An Overcooked Salmon Taught Danny Meyer to Lead With Generosity

The woman waited until after dinner to pull Danny Meyer aside in his brand new restaurant. Meyer, the New York restaurateur behind Union Square Cafe and later Shake Shack, had just opened Gramercy Tavern in New York after 10 years running his only restaurant, Union Square Cafe. She was a regular at the first place, and she told him what had just happened never would have happened there.

She had ordered her salmon rare. It came well done. Meyer's first thought, he said, was that a cook had made an honest mistake and he did not feel that bad about it. Then she kept talking.

At Union Square Cafe, she said, the server who knew she liked her salmon rare would have seen the mistake, quietly taken the plate away without letting the rest of the table notice, and brought a cup of soup so she would have something to eat while her guests kept eating. The kitchen would have cooked a new fillet without a word, and the restaurant probably would have removed the charge for the fish from her check.

What happened at Gramercy Tavern was the opposite, and it became Meyer's first painful lesson in how to grow a culture beyond one room. No one came over while she picked at the fish. Then the manager took it away, handed her a coat check ticket in exchange, told her the rest of her salmon would be waiting at the door, and left the full price on the check. Meyer said he got sick hearing it, because he realized he had never taught the new staff what he had always just done himself.

For a decade, he had led by example. As Meyer put it: "if you saw Danny doing it, that's how you should do it." With two restaurants, he could not be in both places at once, and he had no words for how things should be done. He put it simply, in his words: "If you don't have language, you cannot teach."

So that Saturday, before lunch service, he called an all staff meeting and gave the lesson a name for the first time. He called it enlightened hospitality, and said the business would lead with generosity. As Meyer explained it: "We are in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars." Staff came first, treated with generosity and a charitable assumption, then guests, then community and suppliers, then investors. If those came first, he told the room, there would be more money left over, and that would mean raises and promotions for them.

He never learned the regular's name, but he said she gave them a gift by complaining. The overcooked fish gave him the sentence he had been missing.