Setting the Table

The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
Danny Meyer

No Reservations – The first seven years I worked were at Fulton St. Fishery & Market, a suburban Chicago restaurant that opened in 1976. On Milwaukee Avenue, in northwest Wheeling, up the street from Le Francais and Don Roth’s. Busboy, waiter, host. The money I earned paid for college; I realize now the social skills I learned have served me well throughout my career and life.

“Setting the Table” is full of tips about building those social skills and other learning from other good lessons. Danny Meyer’s ideas about hiring managers and looking for “51 percenters,” the core emotional skills each needs, and his outline of the “Yes Criteria for New Ventures” are extraordinarily valuable – and transferrable to other fields. I was most struck by how he thinks about stakeholders; the idea that someone (staff) must be tended to before the customer is revolutionary. I work in the early education field – and I’m old enough to remember all of the work done to make early education “child-centered, family-focused.” Now, when the early ed field is facing a workforce crisis (not unlike the restaurant business and so many fields), I’m rethinking how early ed really needs to become staff-focused first to truly reach a place where children and families are best served.

And for anyone who just loves restaurants, this book offers a buffet of page-turning stories. Lessons, here, too: the aesthetic components of a memorable experience around a dinner table. Made me think how the people I worked with back at Fulton St. in the ‘70s were the first people I knew who hosted real dinner parties in their apartments – candles lit on the table, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn recordings playing softly in the background, cocktails served first in the living room before we all sat at the dining room table where we drank wine with our meals. This was not the way food was served in the house I grew up in. But it was the beginning of developing a way of treating people, not only at work in a restaurant but at home and among friends.

“Setting the Table” also honors Irving B. Harris, Danny Meyer’s grandfather. I met Mr. Harris when I worked in the 1980s at the American Academy of Pediatrics, doing public relations. I saw him in action more frequently when I went to work for a Chicago nonprofit called Ounce of Prevention in the late 1990s. Irving was a force to be reckoned with in the early childhood field, decades ahead of his time.

My two favorite Irving stories: First, Mr. Harris, the Ounce and the Chicago Public Schools partnered to create the first Educare center on the city’s south side. Educare was then just a promising idea – a way of preparing infants, toddlers and preschoolers for success in school and life. Now it’s a coast-to-coast network of two dozen Educare schools doing some of the most innovative work in the field. One summer day at the construction site of that first Educare in Chicago’s Grand Boulevard neighborhood, I found myself walking beside Mr. Harris. We didn’t have a name for the place yet, so I piped up as Mr. Young P.R. Professional. “Mr. Harris,” I said, “I can’t think of a better name than calling this the Harris Center!”

Irving was a truly towering figure, in stature as well as height, and he looked down on me with a withering look that said, “Who the hell is this kid?” I gulped.

“We’re going to call it ‘Educare,’” he explained. “Bettye Caldwell, a pediatrician in Arkansas coined the word. It combines education and care.” He was always teaching.

My second story was a few weeks after Mr. Harris turned 90. (He passed away, at 94, I believe, in 2004.) I was editing something he had written, and I telephoned to offer my suggestions. “Let me find my copy,” Mr. Harris told me on the phone, and I could hear papers rustling on his desk.

I took the moment’s opportunity. “Mr. Harris,” I asked, “do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“What is it?”

“What’s it like to be 90?”

He paused. Then, with a booming, beaming voice, he replied: “Goddamn. It’s awesome!”