Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
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Will Guidara on Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A $2 hot dog and a bottle of whiskeyThe book’s conceptual origin can be traced to a single night in 2011 at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in London. Guidara and chef Daniel Humm had traveled expecting to land somewhere around number 35 on the list. When the announcer called Eleven Madison Park first, the shock sent them back to the hotel room with a bottle of whiskey to work through what came next. Sitting there, Guidara looked at the restaurants that had previously topped the list and saw they’d won by being obsessive about food. He decided EMP would chase something else entirely.
Rather than being unreasonable in pursuit of product and relentless in pursuit of change, [I chose] to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that will never change, which is our human desire to feel seen, to feel cared for, to feel a sense of belonging. And that night is when the words Unreasonable Hospitality came out.
About eighteen months after that London night, a lunchtime moment during busy service gave the concept its first real-world proof. Guidara was clearing tables when he overheard European tourists on the last meal of a New York food trip say they’d never stopped at a street cart for a hot dog. He went outside, bought one, brought it back, and had his chef plate it. What he watched happen next upended his understanding of what his restaurant was actually selling.
I had been serving food my entire life, millions of dollars worth of foie gras, caviar, Wagyu beef, lobster, truffles. I never had seen anyone react like they did to the $2 hot dog. And that moment, that was a coming of age for me where I realized that I’ve been looking at my business in the entirely wrong way.
When Guidara sold his hospitality company just before Covid, he had no clear idea what came next. Writing the book was the process by which he figured it out, and the act of writing ended up answering the question it was meant to ask.
The book was meant to help me decide what I wanted to do next, and it kind of became the thing that I went on to do.
Part of the decision to write the book came from a gap he’d noticed in what was available to people who worked the dining room rather than the kitchen. He had watched that shelf stay largely empty while cookbooks multiplied.
There are so many books about how to be a better cook, but I’ve found that there aren’t many industry specific books for hospitality.
That gap shaped both his intended audience and his ambition: he wanted to write for the people who make guests feel something, not just the people who make the food.
How he wrote it
Fleshing out ideas in a moving carThe book exists in the form it does partly because of Simon Sinek, whose Optimism Press imprint with Penguin published it. The relationship had developed over several years through a comped dinner at an Aspen pop-up and a speaking invitation to Sinek’s annual salon. What Guidara valued most wasn’t the publishing platform but the thinking partnership that came with it.
He’s one of my favorite people to flesh out an idea with. I’ll be on in the car on my way somewhere and I’ll call him up and I’ll be like, all right dude, I was just thinking about this — and it’s really fun to find people that you can have a conversation with where there’s enough air around it where you can just talk about an idea for the sake of talking about it.
A nightly journaling practice his father taught him early in his restaurant career supplied much of the book’s raw material. His father’s reasoning for the habit was a warning about memory: once you leave a role, you lose the ability to see it from the inside. The phrase his father used to make that point became a guiding principle for the book’s construction.
I would journal for a few minutes every night after work to reflect on the day.
Guidara was explicit about the literary inheritance he was working within. Walking into a podcast recording and seeing Danny Meyer’s ‘Setting the Table’ on the shelf, his first observation positioned his own book as a continuation of a conversation Meyer had started, rather than a departure from it.
I also love that it is sitting next to Setting the Table, because in many ways I feel like my book was the sequel to that one, so it’s fun to see them side by side.
He put the debt more plainly elsewhere: “My book, ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’ doesn’t exist without everything I learned from Danny [Meyer].” The sequel framing matters because it tells readers what kind of book this is: not a repudiation of fine dining’s old values, but an extension of them into territory the earlier book left unexplored.
The personal thread
What a wheelchair at the end of the block teachesThe book’s deepest argument, that making someone feel welcome is among the most powerful things one person can do for another, did not come from running a restaurant. It came from watching his mother, diagnosed with brain cancer when Guidara was four and quadriplegic by the time he was nine or ten. On days when the weather allowed, she had her nurses push her wheelchair to the end of the block so she would be there when he walked home from school.
She wanted to be there to welcome me home every single day...it just showed me the power of that. It showed me how when you give all of yourself to make someone feel welcome, the way it makes them feel is something that they might never forget.
His mother was expected to live only to around eleven. She died five hours after he graduated from college. The memory of that wheelchair at the end of the block, and what it cost her to be there, is the emotional core the book’s business lessons are built on.
On what’s at stake
When ‘unreasonable’ stops being an insultGuidara’s central claim is that hospitality is not an industry category but a decision available to anyone, and that the decision carries competitive consequences. He frames it as a response to a world where products and brands can always be replicated: the one advantage that holds over time comes through relationships, which take a long time to build and, if built well, a long time to erode.
If you distill my book down to a single idea, it’s that I believe everyone, regardless of what you do for a living, can make the choice to be in the hospitality industry, simply by being as unreasonable in your pursuit of people as so many different companies are solely in pursuit of product.
The book draws a distinction that Guidara returns to in almost every interview, because without it the word hospitality collapses into something generic. Service and hospitality occupy the same room and run on the same schedule, but they are not the same thing, and confusing them means you can deliver one while completely failing at the other.
Service is simply a part of the product you’re selling. It is living up to the basic promise you’ve made to your customer...Hospitality is how you make people feel while you’re doing that thing. It’s the extent to which the people you are serving feel a sense of belonging.
The book also argues that feedback, which many cultures avoid because it creates discomfort, is where genuine investment in people actually shows up. Guidara sets praise and criticism in direct opposition to each other, and the distinction reframes how leaders should understand the cost of staying quiet.
Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment. There are few things more powerful than when someone is willing to step outside of their comfort zone for long enough to invest in someone else’s growth.
The title of the book began as an insult: what people said when they wanted to shut his ideas down. He took it and made it a declaration. His stated measure for whether the declaration lands is not immediate adoption but whether, in time, the ideas stop needing the adjective.
My hope is that in the next five, six, or seven years, the ideas in my book are not considered to be unreasonable any more and to me would be the book was a great success.
What he wants us to sit with
You can’t give what you haven’t receivedGuidara’s prescription for where hospitality has to begin runs counter to how most organizations think about the guest experience. The instinct is to optimize outward, toward the customer. His argument reverses the order: the guest only receives what the employee has already been given, which means the most consequential investment a leader makes is inward.
You can’t invest in the guest unless you start with the employee.
His mentor Danny Meyer’s belief that “hospitality is a team sport” runs through the book as structural conviction. Guidara wants readers to leave with the understanding that culture is the product, and culture is built person by person, starting with whoever is closest to you.