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Restaurateur Will Guidara on Delivering Unreasonable Hospitality

37m 37s

Restaurateur Will Guidara on Delivering Unreasonable Hospitality

A restaurant AI assistant, Yelphost, helps restaurants manage phone calls 24/7 by answering guest inquiries about reservations, wait times, and takeout with a natural, human-like voice—offering a free 30-day trial. This is paired with a deeper exploration of hospitality culture through Will Gidera’s book, *Unreasonable Hospitality*. The core idea is that true restaurant success comes not from technical perfection or food innovation alone, but from creating deeply personal, memorable experiences that make guests feel seen and valued. Gidera argues that hospitality must be intentional, unpredictable, and rooted in genuine human connection—like serving a hot dog to a guest who mentioned missing one during a trip. This requires leadership that communicates clearly, empowers teams with resources, and remains open to change. The show emphasizes that traditions in the restaurant world should be questioned when they no longer serve current guest needs, and that hospitality is a living, evolving craft shaped by human change. Ultimately, successful hospitality is about prioritizing emotional connection over efficiency, and making every guest feel uniquely cared for—no matter how small or unexpected the gesture.

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When you run a restaurant in the phone rings, you can't ignore it because it could mean that there's money on the other end of the line. But it could also be a bot that's calling you about your car warranty expiring. And that's why Yelphost solves all of your phone problems. It's an AI voice assistant made for restaurants that answers every call 24/7. Let Yelphost handle reservations, share wait times, answer guest questions, and even text links to guests for takeout orders. In the best part, it doesn't sound like AI. It sounds like someone who would working your restaurant and takes care of every guest on the phone. Try Yelphost free for up to 30 days and see how easy it is to turn your phone into a money maker. Terms apply. Visit host.yelp.ai to book your demo today. Now here, we go. Fran, Adria, and Renee, RedZepi, and Massimo Patura, all these guys were completely unreasonable in pursuit of technique and ingredients and precision and plating and all of that. What if we built a culture where we're just as unreasonable and how we made the people who we were serving that food to feel? What if we decided that just as they would do whatever it took and go to whatever lengths we would do the exactly the same thing just to create a kind of memories for the people we were serving that would last a lifetime that would give them an unbelievable sense of belonging that would make everyone feel seen in the most genuine and authentic way. Welcome to FullCon, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurant tours, thought leaders, and innovators. Serve though on the house. If you own a restaurant and you want more paying guests this month, listen up. I built a free five-day restaurant marketing masterclass that hands you the exact campaigns to fill seats, boost catering and event sales, and sell gift cards on demand. Day one, I'll supply you with the blueprints of scale. Day two, you'll get the sales playbook to make more of every guest. On day three, we're turning eyeballs online into butts and seats. And on day four, we scale catering and event sales. And on the last day, we're going to build the frequency machine that's going to keep your best guests coming back programatically. This isn't high-level BS. These are the actual playbooks we use. And it's free to attend, but the seats are limited so we can keep this thing hands-on. Visit restaurantbusinessschool.com to learn more. Check out the testimonials in register today. World-famous restaurant tour Wil Godera is back with his latest project. And it's not a restaurant. It's a book. Wil was made famous by the over-the-top service he provided at 11 Madison Park. And as it turns out, there was a method to the madness. In this episode, Wil and I sit down to discuss the formulaic way that he set expectations for his guest experience and the process he created to exceed those expectations. I'm a restaurant tour. I used to be a restaurant tour with restaurants. Now I'm a restaurant tour who is in between having restaurants. Although it's interesting, I might evolve that a little bit because here's the thing. When I sold my company, and I think this is natural, or I've come to learn through talking to a lot of people who I respect that it is natural. When you do something for so long and you give so much of yourself to doing that thing, and I'm sure you can relate to this, it starts to become your entire identity. And so when I sold my company, suddenly the next day I looked up and had a little bit of an existential crisis where I was like, "Wait a minute, who am I without restaurants?" And frantically started running to open restaurants and put together an entire team of people and was a week away from signing three leases when COVID hit. We've talked about this before. And in hindsight, everyone I've talked to, even those that suffered significant loss through COVID has something about the pandemic that they can look back and appreciate. For me, it was the fact that it forced me to take the time and to give myself the space and the grace to actually have a bit of a pause. And to rather than just run back to doing whatever I've always done, have to decide to do it again. And I was on a walk through the museum, Mass Mocha, and a guy that I was with said, "Hey, are you in the restaurant business or are you in the hospitality business?" And it was the first time anyone had asked me that question so directly. And when he did, the answer was actually clear. I was in the hospitality business. I had just been delivering hospitality in the form of food and drink for a long time. And so maybe I withdraw my first answer. I'm a hospitality professional. And what gets me excited and out of bed every day is having the opportunity to either deliver hospitality to people myself or to inspire other people to want to make the choice, to prioritize the idea of hospitality within their worlds as well. Well, and even though that might have been a relatively recent realization, you, you're a self described cheeseburger guy in the book, right? More cheeseburger than foie gras. Yes. And I can empathize with this because I felt very much the same way. For me, food was always a vehicle. It wasn't my passion. Like, my passion has been people. I'm not a foodie. But like, I love the experience of dining. I love giving that to people. I love sharing that with people. And in large part, throughout your career, it really does seem to be the thing you've doubled down on time and time again is people and building that relationship through process and through food. Yeah. Yeah, you know, what's funny and something happened recently that compelled me to articulate it like this. And I talk about in the book a lot, my OCD tendency is my constantly having to navigate kind of my relationships with both trusting my team and having this deep rooted need to control the details that the experience is as close to perfect as it possibly can be. I am a perfectionist in life and in work. But I do prioritize and I have always and I will always connection over perfection. If I have to make a choice in an experience, do I nail every single detail from an excellence perspective or do I leave both the people I work with and those that we collectively served, feeling a genuine sense of connection to us, to one another, to the experience, leaving them with a memory that is much bigger than that of whatever the piece of tuna that they ate. That for me has always felt much more important and much more significant. So we're here to talk about your book, Unreasonable Hospitality. And I want to start with why, which is hilarious because Simon Sinek published your book. But obviously like everything you do, you do with intention talking specifically about you, but like books serve a need. And typically, if you write a book, it's because you saw an unserved need in the market. What was that for you? You wrote this book because you were in the black. So it's interesting. I've been thinking about writing this book for a while. And in the beginning, the reasons I wanted to write it was because I look back on my career and on my life and feel very blessed for the people that I've had the chance to learn from for the experiences that I've had and the myriad of things I've learned from those. And I understand that I'm blessed. And I think that when you've lived a life through which you've kind of collected a lot of beautiful lessons that have helped me be much better at what I do than I ever would have been in the absence of having learned them. I've always felt some responsibility to share those. It's not dissimilar to why, you know, Renee Redzepi or Farhan Adria or anyone choose this to write a cookbook. They've learned a bunch of stuff and they want to share it with the world because when you love your craft, you want to help make it and it's entirety better. The thing about a book, though, is it's not like running a restaurant. You don't just get a bunch of people in a room and you say, all right, let's figure this out, right? Like it's a very intensely focused time-consuming process that is different than any of the other intensely focused time-consuming things I've done in my life. I took stabs at it before and it was not dissimilar to the scene you see in a movie where the guy sits down in front of his computer and keeps on deleting the first line over and over and over again. And then COVID happened and I finally found myself at the time to do it and speaking to the same point that we started this conversation with, I almost felt like this personal need to go through the journey of reflecting on everything that it led to now before I could then turn around and figure out what to do next. All that said, in COVID, the book started feeling more important to write than it ever had before for a couple different reasons. If I were to describe what the book is about, it's a book filled with lessons of service and leadership through the lens of hospitality that I've I've learned over a career in restaurants. But more than that, it's a book on how to be really intentional in pursuit of relationships. It's a book about how to be intentional in pursuit of connection. And throughout COVID, whether it was the pandemic and isolation, or whether it was how politically divided we were becoming, or the myriad of other things that kind of led people to, listen, people are buying tons of stuff through the pandemic, right? If you weren't missing things, they're missing connection. And the recipe for connection, the most important ingredient is hospitality. And I believe the best way to, I don't know, try to deal with a lot of the stuff that has been put on our collective plate is through being unreasonable in our pursuit of it. And so all of that kind of together, having had a desire to share the lessons I'd learned and then finding myself with the time to actually take all these crazy ideas in my head and organize them into a few hundred pages, and then feeling like the message is actually more resonant now than it ever was before, it became clear that it was time. When I was competing in the restaurant industry in Los Angeles, I knew that being the best restaurant in the world wasn't going to get me anywhere, but I knew that being a better marketer than everyone else would. That's where I put my attention, because I knew no one else was focused in that area, and we won because of it. But you chose hospitality. Hospitality is typically down and low on the list with like marketing and all of this other stuff that we don't have time for or the inclination to do. How would you inspire someone to prioritize it, knowing how busy everyone is, knowing how short staffed everyone is? Well, one of the things you hear people say all the time, which is why it always astounds me that not as many people decide to make that their focus. This is kind of an adage in our business, is people, if they go to a restaurant, the food's not great, but they're treated really, really well, they'll go back. If they go to a restaurant, the food's amazing, but they're treated like crap, they won't. I have not met very many people that wouldn't sign on to that idea, which by the way, makes it crystal clear, the way that people are made to feel matters more, and yet sometimes we can't get out of our own way. I mean, for me, making that choice was about impact. I mean, it was when we went to the 50 best for the first time and came in 50th and dead last and started reflecting on where we were in our journey compared to those restaurants that had reached the top of that list and acknowledged the fact that, okay, it's ridiculous to say that one restaurant is better than every other restaurant in the world. And instead, excepted that the number one restaurant on that list is the restaurant that's having the greatest impact on the world of food, perhaps better said the world of restaurants. And when I looked back at the people that had topped the list before us, it was Farhan Adria, El Boulis, number one on that list for years, and no one was prioritizing molecular gastronomy before he started. And in fact, I'm not even sure he understood what he was pursuing until he was well down the road of pursuing it, but because he did, he innovated an approach to cooking that has impacted pretty much every restaurant around the world, even those that don't understand that they're utilizing some of his techniques. The same was true for René Rhodes, Epi et Noma, with local and foraging and really serving ingredients that wouldn't make sense if they were served anywhere else in the world, but where he was creating something that had a sense of place, right? That was unbelievably innovative and impactful, right? The idea that he was trying to be one of the best restaurants in the world and wasn't serving Fagra or caviar, I mean, it doesn't seem innovative now, but then it was hugely innovative. And when I thought about the impact those chefs and others that had topped that list head, they were obviously doing it with the things that they were serving with what they were putting on the plate, but they were also doing it by looking forward at what needed to change in food. Listen, I think a lot of the time when you find yourself trying to make an impact or trying to excel or trying to succeed the first question you need to ask yourself is what are my superpowers and lean fully into those and hospitality, that's my happy place. And so it started to become very clear that the way for us to have our impact was not to focus on what needed to change, but to focus on the one thing that never would, which is the human desire to be taken care of. Farhan, Adria, and René Rezepi and Massimo Petor, all these guys were completely unreasonable in pursuit of technique and ingredients and precision and plating and all of that. What if we built a culture where we were just as unreasonable and how we made the people who we were serving that food to feel? What if we decided that just as they would do whatever it took and go to whatever lengths to fulfill their idea of what the food and their restaurant should be, we would do the exactly the same thing just to create the kind of memories for the people we were serving that would last a little lifetime, that would give them an unbelievable sense of belonging that would make everyone feel seen in the most genuine and authentic way. And when you decide to go for it and you're playing in one of your superpowers, there are a few things in the world that are more gratifying because you start to make progress and it feels really good along the way. But 11 Madison Park wasn't yours to begin with, right? It's you stepped into a leadership role in a restaurant that at the time was a brass array and at the time was Danny Myers restaurant. And so there's this really interesting process in the book where I don't know how to describe it other than to say, you were seeding the ground, right? Trying to create like this fertile place where you could create this level of hospitality, which is incredible because you work to set these incredible expectations and then work to exceed those incredible expectations. You mentioned earlier in the conversation that you did have amazing mentors going into it. And so you did have tools as you ventured out into this new way of doing things and you guys are reaching in the dark, trying to figure out what the most reasonable path forward is. You had a great platform. Talk to me about your time at Union Square Hospitality Group and the lessons that you learned that informed how to build and maintain a pervasive culture. I mean, Danny Meyer, the fact that I was a general manager at Union Square Hospitality Group, when the company was still pretty small, there are not that many of us that got to experience that and got to work so closely with them. And my gosh, what an experience that was. There are so many different things. I think one of the biggest ones was the importance of language. Like Danny was so good and you know, anyone, I'm sure most of the people that listen to your podcast are familiar with the Be the Swan charitable assumption, constant gentle pressure, the salt shaker, right? All these things, Danny taught me and so many of us. But the power of articulating ideas in simple enough ways that an army of people could understand them and rally around them and breathe life into them. I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of language and the importance of slowing down for long enough such that you can find the words to articulate what you're trying to do because only when you have that language can an entire group of people be aligned enough in the spirit of their collective endeavor. I mean, the tenants of a line hospitality take care of each other first. That's one of the biggest ones. I mean, Danny gave me the foundation upon which everything that I've innovated from a cultural perspective was built. But again, in the same way that I was saying, what Renee did with the food now seems so commonplace, but when he did it, it seemed innovative. The same is true with Danny's whole idea of take care of one another first and then the guests will get taken care of. I mean, A, it just makes sense from a strategic perspective, right? No one person can take care of every guest. If you create a culture where everyone feels cared for, they're going to pay that forward to their guests. But if you really believe in the importance of how you make people feel, then even if there's no strategic benefit to it, it's just the right thing to do. And you can't decide when to care about something and when to not care about something. But I think perhaps most importantly, by the time I started working for Danny Meyer, it was cool to be a chef. And I'd wanted to be in the dining room my entire life. And in Danny, there was a dining room rock star. I think in any industry for someone to want to give every ounce of their being in pursuit of being the best at that thing, you need a rock star to look up to. And Danny showed me like, hey, if I give everything to this, maybe one day I could be just a little bit like him. You need your heroes. In addition to everything that Danny taught me, he also just by being him gave me a hero. You started with a really clear intention, which struck me in the book because when I opened the fine dining restaurant at a very clear intention, when I opened the bar, I had a very clear intention. When I opened the fast casual concept, there was no clear intention. It was like, I was trying to capitalize on all of this momentum that we had for I check him was big. I felt there was a hole in the market and it didn't do particularly well. I think as a result of that, and I think a lot of us, the intention into opening a restaurant and it's just a. open it, just to have it. We don't really give a lot of credence to what purpose does this serve in the world. Does the world really need another restaurant? And it's so why this one. And intention comes up again and again and again and again throughout the book. And it is so clear that that is a differentiating factor for you that directly led to your success was you could clearly see it from the beginning. I want you to talk about that initial intention, the UN Daniel head because you hit it. The shit out of it. I mean we wanted to be a restaurant run by both the kitchen and the dining room. I mean that was probably propelled most because that was at a time where I didn't even want to be in fine dining because of the relationships that I had had with chefs before that. Where I always was running around working my ass off trying to convince them that the things I cared about matter as much as the things they cared about. And you get to a point in your life where you just don't have the space for that kind of thing anymore. And I don't know if it's ultimatum, but you know in the first day I was like I can only do this if we agree that the dining room and the kitchen are equals in this great experiment that is 11 medicine park. It had the added benefit of being something that we really believed could change the game because when we looked around at all the other restaurants out there someone was in the driver's seat. And by virtue of whether it was a chef or a restaurant or in the driver's seat that dictated what the priorities of the restaurant were. I quote in the book again named Roger Martin who's an amazing strategic thinker. He's one of these guys that like CEOs of Fortune 500 companies when they're kind of confused and lost they call Roger Martin and he comes in and he's like this is what you should do. And one of his like big things is the whole idea of conflicting goals and the power of choosing conflicting goals and how they actually make business better. And the kitchen and the dining room have conflicting goals right it's excellence it's the same reason why excellence and hospitality are not friends unpack that because you break it up in the book and I thought it was a super compelling idea. Well okay the reason why excellence and hospitality aren't friends I mean listen it's easy to have a really hospitable culture if you don't care about the details right you can just celebrate and cheer everyone on and tell everyone like you guys are doing a great job and if you do those people are going to be uplifted and warm and cheerful and that energy is going to pass on to the guest. But if you never hold people accountable they're going to start making a lot of mistakes and the experience is going to be far from excellent. Similarly if all you do is harp on the details and criticize people every single time they make a mistake you can scare people into not making a mistake but if people are living in fear of not doing something correctly there's no world in which they're going to be able to bring their fully realized selves to the table. Doing those two things at the same time is very very very difficult because you're effectively driving a car like with your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. There's a reason why New York City taxis get you cars to it and it requires back to the word an exceptional amount of intention to be pushing both envelops simultaneously and still have it result in being a smooth drive. I want to get really tactical because there's so many great tidbits in the book. Talk to me about that idea that every hire sends a message. I think that there's this thing that people say all the time where the people are higher reflection of me and yes that's true but it's not the entire truth. The people you hire are reflection of you and everyone that you've already hired and I understand I'm not empathetic to being short-staffed and I know it's a real issue right now. I learned the hard way that every time I hired someone instead of selected someone I eventually regretted it because the best way to reward A players is to surround them with other A players. Any single person you add to your team can have an outsized and asymmetrical impact on the entire team positive or negative and when you put together a team of rock stars it is rare if you were to really sit down with them if you were like looking to hire someone and you were short-staffed and everyone was working an extra shift a week if you sat down with your team and said hey guys here's where we're at I found someone they're not good at all they have a bad attitude they have no experience but you will work one less shift a week now here's the deal on the shifts that you do work you're going to work a little bit harder because you have to fix all their mistakes. What do you think should I hire them I'm sure there's cultures out there where the people will be like yeah hire them but in any high performing organization people are going to be like no we'd rather work a little bit more for a few more weeks so we can hire the right person to join our team. I would always prefer to be short-staffed a little bit longer to bring the right person onto the team and I found in my experience that my team almost always supported me in that decision you need to be just as intentional just as unreasonable with every single person you put on your team as you are with every other element of your business. You mentioned the one-inch rule let's take a minute to unpack it I was going to tackle it later but it's super relevant to this conversation because it's a very Danny Meyer ask explaining something that is complicated both in theory and in practical application in a way that I think is really palatable to the masses. Yeah the one-inch rule was our way of saying like find your follow-through it happens so often in restaurants I think the example I give in the book is like do you just think about a dish right there's a dish that a team of chefs has spent months recipe testing and creatively brainstorming and then actually producing that dish takes days if not hours and then I guess spends all this time making a reservation coming in it's like this big big big event and this whole kind of machinery is leading into this one moment where the guest takes that first bite of the dish but the last leg in the journey is the food runner picking up the plate from the past walking into the dining room putting it down to the plate explaining it and the number of times I've seen in my restaurants and so many restaurants around the world the food runner having a long list of stuff they need to do next just drop the dish the last inch onto the table as opposed to placing it down perfectly and in doing so the sauce runs or the garnish slips and this person has now due to carelessness due to not finishing the job completely has ruined something that an entire chain of people over hours if not days if not months have been working on when we say the one inch rule though it applies to many things that are much bigger than putting a dish down it applies to really anything it could be in resolving tension with a colleague it could go to don't like spend your entire night trying to make an experience the best one that someone has ever had and then not be there to walk them to the door when they're done it's an idea that if you phone it in on the last inch you've basically wasted all the energy that came before it so you advocate for sharing your vision with the team which I think is a common pitfall right is that when we do take the time to create an intention we don't disseminate that information in a way that resonates with our team yeah the other side of that coin is there are a lot of people listening that are going to say these are part timers they don't give a shit they don't care about my vision and so I know what your response would be your response would be you make it cool to care which is another part of the book who those two things together for me talk about sharing your vision and how making it cool to care relates to that yeah sharing your vision it goes back to the importance of articulating like what I learned from Danny like the power of language to articulate an idea I think a lot of people don't care about the vision because people don't spend enough time talking about the idea they don't invite people to the table the third thing I'd add is make it everybody's idea right the collective brain power of many will always be better than than that of a few and honestly some of your part timers might have the most important insights because they're seeing the world through a different lens than you are they're experiencing something outside of your business that you're not because you're so in it you're so close to it what I mean by that is you know we did strategic planning every year we closed the restaurant for a day and we invite everyone from the general manager to the bus boy to spend an entire day talking about what we wanted to accomplish in the year that followed and the result of that and by the way this is human nature there's science to back this up science people will always give much more of themselves to help you accomplish a goal if they were able to plan a role in determining what that goal is think about if you're ever one on a road trip if both people think about this before the days of google maps of both people in the hotel sit down and look at the map and decide together where they're going to go if you get lost both people are going to be just as motivated to help you get unlost as both if one person does it and you get lost the other person's just going to bitch that the other person made a mistake invite people right and then listen it's unlikely that every single person of the organization is going to have a hand and deciding whether you're taking root 95 or 32 or whatever but when you do have the directions when you do have a goal when you do have a vision make sure that everyone understands it clearly don't be scared of that I'm fusing it with all of the passion you have for it because I believe that energy, enthusiasm, and passion is contagious. I see this a lot with leaders where they care so much, but they've convinced themselves that the people that work for them will never care. And so listen, we're all high schoolers a little bit, right? Like, we all want to be cool. And I see managers, maybe a manager is super passionate about the tablecloth being ironed just the right way because they believe in it, but they want to the cool in front of their team. And so when they talk about it, they're like, Hey, guys, make sure you are in the tablecloth. It's supposed to be in like, Hey, guys, we're going to make this so amazing, but tablecloth is going to be ironed. Leaders need their energy to impact others, not let the energy of others impact them. I believe if you bring all of your enthusiasm, all of your energy, all of your passion to every conversation and most importantly to the ones where you articulate the vision you have for the restaurant to your team, it is nothing short of extraordinary. How quickly people will very quickly become infected by your enthusiasm and find themselves caring more than you ever thought they could. And that's when it becomes cool to care for those that are inspired, for those that want to advocate for and practice unreasonable hospitality. You talk about your team and the leaders themselves needing a toolbox. What do those tools look like? So it's about halfway through the book that the idea of unreasonable hospitality comes into play. And then about three quarters of the book that I finally figure out what those words mean. And it happened because one day during lunch service, I was in the dining room helping out the servers on a busier than normal service, and I found myself clearing appetizers from a table of four foodies and vacation on the ark on the way home to the airport after the lunch. And I ever heard them talking. And they're like, going on about what an amazing meal they had, or an amazing trip they had. They were like, per se, and they were like, "Deniel, Mama Fuku, now, 11 Madison Park." But then one of the other guest jumps in says, "The only thing we didn't have was a hot dog from a street cart." And it was like one of those moments when the light bulb went off over my head. I as calmly as I could walked back into the kitchen, dropped the place and then ran outside of the restaurant, grabbed a hot dog from the cart, ran back into the kitchen, somehow managed to convince the chef to serve the hot dog in our four-star restaurant. He looked at me like I lost my mind, but eventually he cut the hot dog up into four perfect pieces, adding a swish, a ketchup and mustard, a canal of sauerkraut and relished huge plate. And before their final savory course, which was a honey lavender glaze muscovy duck that had been dried for two weeks, we put down their dirty water hot dog. And I explained it. I said to make sure you don't go home with any culinary regrets on New York City hot dog. And they freaked out. They reacted in a way that I'd never seen a guest react to anything I'd served them before, no piece of flagra or caviar or butter poached lobster, had ever elicited that kind of response. Because nothing we had done before was ever so specific to the people we were serving it to. Like I was present enough at the table to pick up on the queue. I wasn't taking myself so seriously that I ruled out the idea of serving a hot dog in a restaurant. And I remember the idea that in true hospitality one size fits one, the most gracious gestures are for just the people receiving them. And I started talking about it all the time with the team and encouraging them to do it. And we started doing it a little bit, but we knew that we had unlocked something important and also that we had not given the team the resources to do it as often as we wanted to do it. A toolkit, I'll define this a little bit more in a moment, but can be used to articulate the following. If you believe in something, if you want your team to get on board and believe in it too, you can't just give them the permission to do something. You need to give them the resources that makes it easy for them to do it. And so we hired people out of the team. People called dream waivers whose only responsibility was to help other people bring their ideas to life. And the dream waivers we hired from Parsons and the various other art schools in New York City so that they could literally create anything that anyone wanted to have created. They could make a teddy bear, let me know it from kitchen towels, or they could create Jack in the box that popped out and popcorned with litter all over the tables, or they could go to the storm by sleds or sand from a home depot to recreate a beach scene in our private dining room for a couple that midst a beach vacation flame. For us unreasonable hospitality meant that no matter what the guest said, if we were listening, we could pick up on little cues that made their experience completely bespoke, that made our hospitality improvisational, it truly became one size fits one, but then never would have happened if we didn't, in addition to giving the team the permission to come up with ideas that could impact the experience, also give them the resources to bring those ideas to life. The restaurant industry is filled with unspoken rules and traditions about how things should be done. How would you like to see the industry turn the tables to create a better future for all of us? Hmm, I'm not someone who doesn't celebrate where we came from. In fact, a lot of what I've done has been inspired by the past, but I do believe we should always be interrogating everything to confirm that it's still right for today. The reality of hospitality, I believe it's a craft, I believe it's a muscle that can be strengthened, and like every other craft, especially one that is as subjective as how you make people feel, people change and so must your approach to the craft. You look at film, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but during the pandemic, I really consumed a lot of television, and I tore through some old TV shows, just the entire series, and I watched like cheers and friends, and those don't age very well. If people were doing those things the same way today, they'd all get canceled, right? So that's one example. Because people change. How they want to be seen changes, how they want to be cared for changes, and any time I've been at a restaurant, and I say, "Why do we do that?" And so on says, "Because that's how it's always been done." If that's the only answer they can come up with, normally it means it's time to change how it's done. At the end of the day, I believe that the food, the service, and the design at a restaurant are simply ingredients in the recipe of human connection, and the moment that word "human" goes into the sentence, you need to acknowledge that humans are constantly changing and so must your approach to serving them. Never change for the sake of change, but question everything. That's Will Giderra, be sure to pick up a copy of Will's book, "Unreasonable Hospitality" when it releases on a Topa 25. If you want to tell us your story, here are previous episodes or check out our other content, go to restaurants.yelp.com/fullcomp. Thank you so much for listening to this show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a review. A special thanks to Yelp for helping us spread the word to the whole hospitality community. I'm Josh Kopel, you've been listening to Full Comp.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Yelphost is an AI voice assistant designed for restaurants that answers calls 24/7, handling reservations, wait times, guest questions, and takeout links—without sounding robotic, and offering a free 30-day trial.
  2. The show highlights "Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Gidera, emphasizing that true excellence lies in creating deep, personal connections with guests, not just in food or technique, and that hospitality should be as bold and individualized as the people being served.
  3. Key principles include setting clear intentions, fostering team alignment through language and shared vision, empowering staff with resources (like "dream waivers"), and questioning traditions to adapt to evolving guest expectations and cultural shifts.

Summary:

A restaurant AI assistant, Yelphost, helps restaurants manage phone calls 24/7 by answering guest inquiries about reservations, wait times, and takeout with a natural, human-like voice—offering a free 30-day trial. This is paired with a deeper exploration of hospitality culture through Will Gidera’s book, *Unreasonable Hospitality*. The core idea is that true restaurant success comes not from technical perfection or food innovation alone, but from creating deeply personal, memorable experiences that make guests feel seen and valued.

Gidera argues that hospitality must be intentional, unpredictable, and rooted in genuine human connection—like serving a hot dog to a guest who mentioned missing one during a trip. This requires leadership that communicates clearly, empowers teams with resources, and remains open to change. The show emphasizes that traditions in the restaurant world should be questioned when they no longer serve current guest needs, and that hospitality is a living, evolving craft shaped by human change.

Ultimately, successful hospitality is about prioritizing emotional connection over efficiency, and making every guest feel uniquely cared for—no matter how small or unexpected the gesture.

FAQs

Yelphost is an AI voice assistant designed for restaurants that answers phone calls 24/7. It handles reservations, shares wait times, answers guest questions, and sends takeout order links—without sounding robotic, as it mimics a real person.

By automating phone interactions, Yelphost helps restaurants convert calls into bookings and orders, improving guest engagement and increasing sales through better responsiveness and service.

The book advocates for prioritizing human connection over perfection in hospitality. It promotes being 'unreasonable' in serving guests—creating personalized, memorable experiences that make people feel seen and valued.

Guests are more likely to return if they feel well-treated, even if the food isn’t exceptional. The experience of being cared for has a lasting impact, making hospitality a more powerful driver of loyalty than food alone.

It means ensuring every part of the guest experience—like serving a dish—is completed with care. A poor final touch, such as a dropped plate or missed detail, undermines hours of effort and damages the experience.

By clearly communicating a shared vision, making it cool to care, involving all team members in decisions, and empowering staff with resources to create personalized, guest-specific experiences.

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