Setting the Table

Danny Meyer, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG), his restaurant company, recounts his journey from a food-obsessed childhood in St. Louis to becoming one of New York City's most acclaimed restaurateurs. He weaves autobiography with business philosophy, building toward a central argument: that hospitality, which he defines as making people feel you are on their side, matters more than food, décor, or location in determining a restaurant's long-term success.

Meyer traces his love of food to early childhood, recalling stone crab in Miami Beach at age four, quiche lorraine in France at age seven, and wild strawberries in Saint-Paul de Vence. His mother insisted he keep a travel diary, which he filled with descriptions of meals rather than museums. Back in St. Louis, he swapped school lunches to learn about other families, fascinated by how household brand preferences revealed identity.

Three male role models shaped his competing instincts about business: his paternal grandfather, Morton Meyer, a stoic civic leader; his maternal grandfather, Irving Harris, a shrewd investor who bet on people rather than operating companies; and his father, Morty, the most charismatic and volatile of the three. Morty parlayed his love of France into a travel agency that thrived before going bankrupt due to overexpansion. He launched subsequent ventures but repeatedly gambled on risky deals, and by 1990, shortly before dying of lung cancer at 59, he was bankrupt a second time. Meyer reflects that these failures instilled a permanent wariness about rapid expansion while teaching him the importance of surrounding himself with talented, trustworthy colleagues.

After graduating from Trinity College in 1980, where rejections from Princeton and Brown had awakened his competitive drive, Meyer worked briefly on John Anderson's presidential campaign in Chicago. He moved to New York and became the top salesman at Checkpoint Systems, a manufacturer of anti-shoplifting devices, while spending every free moment exploring restaurants. One evening, his uncle Richard Polsky challenged him to stop considering law school and simply open a restaurant. Meyer took the Law School Admission Test the next morning but never applied.

In January 1984, Meyer took a steep pay cut to work as an assistant manager at Pesca, an Italian seafood restaurant in Manhattan's Flatiron district. There he met Audrey Heffernan, a waitress who would become his wife, and Gordon Dudash, a bar manager whose innate warmth modeled his developing understanding of hospitality. He also befriended chef Michael Romano. Meyer then spent 100 days training in kitchens in Italy and France before returning to New York determined to open his own restaurant, certain he was better suited as a generalist than as a chef.

Meyer scouted over 100 prospective sites before settling on a former vegetarian restaurant near Union Square. The neighborhood was seedy, but Meyer bet that low rent would let him offer excellent value and that a successful restaurant could help transform the area. His father suggested the name Union Square Cafe. The restaurant opened on October 20, 1985, built for just over $700,000 and funded by Meyer's cashed-in stock and investments from family members.

The early months were chaotic. Meyer's obsession with serving as many diners as possible created logjams in the undersized kitchen. He developed what he calls an "athletic" approach to hospitality, playing offense with complimentary dessert wines and playing defense by turning mistakes into opportunities. Pat Cetta, co-owner of Sparks Steakhouse, became an unexpected mentor, teaching Meyer the "saltshaker theory": Staff and guests constantly move the saltshaker off center, and a manager's job is to calmly move it back each time. A two-star review from Bryan Miller at the New York Times spiked business by 60 percent overnight.

During this period, Meyer articulated a distinction he considers foundational: Service is the technical delivery of a product, while hospitality is how that delivery makes the recipient feel. He also developed practices he calls "collecting dots" and "connecting dots," gathering information about guests and using it to deepen relationships and build a community of regulars. In 1988, Ali Barker, Union Square Cafe's opening chef, departed, and Meyer hired Romano, whose refined cooking earned Union Square Cafe a three-star New York Times review in 1989.

For nearly a decade, Meyer resisted opening a second restaurant, haunted by his father's trajectory. After Morty's death, he gave himself permission to grow. Tom Colicchio, an acclaimed chef whose restaurant Mondrian had recently closed, proposed a collaboration, and together they conceived Gramercy Tavern, blending outstanding modern food with the warmth of an early American tavern. It opened in 1994 to intense media scrutiny after a New York magazine cover story invited critics to judge whether it was "the next great restaurant." The backlash, combined with flagging performance at Union Square Cafe and the devastating loss of premature twins in 1995, brought Meyer to a crisis point.

Out of that crisis, Meyer formally articulated what he calls "enlightened hospitality," a philosophy that prioritizes stakeholders in a specific order: employees first, then guests, community, suppliers, and investors. He presented this framework at a staff meeting, making clear that nothing mattered more than how team members treated one another. Staff who could not embrace the philosophy left; those who stayed grew more confident. Ruth Reichl of the New York Times returned and promoted Gramercy Tavern to three stars.

Meyer expanded steadily, each venture driven by the question "Who ever wrote the rule...?" Eleven Madison Park, a brasserie-style restaurant in a grand Art Deco space at 11 Madison Avenue, and Tabla, an adjacent Indian-inspired restaurant, opened in 1998. Meyer had negotiated with the landlord, MetLife, insisting the company help restore nearby Madison Square Park; he believed community investment would strengthen both neighborhood and business. Blue Smoke, a barbecue restaurant with a downstairs jazz club called the Jazz Standard, and Shake Shack, which evolved from a philanthropic hot dog cart into a permanent kiosk, followed. Shake Shack became a cultural phenomenon, with a percentage of every sale supporting the park's conservancy.

Throughout, Meyer refines his approach to hiring, arguing that emotional skills matter more than technical ones. He seeks employees who score what he calls "51 percent" for innate emotional qualities, including optimistic warmth, curiosity, work ethic, empathy, and self-awareness, with the remaining 49 percent for technical proficiency. He names his management style "constant, gentle pressure" and warns against hiring "whelmers," employees neither outstanding enough to promote nor poor enough to fire. His philosophy of handling mistakes, inspired by retail legend Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus, centers on the Five A's (Awareness, Acknowledgment, Apology, Action, and Additional generosity) and the concept of "writing a great last chapter" that redeems any error.

The book culminates with the opening of The Modern and two cafés at the Museum of Modern Art in 2004, a project that nearly doubled USHG's staff to over 1,000 employees. Meyer hired Alsatian chef Gabriel Kreuther, encouraging him to draw on his culinary roots. The chaotic opening day, with 20,000 visitors on a free-admission day, forced Meyer to do what he had always known he needed to do: let go, trust his team, and stop controlling every detail. In May 2005, Meyer won the first-ever James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur. He concludes that the award reflects the successful extension of a hospitality-driven business model across diverse contexts, from Shake Shack's paper plates to The Modern's Limoges china, always with the goal of creating restaurants that contribute as much to their communities as they receive from them.