Danny Meyer - The Power of Hospitality - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9a643b09691f632d

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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
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My guest today is Danny Meyer, the founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, which compromises some of the most acclaimed restaurants in New York City, like Grammar Sea Tavern and Union Square Cafe.
Danny is also the founder and chairman of Shake Shack, which began in New York City but is now a publicly traded company with hundreds of locations worldwide.
Our conversation focuses on how great hospitality leads to great business, regardless of the sector that it's in. We discuss why hospitality is the starting point for Danny's business philosophy, why first impressions matter, Danny's concept of ABCD, which stands for always be connecting dots, how to scale hospitality, and how to build a business with essentialism and soul.

Just the other day when my son went ice skating for the first time and fell a lot, he said to me, Well, you learn from your mistakes, so you try to make as many of them as you can.
You'll hear Danny say something powerfully similar late in our conversation. It's a lovely thought then that I found out that my son, my firstborn, was a boy in one of Danny's restaurants in a reveal orchestrated by his incredible team. I hope you enjoyed this wonderful conversation.
Danny, I thought of a neat place to begin this conversation, which will probably go a lot of different directions, is to go all the way back to some early experience that you had as a tour guide in Italy.
and ask what that experience at a very young age taught you about hospitality. And then I want to explore the idea of hospitality in as many ways as we can.
I'll start by saying my dad was at that point in the
Group tour business.
And he had established
Foot holds in about
Eight different European cities and
Interestingly, as a summer job.
By the time
My older sister and then I and then my younger brother each turn twenty. We got to pick a
Town.
In which his
Tour business was based.
to be tour guides and work for his on the ground local teams.
Who were always
Citizens of whatever that city was.
I wanted to be in Italy.
So when I turn twenty, I pick Rome.
My dad had picked out a interesting niche to sell these group tours to.
They were airline employees and their families.
And the reason he picked them out is that he was able to aggregate
These
Extraordinary discounts that
were afforded to airline employees and their families.
Everything from the travel itself.
Which usually amounted to about
Forty dollars round trip.
On an international carrier.
Two additional
Deep discounts for hotels.
He was able to negotiate all kinds of
Deals with restaurants and sightseeing.
Tour buses.
A typical
airline pilot or flight attendant or baggage handler.
Or gate agent.
Could get a
four day trip to Rome or to London.
including going to plays and you name it.
But they could get a four day trip.
For some
Amazingly low number like four hundred ninety nine dollars, including their round trip airfare.
I just want to set the stage.
So I'm twenty years old.
I go, I want to go to Rome.
And it was great. I got to live in a hotel
Where P put up all of his people, which happened to be
About a block away from the Vatican.
And it happened to be the summer.
The two different popes died.
Pope Paul.
And I went to that funeral.
And then
Some short weeks later, Pop John Paul the first died. You may remember that was sort of mysterious.
Death.
I went to his funeral.
I said this is kind of interesting.
In one summer I get to go to two papal funerals.
Most people never get to go to one.
I was the guy that they sent every single morning.
Or three or four mornings a week to go pick up
A tour.
At the airport, a tour group.
And you know how it is when you traveled overseas, you're groggy the next day and jet lagged and
A lot of people don't sleep too well, and believe me, these
People were not flying first class in order to get those rates.
And everybody was grumpy and I was the guy on the
bus after collecting everybody's baggage and getting it on the bus.
Who would get on the loudspeaker the microphone and start talking about the tour that was ahead.
You could just tell, I could tell from standing up looking at the people.
Half of them were nodding their heads.
'Cause they were happy, half of them were
Shaking their heads'cause they were unhappy and
Maybe the third half. I never was good at math.
We're sleeping through the whole thing, but
I could just tell.
Knowing that I was gonna be with these people for four days, five days, there was one tour that would be seven days.
I could tell who was gonna be the hardest nut to crack.
Who is gonna be the easiest
And I just kind of
Made a game. I I kind of loved it.
Of trying to figure out
How I was going to
turn around the unhappy people and make them happy.
And
Build a group of people that would really have a fun time together.
I wasn't thinking about the word hospitality. I wasn't thinking about any of this.
Except feeling it intuitively.
And I was actually learning like crazy. I got to learn how to give a roam by night tour.
Not to begin to learn the language.
I got to get to know many
Local trateras where I would not only bring these groups
For their included dinners.
But I would get paid a thousand lira
Commission.
for every head I brought in there.
This became
Hospitality experience?
Culinary experience.
Group psychology experience.
And ultimately
It began my love affair with Italy.
Which continues to this day.
I love the line in your book that it's human nature for people to take precisely as much interest in you as they believe you're taking in them.
I think that's a really nice summation of
or an introduction into your conception of hospitality.
I would love to d hear you describe
why and how hospitality is sort of the starting point for your business philosophy, generally.
Maybe some of it has to do with having
Establish my business in New York City.
That has always had really good food and a lot of it.
And
You can't win here on food alone.
And you can't even win here on wine alone. Everybody's got good wines on their list. There's certainly enough people do.
And so
I feel like
A long time ago I realized that
Found
The starting gate.
If you didn't have really good food and
Good wine list.
And fair pricing and a nice environment.
You just weren't even gonna get anybody to wanna come back. But I was more interested in
Turning
First Union Square Cafe, which was my only restaurant for the first ten years of my career.
And then Gramercy Tavern. I was more interested in turning those into your favorite restaurant.
And in order to make it your favorite restaurant.
We not only had to be really good at what we did, but we had to be even better.
And how we made you feel.
We had to make you feel
Like we were on your side.
Which is hospitality, but then take it a step further. We had to
really make you feel like you belonged. And it was this unlocking of a
Human
Emotion.
Which is
That
More than anything else, I think.
Human beings long to belong.
You first get to belong to a family.
Then you get to belong to
Whatever school you grew up going to and
Whatever team they rooted for and
Maybe you had an organized religion and you belonged to that
Congregation.
Maybe you were in a fraternity and you belonged to that fraternity.
But whatever it is.
It's such a deep drive to belong to something.
It's really the reason that our industry exists. Now that's different perhaps if you're talking about
chain restaurant that you find on an exit of the highway, which is
One of a thousand units.
That's not necessarily a place that exists.
for belonging as much as it exists to refuel people.
But I think restaurants, especially
Full service restaurants really exist.
for the purpose of creating a place to belong to. I want to go all the way back to the earliest lessons you learned at Union Square Cafe. I think you were in your late twenties when you set that restaurant up. It sounds like from the Italy store you had some natural instinct for hospitality or natural skill, but I think one of the things you've written about and talked about is just always getting better at this.
What were some of the key early lessons that you learned at creating that environment of hospitality? Because just seems very hard to do. You get someone for a first initial meal, hopefully they come back. It's somewhat transactional when it starts and you're trying to transition it into something much more, I think you say, dialogue, not a monologue, which is a neat way of thinking about this.
What were the mistakes or the early lessons you learned at Union Square Cafe that started to lay this foundation for all these other great restaurants?
I learned that it was all about the front door.
Front door.
Is the first signal that you get when you go to a full service restaurant.
As to whether this is gonna be a transaction, i.e.
Give me your name and I'll give you a table. Give me your order and I'll give you food.
Pay your bill.
And we're done.
Okay, it could either be that or it could be
Recognition, eye contact, a smile, a sense that I'm happy to see you.
I sense that I do see you.
A sense that you matter.
That can all happen.
Right at the front door or not. And that's when you know.
With any place you go to.
You can go to a
Pick your favorite.
Coffee bar in your neighborhood.
We all have stories of
The chain that
Over the last ten years, maybe you've gone there.
five hundred times and you always order your coffee the exact same way and they never remember.
Which is a great way of
Expressly
Letting you know that you don't really matter and they don't really see you.
A transaction.
By the way.
If it's quick.
And the coffee is hot.
And you keep coming back, then the transaction was fine. I can do it quickly.
And it doesn't take me any longer.
While I'm taking your money.
To smile and thank you.
And remember
All I have to do is say would you like the usual.
And now you feel like you belong there. And now I've become essential in your life.
Um
That's what we strive for.
And that's
Frankly, the reason that I love this business so much
I am really focused on
This challenge that I don't think I've seen a lot.
In our industry.
And that is
Can you successfully scale?
Hospitality can you successfully scale a feeling?
Of welcome.
Very, very different than
The massive success that
Ray Crock had in our industry.
And so many others afterwards, which is
Can you successfully scale a system?
to consistently produce a flavor.
Whether or not you ever go to
eat fast food, gotta give some credit to the fact that
The fries are gonna taste exactly the same.
Coast to coast, country to country.
They nailed the systems for consistent flavor.
But I will also tell you that
I promise you that the way you are made to feel.
Coast to coast, country to country is gonna be vastly different because it just was never part of their calculus.
Should we be able to scale?
A human feeling of belonging.
And that's what I'm kind of
Transfixed on.
Is can you actually scale hospitality?
I want to explore that idea in some depth, but before we do lay a couple examples that I so love about the method, if you will, for creating good hospitality.
Two things come to mind, your acronym ABCD, and this great story around learning from a trout fisherman who overturned a certain rock when you were fishing with him.
Can you describe how those two things might relate to each other and relate back to hospitality?
A B C D
Simply means always be collecting dots.
So you can always be connecting dots.
And
In this case, dots.
Some people would rather call it data.
But
When I talk about a dot
I'm talking about
A morsel of information
That
matters to you.
And if it matters to you, then it better matter to me.
'Cause if I want to matter to you, I better care.
about something important to you so
If you're coming to dine in our restaurant
A B C D always be collecting dots.
I better take a minute.
And
Check out who
Patrick O'Shaughnessy has interviewed in the past.
I might even want to take it a step further and ask myself.
If I know any of those people.
When you and I first met and we established that we each know Bill Gurley.
That was connecting a dot.
You did it for me. I would have done it on my own.
'Cause I'm a big fan of Bill's
But
That is A B C D, so you can A B C D.
This gets back to this notion that people really want to belong to something.
I think people also want to connect with people.
And we look for things that we have in common.
Which is the root of the word community, which we're all craving.
I want to belong to a community.
I better start by finding things we have in common.
It could be a sport team that we root for.
It could be
That we live in the same state.
And now maybe we have that in common.
It could be
We went to the same
college or we were in the same fraternity at two different colleges.
But we're looking for that stuff. That's the collection of dots.
And then when you connect those dots.
You're showing an interest in someone else, and what happens is you get that interest back.
the people component of all this, and this will circle us back to the ability to scale hospitality just obviously seems central. I love the idea that
in your companies people were evaluated with fifty one percent emotional performance, forty nine percent technical performance. Very deliberate, I'm sure, which way that scale tips. Say a bit about that. And again, I'm thinking about this trout fisherman, you know, turning over the rock and the care that it takes
And how you engender that care.
To make sure that
All the people that are
interacting with customers have that same standard. How do you start to scale beyond
just Union Square Cafe to this much larger collection of restaurants and businesses around the country.
Let's just take a second and
Tell the story about the turning over the rocks, and that is
I'll start by saying I love fishing.
I have never developed a love for
Fly fishing.
And this happens to be a fly fishing story.
But
What I got out of fly fishing.
Has helped me in business, and that is.
That the expert fly fisher
People
Even before they show their physical dexterity.
In fishing.
They have to actually
Щоені.
in the fish themselves before they can possibly catch a fish.
And the way they show interest in the fish is to figure out what
Is actually hatching.
in the water at that moment. What kind of insects are actually
Hatching.
Because the fish are smart enough.
to not eat something that isn't hatching at that moment.
A really good fly for Sherman waves into the water.
Turns over a rock.
Underneath which
Is a whole community.
Of things hatching.
And they're really good.
Fly Fisher.
Sees what's hatching.
says aha.
I've got them.
tie a fly that's gonna actually look just like what's about to hatch.
And that's what I'm gonna tie at this moment.
If I want to catch those fish.
So that's where this all came from.
How does that
Apply to business? Well
I think if you're in business you want to
Catch as many fish as you possibly can.
Also known as customers.
It sure does help to have a product that the customers actually want.
At that moment.
And furthermore.
As marketers
And we're all marketing.
our product all the time.
It sure does.
Help.
Not only to have
the product people want, but to deliver it.
In a way.
But they cannot miss it.
It all has to do with taking an interest in who is your customer.
And
Having what they want.
That's kind of what I think about all the time. And then how do you surround yourself with people who get that as well?
I feel like leadership is
About setting priorities.
And then exemplifying the behaviors that you want to see in other people.
It is a priority of mine, and it is an example that I do try to set all the time.
With everybody who works for us.
T.
Follow through and care.
As much about the customer you want.
As you hope that they'll care about you.
Somebody writes you an email
You don't just write them back.
It's inexcusable not to figure out something about them before you write them back.
Does that take extra time?
Yes, of course it does.
However.
It's gonna most likely lead to a much richer opportunity.
If a good opportunity exists at all.
I'd love to hear a bit more about the challenges of scaling hospitality that you've encountered as you thought through this.
I don't know whether Shake Shack's appropriate to touch on here since it is a much more scaled up, repeated experience than a single restaurant. As you sit back and try to solve that French fry problem on the service side rather than the product side.
What are the major challenges that you've encountered and ways you've gotten around them?
Well, I think Shake Shack's a great example because it's a scaled
business. There's over three hundred shake shaks.
In the world, and there are at least last time I checked something like fourteen different countries.
In which Shake Shack operates.
In Shake Shack's case, you're not only scaling hospitality, but you're scaling a culture.
across many many many different cultures.
It's a great example. It's an example of what we've been talking about, which is
Taking an interest in other people so that they'll take an interest in you.
You better go in to a community.
Whether it's in the United States or abroad.
Number one with humility.
Because no one in the world wants you to come in.
Saying we're the big smart New York people lay down for us and eat our hamburgers.
That's just not how the world works at all. So you go in with humility.
And you learn as much as you possibly can.
About the community. The same way I talked about learning as much as you can about
A prospective guest in one of your fine dining restaurants.
Here's an example.
And this could be for any city, it could be for any country. We send in a team of people.
And
Take Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was a great laboratory for this theory.
Us California's sort of
Hamburger Central in the United States.
They know everything about

It's a driving culture.
They know everything about burgers and shakes.
And the last thing
California needs.
Is a New Yorker telling them how to eat burgers.
We knew that going in.
We didn't
California. We started in Los Angeles. In fact, the first Shake Shack was in West Hollywood.
With a huge amount of humility.
And that starts with
Two months beforehand.
Using the advantage of coming from the fine dining industry.
To send our team
to the best restaurants in Los Angeles as ambassadors and getting to understand
the restaurant community.
Understand who they buy their products from.
understand the products they make that they're really proud of.
understand the distributors and the suppliers and the farmers that they work with.
Understand how they recruit people, understand.
Who the players are in the media world. On and on and on.
Lo and behold.
Shake Shack opens with four items on its menu.
In addition to the eighty percent of the items that are consistent at every shake shack.
Twenty percent of the items.
Are customized
And
By doing that in every city we go to.
Even a close city, like in New Haven.
When Shake Shack first opened in New Haven, uh next door to Yale.
The walls
Or made from
Recycle
bleacher seeds from the original Yale bowl.
The special hot dog was
Named after the Yale mascot and a special recipe.
Went with it.
It's that eighty twenty.
Eighty percent consistent, twenty percent all about you, showing an interest in you.
Which makes you feel like this is my shake shack.
I now belong here.
And guess what? You can actually do that.
With a scale business. We do the same thing also, where each shake shack.
Actually
Picks one menu item.
And gives
a percentage of the proceeds of that menu item.
to a local not for profit.
different in every shake shack.
And
That local not for profit usually gets to take part in the opening night.
Prevent.
Members of the staff get to know the the not for profit and volunteer there in many cases.
It's just a way of showing interest.
If you expect to get that interest back.
It's a great way to just avoid being a cookie cutter.
transactional business.
Which
Doesn't really interest me.
I absolutely love the eighty twenty rule. I won't forget that one. What are the characteristics shared by the people that make an organization like this hum?
thinking back to that fifty one percent.
emotional. What have you learned about
the people that fuel all this because
I guess every business is just about people, but certainly yours is even more so about the people delivering the service and the hospitality. What have you learned there about building a bigger organization?
Well, we've learned that
There is an answer to a question that I was stymied by for years and years and years. Almost everywhere I would go giving
speeches to different organizations, most of which were not even in the food business.
They just wanted to know about hospitality.
They would always ask
Consistently two different questions. One was
How do you guys always manage to hire so many awesome people?
I love the food.
But it's your people that really make me come back.
I would talk about
Looking for what you just
Accurately described as fifty one percenters.
People who
Or
Emotionally wired.
to be happier themselves when they deliver happiness to you.
Now that's
Not a good thing and it's not a bad thing if you're not that person.
But it's an essential thing.
If you're gonna succeed.
in a hospitality
Driven business.
Okay, so
We're looking for people who have six
Emotional skills.
At a very, very high level.
Kind optimism?
Curiosity, intellectual curiosity.
Amazing work ethic.
Highly empathetic.
Highly self aware.
And a high degree of integrity.
Those are the six emotional skills.
That's 51% of what we're looking for in a hopefully 100% higher.
The other forty nine percent.
are all performance issues. Like, are you a really good cook?
Are you a really good sommelier?
Are you a really good dishwasher?
I don't really care what the role is.
We're looking for a hundred percent.
And fifty one percent of that has to be
What we call high HQ, high hospitality quotient.
And when you add up those six emotional skills, it generally adds up to someone
who while they're doing the thing they do really, really well.
Or doing it.
In the service.
of making you feel better than you would have felt.
If we had never come into your lives.
And that gets
Down to
A bigger sense I have that
To have an enduring business built to last.
It needs to become essential in the lives of people.
It needs to be the kind of business that
Makes your life better because it exists.
Here's an example.
Within three blocks of my apartment in
Manhattan.
Are five different
Dry cleaners.
Four different
nail salons.
Go figure. I go to the nail salon myself, but I do ask myself
If any one of those went out of business.
Or any one of us five.
Dry cleaners went out of business. What I noticed.
What I care.
Well, I don't want to start a business that
didn't actually make a difference in people's lives.
You would know that that had
Become an essential place in people's lives.
Yeah.
They really felt that something went missing.
The cool thing is there's a lot of examples of
Essential
Things in the world.
There are essential pieces of art.
There are essential books you've read.
There are essential songs you've heard.
But your life got better'cause that song was written.
And you actually can't even imagine your life.
If that
Songhead or that
group had never been formed.
I can't imagine my life if the Beatles have never been formed.
Or Paul Simon had never been born.
Crosby Sills and Nash. Now obviously I'm dating myself, but
I just feel good when I hear their music.
And it made my life better.
And it would make my life really, really sad if someone told me
You can never listen to one of those songs again.
That means it it achieved essentiality. And guess what?
There are millions of songs.
Did have been written.
That didn't achieve that.
There are millions of restaurants that have been built.
I think I've built restaurants that never achieved
Essentiality.
But that's not what we strive for, and you you only get there.
When you start with people
who exist for the purpose of doing the thing they do really well.
in the service of making other people feel better. And if you can do it for a long enough time.
That business develops soul.
I absolutely love the acid test of is what we're building here.
Does it have the potential to reach that stage of essentialism and soul?
I think the answer is often gonna be no.
It's a great way to move on from something of an idea early on. I also imagine that sticking sort of with the emotional
Theme here.
The leadership component.
as the organizations get bigger becomes obviously different and new challenges. And I love this framework that you've laid out.
for I think the three words were constant, gentle, and pressure as ways of being a leader and trying to align a couple of those things with your personal style. Can you walk us through that framework for leadership?
I feel like
So most leaders have a vision for where they're trying to take you.
And good leaders not only have a vision, but
They were able to communicate it.
Then it becomes a lot of
Hurting cats.
And you can do it with a command and control approach.
I just don't think that lasts very long. Do as I say'cause I've got all the power.
Do as I say because otherwise you're fired.
I don't think you're gonna get the best work out of people working in that kind of environment.
What that also means is that
Think really strong leaders.
need to be really good at not only having a vision.
And communicating the vision.
They have to be equally good at persuading people.
Bad.
It's worth your while.
to come along and do it.
And oftentimes the vision is going to
Involves some type of change, change in your behavior, change in the way we do things around here.
A change to your
Expectations about how life was gonna go.
You know, most people don't really like change.
Most people don't really like uncertainty.
The notion of constant gentle pressure
Is that
I believe you need all three words as a leader.
Yeah.
Better be consistent with it.
The reason I use the word gentle
Is that
If you're too harsh while you're trying to reel in a fish, the line is gonna break.
If you're
Constantly
playing the fish and reeling it in in one direction.
And you're keeping the pressure on.
You don't let up on any of those things. You don't let up on the constant.
Or the channel or the pressure.
I think that
More great people.
are gonna do more great work.
For more time.
In your company.
Just the way I am. I know that
There are some times, especially in times of
Crisis.
When
You do have to shift into I know what I want.
Do it. You gotta shift into that mode.
command and control mode.
But
I don't think most
People.
will want to be part of a team.
for a sustained period of time in that environment.
I think those are the kind of
Work environments that tend to see
A ton of turnover.
Which never
equates to a great
Morale.
And
Often does not
correlate to the best talent.
Because the best talent I know in the world
Would love
To buy into a vision.
And then sort of be left alone.
to do their best work.
And not have a micro manager.
At every step of the way, say, Do it this way, do it this way, do it this way.
So constant channel pressure.
I tend to use much more
When it has to do with our culture.
This is why we do what we do.
This is what I expect the results to be.
I really
Let people figure out.
How to use their expertise to execute on that.
If I knew all the answers, I wouldn't need them in the first place.
Another aspect of leadership you have mentioned a bit earlier is just this notion of embodying the things that you're trying to preach. And I love this line in the book, the road to success is paved with mistakes well handled. Is there a particular mistake that you remember that you were personally
involved with maybe you were in the restaurant yourself, and to say a little bit more about handling mistakes well and the role that that plays in this notion of hospitality.
Well, my notion of mistakes is that they are the greatest
Renewable resource on earth.
There's always another one.
You're never gonna run out of it. Ever, ever, ever.
А злом the human race
occupies parts of the earth
There will be mistakes.
You can disagree with that.
I've never met anyone who doesn't make mistakes, but
If you agree with that notion, then you say, All right.
We can either
Let mistakes do us in.
We can either hide from our mistakes, we can either deny that we made mistakes.
We can either lie about our mistakes.
Yeah.
What if we could actually put those mistakes to work for us? What if we could say,
Hey, as long as there's this
constant waterfall her constant waves
Of mistakes coming.
Think about the waves in the ocean.
There's always another one.
You don't know when it's gonna come, you don't know how big it's gonna be.
Water might be calm enough for a while to make you think there's no waves, but
There's gonna be another one.
That's what I like to do.
with mistake making and it's like all right
As long as it's an honest mistake, I have zero
Patien whatsoever for dishonest mistakes, but
An honest mistake.
It's like great.
Let's use it to our advantage. Let's learn from it.
Let's own it.
Let's name it. Let's teach from it.
Let's employ what I call the five A's of mistake making, which are be aware you made it.
That's A number one.
You wouldn't believe how many mistakes
Get made where you didn't even know you made it.
So be aware, number two, acknowledge it.
Number three, apologize for it.
Number four.
Act to fix it.
And number five, apply additional generosity. Those are the five A's of mistake making.
People are blown away when you do those things because unfortunately in our society.
There is so much either shame or
Just
natural muscle reflex to
Be afraid of acknowledging that you made a mistake.
Or ashamed.
To apologize or whatever.
That
It blows people away when you do those five things.
And you can actually end up in a better spot with someone.

embraced and overcame a mistake than if you had never made it in the first place.
To your first question.
I would not even know where to start.
Because
There's just not a day that goes by. I mean, there's the obvious kind of mistakes like
in the restaurant business like spilling on somebody.
Or
For getting somebody's birthday candle that they had requested. We've made
More macro mistakes like picking
A subpar location for a restaurant.
In each case.
If I've learned one lesson, it's not only apply the five A's of mistake making.
but really trying to do it more quickly than ever.
Don't be so afraid of the response.
Let you
keep this acknowledgement and apology.
And action.
In your pocket.
For too long. Fail quickly is really good piece of advice.
One of the things that
is imbued throughout the restaurants and the business in general is creativity.
And you've opened many different kinds of restaurants. Obviously, I'm sure many of these themes we've talked about pervade them all.
But there's probably some sort of creative spark.
At the beginning.
of each. And as an repeat entrepreneur, I'm sure these are moments that you live for, these sort of
primordial ooze stages of a new enterprise.
And there's this concept you have of whoever wrote the rule.
That I would love
You to explain as a device for this early stage.
of entrepreneurial spark and creativity.
That spark you described.
is something that I haven't really analyzed a lot. I know that
Great musicians are often asked
I've heard interviews with Paul McCartney. How did you come up with
Blackbird or
Eleanor Rigby.
And
I don't know how he did it, but he did, and maybe he woke up in the middle of the night singing a song.
I haven't actually thought about
When it happens or how as much as I probably should, except for this.
I know that my life experience.
plays into it and I like to collect experiences. In fact, one of the things I cannot stand about the pandemic
Is
not being able to travel because I collect experiences and it's not only in restaurants, it can be window shopping.
I can see the names of companies. I can see what
Trade signs look like.
I can see how
A butcher.
cuts things differently in one country or another.
I love going to markets to see.
How people eat.
I love seeing art. I love seeing plays.
And I'm bringing this up because
I just
Being voracious when it comes to
Collecting life experiences.
We're putting these experiences in our mind, in our heart, in our
Memory bank.
I think inspiration that spark moment that you were describing.
Happens when
You find
the right time to make a withdrawal from the bank.
That is appropriate.
to the current spending opportunity you have.
So in my business I know that sometimes it's
The context that really helps me to figure it out.
Shake Shack.
Wasn't an idea that I was
Just
Dying to do. I didn't
Wake up one morning having been focused on
Three star New York Times restaurants.
Like Gramercy Tavern or eleven Madison Park.
The modern
Units for Cafe.
And wake up one morning saying
Now what I really have to do is frozen custard and hot dogs and cheeseburgers and crinkle cut fries.
It was basically
Looking at
The context of
trying to help revive a park.
And having food that
Would be in the public domain.
At a price point that
Anybody could afford who could afford to go to New York.
And I just jotted out the menu very, very quickly and we haven't really veered
much from that menu in all these since two thousand and four.
It's basically this. I think I do some of my best work from the frame inward.
The great m artist that you see in museums.
generally paint on a canvas and then someone figures out what kind of frame to put it on.
Which kind of wall to hang it on.
And how to light it.
And I feel like I do some of my best work.
Artistically.
When you give me the frame and you say
What do you think belongs in that frame?
You actually give me the frame and the wall and the lighting.
And you say, What do you think belongs in there?
And that's what led to doing things like working in City Field with the Mets.
Or they said here's center field.
A place that nobody goes.
Create a community out there.
What are you gonna do?
Or the Museum of Modern Art says
Here's the space we're gonna give you.
And it's at the intersection of three generations of architects of MOMA.
What are you gonna do there?
I feel like
Increasingly
That's the kind of
Challenge I love, which is you show me the
The frame you show me the context.
I love working inward as opposed to outward.
What is the tension between wanting to start new things? And you know, obviously you're an serial entrepreneur, so you've started a lot of new things.
How do you how do you deliberate at any point in your life or career whether it's better to expand?
Or to pause and go deeper.
into what you already have.
Probably in the same way that a winemaker
To side
Is this a terroir wine?
Is this a wine that needs to taste exactly like where it was grown?
And only like where it was grown.
Or is this a flavor?
That we can and should replicate many, many, many times.
So if you think about wines.
The brands of wine
That have sold
The most globally.
I don't even know what they all are.
Yellow tail doesn't taste like anywhere.
It just tastes like something.
And it's obviously a combination of
A good enough flavor and a good enough price and good enough name.
And
Packaging
That
It can sell everywhere.
But then you take the wines from Burgundy where
Every village
Even though it's
Five blocks village actually tastes a little different. And then within that village
A vineyard.
Same great Pinot Noir.
Or if Chardonnay.
But
A vineyard within that village is gonna taste different than another vineyard within that village.
I often feel that way about Union Square Cafe, my first restaurant. I feel that way about Gramercy Tavern.
My second restaurant.
They not only taste like where they were born.
But they're named for where they were born.
Not unlike those wines we're talking about.
Most of the great French wines
Are named for
Where they're grown.
It's not a marketing name.
And I feel like we have a lot of those kind of restaurants. Gramercy Tavern, the modern
We also have restaurants that
Are more about
Another place
than they are about this place. So a restaurant like
Mylino.
Which is based on my love affair with Rome.
Not just Italy, but Rome.
My Lino actually has scale because we have a restaurant in Washington D C called Myelino Marit.
Which is a seafood version of myelina here in New York.
So every now and then we'll get one that just feels like
There's not gonna be hundreds of them because I just
That doesn't really excite me that much with a full service restaurant.
We have a new business, new ish business called Daily Provisions.
There are two of them now, one in the Flatiron District on nineteenth street and one
On the upper west side.
That I believe
Not only will grow.
But should grow.
It's an interesting hybrid because
Daily provisions.
The spark of
Inspiration for daily provisions.
Came because
We were
moving Union Square Cafe after thirty years to a new location.
On nineteenth Street.
Very close to Union Square, nineteenth and park.
And the space that we got.
Happened to come with
Another space next door.
And we were completely focused on
Not
Screwing up.
Moving a thirty year old beloved
Brand Union Square Cafe.
Meanwhile, we had to figure out what to do with this little space next door, which became daily provisions.
We basically said
Two things.
This one has to be a gift to its neighborhood. It has to be a gift to people who live near here.
And a gift.
to people who work near here.
And it has to have because it's so small.
Really, really good versions.
of the kind of food that you crave at any time of day.
So
Better have really good coffee. Better have really good bread.
It better have really good breakfast sandwiches.
Better have
The world's best crawler. It better have the world's best
Cookie.
I better have the world's best
rotisserie chicken to take home at night.
And we just started thinking about
That neighborhood. And if you live there, and I happen to live very close by
I don't need a lot. I just need
One of the top three versions of
15 different things that I could eat every day of my life.
And
In order to
have a license to get on that little menu in that little
Please.
It better be a really
Essential version of that. We don't need another
Me too croissant.
We don't need another me to
Grilled cheese sandwich.
The ticket to get on that menu is
You better be
An amazing version of whatever that category is.
So it turned out that
Daily provisions was a smash hit the minute it opened.
Which is why we open a second one.
And
Second one.
Was jam packed with people.
Covid hit.
And now Daily Provisions is finding a way to
to be really, really strong in the
pick up and take out in delivery business because it has to because
People can't gather.
Anymore. But
I'm telling you that story because
It's a hybrid. We created a place of its terwar.
And yet
It turns out to be something that we found people were
kind of coming from all over.
Just to pick up their cruller in the morning.
Or just to pick up their
Roast beef sandwich.
In the afternoon.
And we said we should do more of these because this is a really cool thing.
I love the comparison of
locality and extensibility as a way of thinking about any kind of business and the frame inward. I mean, it's such a interesting creative exercise to sort of bookend our conversation.
around and unite many of the themes that we've walked through.
I'd love you to tell maybe a story
From your own experience of this, I think you call it the excellence reflex. Just like you have a reflex of something gets thrown at you and you duck.
there's certain people or companies that have this excellence
Reflex.
I think that will put a bow on this notion of
obviously not everyone's in the restaurant business, but
In our own ways, we're all in the hospitality business. And I'd love you to just tell a closing story from any experience. Doesn't have to be food or can be a meal, can be anything, just to nail home that point of
excellence reflex and why that can be so powerful for us all.
If you're part of an organization that
Wants to compete to win.
You better surround yourself with people who want to win themselves.
We use the expression excellence reflex.
As you just said.
Doing something as well as you can do it.
And learning to do it even better tomorrow.
Is a journey.
I'm tell you right now, I'm not the least bit interested in perfection.
It doesn't exist.
It's a recipe to be pretty unhappy in life.
I'm very, very interested on the other hand.
in the notion of excellence. Yeah, I do believe that excellence is a journey.
And I believe excellence is
Honoring the work you did yesterday.
All the mistakes and everything. You gave it your best.
But damn it, figure out how you could do it a little bit better today.
And when you see something that can be better, you fix it.
Restaurant workers are
Famous for a lot of things, but
There's this consistently weird thing I've noticed through the years where
They don't.
often know how to look down. They walk right over the little
Okay.
Sweet and low rapper that somebody
drop from their table.
That's not using your excellence reflect. That doesn't belong there.
And by the way, I'm not trying to put down restaurant people at all. I'm putting down myself when I say this.
It's like
If it's not right, you gotta fix it, whatever it happens to be.
There's a great expression, always leave your campsite neater than you found it, which I really, really believe in.
That implies some excellence, which is
Here's what I saw when I got here.
I'm gonna make it even better.
But I'll be damned if I'm gonna leave it even worse.
There's just no way I'm gonna do that.
We think a lot about that. I also think a lot about
Competition.
I'm a sports fan.
And I love learning about what motivates championship performance.
Because in business
That's our sport, it's a game.
We are paid to be problem solvers.
I've learned over time that
I need to surround myself with people who
Are motivated to be champions. I've also learned
That there are three primary
Differences in the kind of motivations that
that champions have.
And not one is better than the other.
But it's important.
As you build a team to think about
Where people come from.
And so you've got the
Really, really competitive champion.
Whose motivation primarily comes from a desire to beat the competition.
That jazzism and
And the image I get in my mind is
Muhammad Ali standing atop Sunny Luston with his
Fish in the air.
And you can tell.
He loves that he just beat that guy.
And then you got the champion.
Great champion.
Ус примерли мотиватиба хат.
Or fear of losing.
Like there's just nothing worse than losing.
And I'll be damned if I'm gonna lose
Which is why I'm gonna win.
And then I think of John McEnroe.
Yelling at the umpire.
How could you call that shot against me?
And then you've got the champion.
I was just reading a great article.
About
A great track and field star who just passed away, Rayford Johnson.
And you can tell that his primary motivation was.
outdoing his own personal best.
It's not that he really cared who he beat.
And he didn't really care that much. Losing just wasn't even on his mind.
He just said, You know what? If I jumped
X far yesterday, I'm gonna jump.
X point two tomorrow.
I'm just going to.
Or I'm gonna run X point two faster tomorrow.
I think it's important for any of us who are in a competitive field.
Look, I bet you check out how many people listen to your podcast all the time.
And if I know you well enough
You might even be aware of how other podcasts are doing in the category.
It's just a good thing to have the self awareness of what motivates you to want to be the best.
Well, it's a wonderful closing thought and analogy and an excuse for me to ask my traditional closing question that I ask everybody.
And that is to ask what the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you is.
Kindest thing anyone's ever done for me was to say yes when I asked her to marry me.
I just cannot imagine
Any of my business life or family life.
Or who I've become had it not been for
Audrey Heffernan saying yes.
And becoming Audre Hefern and Meyer.
She is an amazing mom of four kids.
Do I adore?
Who I learned so much from.
And probably more than anything.
In addition to the
Isn't it great?
How she has
Supported
Which it is, but she's
I think more than anything helped me to become
Real
I think there's a fine line between
Wanting people to be happy so much that
You end up losing a piece of your own authenticity, and that never happened.
to me, thank goodness, and I give her all the credit for that.
Well, Danny, this has been easily one of my favorite conversations that I've had in this format. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Pat.

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