I recently selected Unreasonable Hospitality, by experienced restaurateur Will Guidara – of Eleven Madison Park (EMP) New York fame – as the ITP Media Group book of the year. As has become customary, we give a copy of our chosen book to clients, business associates and members of staff. Often the chosen book connects with key themes, hot topics or highlights of the year that is ending – rarely has this been more the case than with Unreasonable Hospitality.
Exceeding all expectations
Just what is unreasonable hospitality? Briefly, Guidara describes unreasonable hospitality as surprising and delighting guests by exceeding all expectations. It consistently goes over and above to provide thoughtful touches that allow people to feel seen, connected, and cared for.
The key takeaway is simple: extraordinary success comes from delivering extraordinary hospitality.
While great hospitality can be found in abundance, extraordinary is a much rarer beast. One of the finest examples of this rare behaviour that I have experienced was here in the UAE, at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. At the time of making our reservation, the restaurant was informed of an allergy in our dining party. On arrival we were not only directed to dishes made without the ingredient in question, but instead to a menu in which the chef had recreated every single dish ordinarily available to exclude this otherwise prevalent ingredient. Even those we had previously expressed we were unlikely ever to order. Just in case we changed our minds.
This is just one instance of extraordinary hospitality, but the start of 2024 will see us recognising and celebrating many more industry success stories, starting with the Gault&Millau UAE awards ceremony at the end of January. Hot on its heels, we will release the third Gault&Millau UAE guide, brimming with the 2024 ratings and reviews of all the restaurants visited by our team of expert investigators.
Recognising the finest
The awards ceremony and publication of the new guide is rightly a time for public recognition and celebration, but also a time for reflection and introspection. This is true not just for award winners and hopefuls, but for all those who care about the future of fine dining and the food and beverages sector in our region and beyond.
In such moments, when opportunities for pause and reflection are afforded to us, connecting with the experiences and successes of other seasoned industry professionals can prove fruitful. Not least, doing so can prompt honest, if sometimes tough, conversations, and help deepen our understanding of what makes for the very best dining experiences, worthy of the highest accolades.
Take the case of Will Guidara, who in his tenure as co-owner of EMP led the restaurant—together with co-owner chef, Daniel Humm – to such well-earned heights as three Michelin stars, and in 2017, to the very top of the 50 Best list as the world’s best restaurant. Guidara coined the term Unreasonable Hospitality to describe the approach that helped make EMP extraordinarily successful.
Incidentally, and somewhat paradoxically in the context of this year’s book of the year (and indeed, this column), when we visited Eleven Madison Park in 2019, we didn’t have the greatest experience – which just goes to show that even the very best restaurants can have off days, and crucially, we remained eager to return and give it another go, even after that less-than-stellar first experience. But that is a story for another time and nonetheless, the message of Guidara’s book remains worth digesting and internalising.
Offering unforgettable experiences
Unreasonable hospitality is founded on one simple but important conviction – that in gastronomy and high-end dining, as in almost everything, fads go in and out of fashion, but one thing remains constant: the human desire to be taken care of.
Put another way, success at the highest levels is founded on an enterprise’s ability to elevate ordinary transactions into unforgettable experiences.
This is true of potentially any business, but it is particularly easy to recognise its presence or absence in the restaurant business, and most crucially, in fine dining.
How many times have you been somewhere that has served incredible food, but the overall experience wasn’t great? Alternatively, how many times have you gone back to a restaurant you have previously enjoyed and found it to be underwhelming, even if the food is still as good as before?
From the front desk to the service staff to the food, restaurants go all-out when they first open to make a fantastic first impression. But all too often, that experience slips over time.
That’s why Gault&Millau investigators return to restaurants time and again over the course of a year, and why they don’t visit in the hyped-up opening period.
I’ve talked before about what sets Gault&Millau apart as a restaurant and fine dining critique guide [link to past articles here]. Crucially, it takes a radically holistic, well-rounded, long-term view. While meaningful innovation is recognised and rewarded, so too are intentionality, integrity and consistency.
The best chefs will tell you that consistency is the hardest thing to come by in their kitchens, whether it be in ingredients, staff or equipment. They know that to deliver the best, they need the best. Consistently.
But front of house, that mindset can fade over time. It’s likely that this is driven by cost considerations, and one can sympathise. Restaurants are notoriously difficult businesses to make successful, and the failure rate is alarmingly high. It’s no wonder, then, that some restaurants resort to cutting costs where they assume clients are least likely to notice.
Do they really need an experienced head sommelier, or once the wine list is in place, are they an expense not worth covering? Is the restaurant manager adding anything to the bottom line? After all, they are probably not personally serving guests. Perhaps the hostess who joined from one of London’s top restaurants could be replaced by three people for the same salary…
As a fellow businessman, I understand the temptation to streamline and cut back when times feel precarious. However, it’s proven that instilling the correct behaviours – the right culture and attitude – and doing them consistently will, over time, prove fruitful.
The culture of Unreasonable Hospitality created and consistently enacted by the team at EMP is a case in point: as Guidara tells it, they passionately, intentionally, wholeheartedly committed to a culture of connection and graciousness. In the face of nagging problems that threatened to erode the bottom line, they did not sneakily chip away at the service they offered, but blew it out in the opposite direction – giving more, not less.
Crucially, they didn’t do this by adding lots of extra cost, and neglecting the profitability of the business. You can achieve unreasonable hospitality without spending much – or at times, any – money. Guidara’s rule of thumb is “Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last five percent ‘foolishly’… Because that last five percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend”.
Consistency in providing excellent hospitality pays off. Making knee-jerk changes that erode the guest experience, will not.
Whether they work in the dining room or in the kitchen, when staff feel part of a culture that is committed to unreasonable hospitality, they are empowered to imbue the dining experience with their own expertise, thoughtfulness, care, and yes, even creativity. Again, this does not come down to the amounts of money spent, as much as it does to organisational culture and attitude.
Just look at the restaurants that have rated highly in Gault&Millau’s two annual guides so far, and the winners of the annual awards for the previous two years.
Two-time Restaurant of the Year Ossiano improved, with time and investment spent on the dining room and the high quality of staff brought in for key positions. Hervé Lorit of Pierre’s TT was named Restaurant Manager of the Year in 2022 and 2023, thanks to the work he does making every guest feel welcome and special in his restaurant. Al Muntaha at Burj Al Arab has refined its offering, using only the very best ingredients and keeping the core team front and back of house intact.
The best restaurants are those that enable guests to leave with a story
All of the very best restaurants in the UAE have experienced professionals in charge of the dining room, wine list, front desk, bar and kitchen.
Just like a recipe, restaurants are more than the sum of their parts. And, likewise, the dining experience, and crucially, the memories that diners are left with, are also more than the sum of their parts. The truth is that, as delicious as any restaurant meal is, it is a fleeting experience, unlikely to live on in anything more than a set of memories.
As Will Guidara says in his book: the people that engage in fine dining – whether regularly, or as a special treat they’ve saved long and hard for – do so primarily to add to their collection of experiences. The best restaurants are those that enable guests to leave with a story that’s good enough to put them back in the moment, reliving their experience at that restaurant all over again, for years to come.
In the case of my 2019 visit to Eleven Madison Park, I certainly left with a story – and not of the nature the team would suggest is representative of their usual work.
But even Guidara would have to admit, the real challenge of a reputation for delivering unreasonable hospitality is that it becomes perfectly reasonable of your customers to expect it from you.
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