Setting the Table

Meyer built Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern and then Shake Shack, and the useful part of this book is that he treats hospitality as an operating problem rather than a feeling.

His distinction between service and hospitality is the thing I quote most. Service is whether the food arrived correctly. Hospitality is how the person felt while it happened. You can be perfect at the first one and still have somebody leave unhappy.

Then he gets specific about producing that at scale, which turns out to be hiring, and his ratio is roughly 51 percent emotional skills to 49 percent technical. You can teach somebody the menu. You cannot teach them to notice.

I did not understand this early enough and it cost us. We did not necessarily hire managers when we should have. That was a very big mistake and I am still cleaning it up. The reviews that actually hurt are never about the trails or the machines.