Meyer Lemon

The most hospitable industry in the world forgot to ask guests to be hospitable back.

“The customer is always right”. First, who the hell came up with that saying. It’s a real lemon. It gives the same vibe as the doctor who invented residency, who, if you do not know the story, worked around the clock and made his residents do the same because he was functionally high on morphine the entire time and could not feel exhaustion. We are still running residents through that same model today. But I digress, this is about hospitality, and how the model continues to need to change.

I was trained to believe the customer is always right. Formally I was trained under folks who were disciples of Danny Meyer, arguably the most hospitable man in America. His book Setting the Table was the bible for many of us hospitality workers. And to be honest, I loved it. There is nothing quite like the feeling of making another person feel genuine surprise and delight. Honing in on what someone wants before they can even surface it themselves. Creating a moment so specific and unexpected that they will remember it years later. It’s one of the best parts of hospitality. I still feel that rush and I don’t think that will ever change.

Most of us can remember special dining experiences and moments of pure hospitality. My first meal at WD-50 was sixteen years ago and I can still tell you what I ate and more importantly how the team made me feel. That kind of impression was curated, intentional, and so strong that it has stayed with me and informed how I run my restaurants to this day. Danny Meyer and the leaders who followed him taught us we could make that the standard, not the exception.

But there was a flaw in what he preached. His philosophy, and how it got twisted over years, often put hospitality workers in the position of being less than the guests, and for the true believers it sometimes meant being subjected to real abuse by guests who had learned that the restaurant would absorb anything. And maybe more importantly that the person serving you would absorb anything. Danny Meyer’s “Enlightened Hospitality” lit the match on a growing expectation by guests that a good dinner was simply not enough. Connection, surprise, uniqueness, over the top recovery from any misstep: that became the expected baseline. I have had guests describe to me, in complete seriousness, how an overcooked piece of chicken or a cocktail with too much ice ruined not just their evening but their entire day. And yet I still take their feelings and energy every time.

The pendulum swung so far it created an untenable reality. And then the pandemic happened, forcing restaurants to change shape and scope multiple times over. Simultaneously the country was being forced to confront generations of racism and inequality as we watched George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery be murdered and the realities of the work we need to do as a society started to take center stage. A lot of us started reevaluating our relationships to other people, to community, to what we were willing to absorb and what we were not. Some operators abandoned Meyer’s “enlightened hospitality” entirely and moved toward mirroring: giving guests back whatever energy they brought in.

I have wrestled with that and I am still wrestling. I’m not for mirroring. I still believe we’ve all had a terrible day, we’ve all been the most drunk human (proverbially), we’ve all been the most difficult version of ourselves publicly, we’ve all been misunderstood. I want folks to give me grace, so I give it to them. But my team and I are human. We make mistakes. We have to say no sometimes. And there has to be a level of understanding that runs in both directions. Feeling like my core value of staff + guest centricity was shifting without a clear replacement was genuinely uncomfortable for me, because having firm values with clear edges is something I have historically relied on. How do we keep creating a safe environment for my team where guests are expected to treat them with basic dignity, while still holding space for the guest who walked in carrying something heavy?

The answer I keep coming back to is mutuality.

We have put the entire burden of hospitality solely on the restaurant workers for decades. But any relationship that actually works requires cooperation, give and take, mutual accountability. As a coach one of the most foundational things I learned is that you have to see your client as whole and complete, not broken and in need of fixing, and show up as a partner on their journey with no agenda beyond being present. It is a relationship built on mutuality. The same principle needs to apply here.

Historically guests have not been expected to show up as partners in their relationships with restaurants. The great ones do, but it hasn’t been required. You go out to dinner, and if you do not love it you can immediately blast your experience on OpenTable, Google, Yelp, or anywhere else you want to broadcast your feelings. You paid so you get the say. And tipping: do not even get me started. There is no other industry I can think of where a stranger can walk in, observe two hours of someone’s work on what may be their hardest day, and then unilaterally decide to cut that person’s pay based on a completely subjective read of the experience. Everyone has off days. Everyone has moments of learning or personal struggle bleeding into their professional one. Restaurant workers are the rare people who get financially penalized for being new at a job, sometimes overwhelmed, maybe in the learning process, basically for being human.

And then Airbnb came along. It was, as far as I can remember, the first time mutuality existed with real recourse in customer relationships. It was built right into the product. Airbnb designed a two-way rating system. Guests rate the home. Homeowners rate the guest. Reviews for homes are public. Consequences are real on both sides. Too many violations and a homeowner loses their listing. Too many bad reviews and a guest loses access to the platform. Uber and Lyft followed. So did eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and others. And in most of those cases something genuinely positive happened: behavior improved because there was an incentive to behave well on both sides.

So why don’t restaurants do this? We are subject to every expectation, opinion, and one star review our guests want to throw at us. Why are guests not subject to behavioral expectations we have set? What if restaurants publicized their expected code of conduct and then rated guests on how they performed? What if guests were actually incentivized for good behavior and high ratings? What if they were even rewarded for it? For example, Every time a guest earned five stars from us they could accumulate points toward a gift card, a discount, something with real value. They have reason to treat our team with respect, arrive on time for their experience, not linger two hours past a reasonable dining time, maybe even be adventurous in their ordering. We have even more reason to continue delivering on food, beverage, and hospitality that makes them want to come back. That feels like a genuine win on both sides.

Ben Leventhal is probably getting the closest to this with Blackbird. His newest platform, Blackbird, incentivizes loyalty and payments in a whole new way but it doesn’t require mutuality of behavior. It only rewards for showing up and spending.

This is the shift I am hoping to see in my lifetime in this industry. The positive ripple effects, for restaurant workers, for communities, for the culture of dining itself, would be significant. While I keep envisioning what this could look like we will remain committed to doing what we believe in. Seeing guests as whole and complete, extending grace when someone comes in as less than their best selves, and also being a little more honest about our limits. Saying no when yes would cost too much. Pushing back when behavior crosses a line or even gets close to it. Holding our side of the relationship with the same care and accountability we are asking guests to bring to theirs.