out. People are picky about ingredients far more than they are about the method of preparation. Give diners the control they don’t want to have to fight for as adults; delight them with surprises they yearn for as children.
It is de rigueur for fine-dining restaurants to throw their no-accommodation policy in the face of diners. These tend to be establishments where the chef’s idea of service extends to the dining room. The menu at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, another on the World’s Best 50 list and a place Guidara frequents, reads: “No substitutions or special requests. We do not serve vegetarian-friendly items.” EMP turns the idea on its head. It starts to listen to not just what the diner doesn’t eat but also what she doesn’t feel like eating on the day. It is a tall ask for a fine-dining kitchen.
It took a bit of convincing to get Daniel and the kitchen staff on board with this one, as they would have to do most of the heavy lifting, coming up with endless variations on dishes they’d already perfected. If the chicken was served with asparagus and morels but the guest didn’t like mushrooms, the kitchen would need to have an alternate but equally delicious preparation of the chicken prepped and on hand, just in case. It was the very definition of unreasonable.
After enrolling Humm as his partner in crime, the two get Danny Meyer, their boss and owner of the restaurant, to buy into their plan.
“Restaurants are like kids,” Meyer is quoted as saying in the 2010 fall review of EMP by Oliver Strand. “You hope you understand their innate gifts, and then you let them realize their aspirations.” The kids in Meyer’s analogy, perhaps, are modeled after EMP’s young operator duo who at thirty-three (Humm) and thirty (Guidara) are some of the greenest in the business.
Guidara and Humm win over their boss. The changes roll out, one after the other.
EMP’s prix fixe meal comes on a printed grid, the size of a wedding card. It has nothing but the names of sixteen ingredients. The diner picks four, and one course each is made using the ingredients. From a 2010 fall review of EMP by Oliver Strand:
The menu is almost an abstraction. Rather than seducing you with luscious descriptions, it’s a reason — or provocation — to talk to your server about what you feel like eating.
In the first fortnight of the service and menu changes, all of the talk about dinner as a dialogue comes to nothing. Not a single table initiates a conversation, not a single diner confesses to a delicacy that grosses them out.
The average diner at a place like EMP is successful, often a gourmet, and has picked the venue for a special occasion. A family visiting New York City for the first time. A banker negotiating a career-making deal. A proposal that has been in the works all year. The stakes are high. On such occasions, the diner doesn’t want a personal quirk in their eating habit to stick out. “It wasn’t cool to admit,” writes Guidara, “that the texture of eggplant or caviar grossed you out or that you hated beets because your mom had served the slimy ones from the can.”
People came to EMP to show that they belong to high society, not to ask for the right to be themselves. So when the server at a table asks about any pet hates, she is met with silence.
Guidara, who has been like a sentinel on watch thus far, takes a station to solve the puzzle. He does one thing different from the staff. Right after asking guests about any pet peeves, he makes his own confession.
I told the guests how I feel about sea urchin. Sea urchin is rare and difficult to source. It is a delicacy many sophisticated eaters love: creamy and decadent, beloved by chefs. And the mere thought of it makes me want to puke.
Once he opens up, guests follow suit.
Sure enough, once I’d come clean, the guy in seat two said, “Actually, I’m not crazy about oysters,” and his wife said, “Yeah, I hate celery.”
Come spring, EMP banishes the memory of coming in dead last on the World’s Best 50 list the previous year. It jumps to number 24, watching several revered names slide down to make space for it in the top half of the world’s best.
That fall, Guidara and Humm complete their purchase of EMP from restaurateur Danny Meyer. In doing so, they complete a cycle as Meyer is the person who had brought them to EMP in 2006. In the same week, EMP becomes a three-Michelin-starred restaurant for the first time ever.
2010
…one morning in early 2010, after I’d checked in with the morning team and made myself a latte, I opened the mail. Bill, junk mail, bill, bill, bill. One envelope piqued my interest, though, and when I ripped it open, I discovered that EMP had been nominated as one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants for 2010.
No sooner have baby-faced Guidara and Humm arrived at The Guildhall in London for the cocktail reception of the World’s Best 50 in 2010 than the two realize they are in the deep end. Guidara recounts:
Imagine every famous chef and restaurateur you’ve ever heard of milling around, drinking champagne and catching up with friends—and not one of them was talking to us. I’d never felt so much like a freshman at a new high school trying to figure out where to sit in the cafeteria, not even when I was a freshman.
The two wonder about EMP’s place on the list. Guidara guesses forty; Humm, thirty-five.
As the lights go down and the gala begins, they find themselves being called on stage to kick off the list in a way they have not imagined. They are fiftieth—dead last in the queue of the World’s Best 50. As they stagger on to the stage, unbeknownst to them, the camera zooms in and projects their morose faces onto an enormous screen for the entire auditorium.
Over that evening, Humm and Guidara drown themselves in wine. The residue of that disappointment is eight words scribbled on a cocktail napkin: “We will be Number One in the world.” Later that night, in his hotel room, Guidara adds two more to the drunken scrawl: “Unreasonable Hospitality.”
Back in New York, sobered up from the wine but buzzing with desire, Guidara and Humm address their young team.
We didn’t like hearing our names called in last place; we’re going to use that humiliation to push ourselves. As amazing as the restaurants in the top ten are, we could be just as good, if not better. We want to be number one.
On that day they share one philosophy that makes a thousand later choices clear for them. They reimagine hospitality as a dialogue, not a monologue.
Later that fall, they close the restaurant for a week, cut the dining room seats from a hundred and fourteen to eighty, and re-open with a new menu that comes to be known as the grid menu and a new philosophy that provokes extreme sentiments.
2009
There’s a five-minute video posted to EMP’s Facebook account, dating back to early 2010. The video, scored to a soft jazz, shows Humm making one of the restaurant’s crowd favorites—turbot with zucchini.
Humm, in chef whites, empties a piping bag stuffed with a finely diced ratatouille of zucchini, bell peppers, and tomatoes into a single zucchini flower. He then prepares a broth with saffron and red meat. He mandolins a flowerless baby zucchini into a pile of coins. He scoops up a handful of the zucchini coins and throws them into a bowl to be poached. Next to it is a vat of ice-cold water, into which he dunks the coins collected in a strainer.
The kitchen sports a sterilized look. It looks like a lab where food scientists mix and match ingredients and invent cooking techniques and create new recipes. Minus the theater and spiel of service, one may be excused for not believing any product from this lab would make its way under the high ceilings and into the plush interiors of EMP.
Humm works quickly, calmly like someone who has internalized the steps. All muscle memory. He moves on to the fish. Sprinkling the deboned turbot with salt, he arranges the zucchini coins across the fish body like scales. It is a fiddly task and thanks to the jump cuts in the edit we don’t see if Humm actually knocks over some coins with a stray touch. We can assume that even if he does so, he does so with a certain European finesse.
In between, he talks up the benefits of sous vide for cooking a delicate fish such as turbot: consistency. It kills any worry, he remarks, about the cook on the fish.
He drizzles olive oil into a sous vide bag, puts a few herbs in, throws more salt on the zucchini coins, and carefully places the zucchini-scaled fish inside the bag. He pushes the bag into an Ultravac sealer and, a few seconds later, pulls out an airless bag.
“And now, you know, most of the work is done,” he says as he puts the sealed bag into a water bath at 54.2 degrees Celsius. For the next eighteen minutes, the fish is cooked in the sous vide machine.
The work that remains needs a surgeon’s finesse. Humm portions out a filet of the cooked fish with coins on it, basted and shiny. He pours the saffron nage on to the plate and places the stuffed zucchini flower next to it. Together, the fish filet and the stuffed zucchini blossom make an asymmetrical V, the valley of which is half-filled with the creamy sauce. Humm adds a few drops of a gel to the sauce and dabs any smudges from the edges of the plate. The dish is ready for service.
As a signature EMP dish, it goes out hundreds of times a day.
Every element researched, every ingredient measured to the gram, every decision pressure-tested. As a specimen of high culinary art, it stands on its own. It piques Guidara’s interest. To him, turbot with zucchini is a clarion call.
“What would happen,” he enquires, “if we took the same unreasonable approach to how we prepared that dish and applied it to hospitality?”
2001
After a long battle with cancer, Guidara’s mother passes the day after his graduation from Cornell. The week after he is supposed to fly out to Spain for an internship. He dithers. Frank Guidara eggs his son to not ditch his plan. Guidara gives in. The last-minute decision means a flight out of New York, instead of Boston.
The last term at Cornell Guidara takes what turns out to be his favorite class: Guest Chefs. He makes his way into the campus management team in charge of hosting chef Daniel Boulud, best known for his eponymous two-Michelin-starred restaurant. While playing emissary, Guidara breaks the ice surely enough with the French chef and his two sous chefs to have the distinguished visitors ask him if he could help them score some weed. Soon he’s driving them down to his “quintessential college party house” for weed. Later, after the class cook and dinner, he leads the visitors and most of his class back to his house and has chef Boulud make scrambled eggs with truffles for “a bunch of wasted college kids.”
So when his father offers to drive him down to New York’s JFK, Guidara takes the longest of long shots. He emails chef Boulud—ignoring the months-long wait for a reservation at Daniel—asking if there is any way he can bring his old man to the chef’s restaurant that Saturday. He gets a response from the celebrated chef: “I would love to have you. You welcomed me into your home; now I will welcome you into mine.”
It is the first time Guidara is taking his dad to a restaurant. When they arrive, father and son are led into a “glass-enclosed private dining room that looks down over the kitchen, where forty cooks—and Chef Boulud—work in a state-of-the-art facility.” Chef Boulud sends over one impeccable course after another food to their table, personally announcing the arrival of each over the intercom.
That night was the saddest I have ever been, or ever want to be, and the same was true for my dad. Yet, even in the midst of that sorrow, Chef Boulud and his staff were able to give the two of us what still feels like four of the best hours of my life.
[...]
I had already happily chosen a life in restaurants, but that night, I learned how important, how noble, working in service can be.
2002-1992
When Guidara was thirteen, his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life.
This might seem like a crazy thing to ask a thirteen-year-old kid, but my dad was incredibly intentional with his parenting, as with everything in his life. Every day, he’d wake up, get my mom out of bed, put her in her wheelchair, help her in the shower, then make and feed her breakfast—all before heading off to work. Fifteen hours later, he’d come home and do it all backward…
With a sick wife and a young son, his father, Guidara reflects, was intentional but not by choice. It was “a requirement.” It is the same purpose that the young Guidara shows when his father asks him about his life goals. The new teen has his future mapped out: study restaurant management at Cornell, open his own restaurant in New York City; and marry Cindy Crawford.
A string of apprenticeship stints follow.
At fourteen, Guidara is piping “Happy Birthday”s onto ice cream cakes at a Baskin-Robbins. In high school, from freshman through to senior year, he picks up stints as dishwasher, host, busser, and server. His employers include Ruth’s Chris Steak House at Westchester; Wolfgang Puck’s Hollywood restaurant, Spago; Drew Nieporent’s Tribeca Grill; and a second Wolfgang Puck restaurant called ObaChine.
Such is the sureness in young Guidara’s steps that his father wonders if his son has committed to a path prematurely. Frank Guidara challenges his son’s assuredness, as the young man prepares to apply to Cornell, but only as much as a father can without suggesting a change to the life plans that his eighteen-year-old son has carried out through his teens.
And in my senior year, I applied and got into the hotel school at Cornell University.
As graduation from Cornell approaches, Guidara and a friend from hotel school, visit New York City for a recce of prospective employers. Starting at Manhattan, they crawl their way uptown, “stopping for a snack or a glass of wine at some of the best restaurants in the city: Nobu, Montrachet, Chanterelle, Zoë, Gotham Bar and Grill, Gramercy Tavern, Union Pacific, Tabla, and Eleven Madison Park. We kept going, up to Alain Ducasse, Café des Artistes, and more.”
From the bevy of restaurants they visit, two stand out, both owned by the same restaurateur—Danny Meyer. And the two restaurants? Tabla and Eleven Madison Park.
Later that year, after he has graduated from the school of hotel administration at Cornell University, after he has completed an internship at a culinary school in Spain, Guidara bags an interview with Meyer’s company. The interview happens at Eleven Madison Park, and once he has cleared it, Guidara has in hand his first full-time job in his career as a restaurateur.
…I was a manager at Tabla, running the front-door team. My education had begun.
1991
Frank Guidara takes his son to the Four Seasons for dinner for his twelfth birthday. In the words of the son:
At the time, I had no idea the Four Seasons was the first truly American fine-dining restaurant. Or that the elegant, mid-century modern interior was so iconic, it would eventually be designated a landmark by the City of New York.
I didn’t know that James Beard and Julia Child had consulted on the menu, or that President John F. Kennedy had celebrated his birthday there an hour before Marilyn Monroe serenaded him with “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Or that celebrities, titans of industry, and heads of state could judge whether their star had fallen in the city’s ever-shifting power rankings by how close their table was to the Carrara marble pool at the center of the room.
By twelfth birthday standards, it is perhaps an odd choice. Guidara insists that his father buy him a Brooks Brothers blazer for the occasion. As a career restaurateur, Frank Guidara gets it. He doesn’t object to his son’s demand. And as a lifelong influence on his young son, his would be the advice that would fill Guidara’s ear at all major transitions. On this evening, though, the father has nothing to do, except show his young son what generosity in hospitality could be like.
The restaurant cast a spell I was all too happy to be enchanted by. It put the world on pause, so that everything else fell away; the only thing that existed for me, for those two and a half hours, was what was in that room.
That night, I learned a restaurant could create magic, and I was hooked. By the time we left, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
Guidara decides he wants to make a living out of making people feel good about themselves the way he is made to feel at the Four Seasons. For most twelve-year-olds, perhaps, no matter how deep, the feeling eventually is lost to life. Not for Guidara. His love endures, evolves, and engulfs the rest of his life.
“Because thirty years later,” writes Guidara, “I still haven’t forgotten how the Four Seasons made me feel.”
