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In April 2017 in Melbourne, Australia, chefs, restaurateurs and the international food media gathered at one of the biggest events of the year, the World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards. The ceremony announces the winners in reverse order. Starting at position 50, they count down through the top restaurants before announcing the number one.
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The new number one in the World's 50 Best Restaurants list and therefore the World's Best Restaurant 2017. From New York, it's Eleven Madison Park.
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Walking up on stage are Will Guidara and his co founder at eleven Madison Park, Daniel Hoon. This success became familiar to Will and Daniel as they won almost every award going. The venerated New York restaurant has earned just about every possible honor. Three stars from the Michelin Guide, four
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stars from the New York Times, and in 2017, the influential guide World's 50
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Best named it the best restaurant in the world. And I'm delighted to say that Will Guidara joins me on today's show.
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Yeah, my name is Will Guidera and I'm just so excited to be here with you. Thanks for having me.
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Stay tuned to hear how Will used behavioral science and marketing psychology to build the world's best restaurant. Apparently, most businesses only use 20% of their data. That's like reading a book with 80% of the pages torn out. The point is, you will miss a lot unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights that are trapped in emails, in call logs, in transcripts, all that unstructured data can really make a difference to your business. Because when you know more, you grow more. You won't learn much reading 20% of a book. So why settle for just 20% of your company's data? Visit HubSpot.com today to learn more. Typically on Nudge, I interview the researchers behind behavioral science. But today is a bit different. I'm very excited to be interviewing a real practitioner, someone who has applied psychology in their work.
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I am a lifelong restaurateur, the former co owner of eleven Madison park, but perhaps most known for my book, Unreasonable Hospitality.
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The book is called Unreasonable Hospitality because Will argues that reasonable service meets expectations, but un unreasonable service exceeds them in surprising and memorable ways. Almost all of these unreasonable attempts at service are backed by a behavioural science principle, including a story right at the start of the book that really inspired Will's attempts at unreasonable hospitality.
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Yeah, so this was my longtime boss and forever mentor, Danny Meyer, and it was a legendary story within the company that there were guests in the restaurant who halfway through their meal. You know that moment where suddenly you remember? And they remembered that before they'd left their apartment, they'd put a very nice bottle of champagne into the freezer to quickly chill it so they could have a glass before coming to dinner and they'd forgotten about it. Now, anyone who knows enough about champagne knows that if you leave a bottle of champagne in the freezer for too long, it will explode. And so now this. This couple was faced with a decision. They either had to leave this memorable meal halfway through or accept the fact that the champagne would explode. Danny or someone on his team did what felt obvious to them, which was to say, hey, if you trust us enough, give us your keys, we'll go back to your apartment and we'll take the bottle out of the freezer, we'll put it in the fridge. I say it felt obvious to them because I think when to adopt this mindset, these things do feel obvious. Obviously, we don't want them to leave halfway through this meal. Obviously we do not want them to return home with an exploded bottle of champagne in their freezer, because even if they did choose that path, they would never be able to be fully present in the restaurant for the balance of their meal. And we're in the restaurant business. There's a lot of people here. We can spare someone for a measure of time to go and make it right. When you make the choice to do the right thing, then that's where the fun part starts. How can we make it even more special? And so they went back to their apartment, took the bottle out of the freezer, and alongside it in the fridge when the couple returned home was a tin of caviar and a note that said, thank you so much for joining us, Happy Anniversary.
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In his book, Will writes how this story circulated through the company. It primed every one of us to seek out new ways to make our guests experiences a little more seamless, relaxing and delightful. And from a behavioural science perspective, it taught the staff a simple yet important lesson about something I harp on about a lot, which is the principle of reciprocity. People feel compelled to return favours. One 2021 study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science proves this nicely. The three researchers in the study tested different promotions for product launches. Some customers were given a standard price discount, but others were offered free gifts instead of the discount, like getting a small free side product. Researchers found that the gift encouraged two times more preorders in the 21 days before the launch than the standard discount. Robert Cialdini who lists reciprocity as one of his six principles of influence, writes that because of the power of the reciprocity rule, unsolicited favors can produce these feelings of obligation. And the customers with the champagne in their freezer will respond to that incredible favor by feeling the need to return the favor.
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There's a quote by Teller of the magician duo Penn and Teller. Sometimes magic is just being willing to invest more energy into an idea than anyone else would deem reasonable. I bring that up now because it asserts something I believe in that was not hard. It simply required caring a little bit more and being willing to try a little bit harder. And most of the most magical gestures require only that, a little bit of extra energy. And when you do those things, the stories that people have to tell and their propensity to want to tell them over and over and over again, I'd argue that is the best, best marketing you can buy.
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It's a lovely one off example of reciprocity. But Will wanted his restaurants to take ideas like this and start applying them systematically. So in addition to giving his staff autonomy to do deeds like the champagne freezer example, he built systems that made gestures like this commonplace throughout the restaurant.
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I categorize these gestures, these things that you can do to connect with your, with your people, into three categories. One size fits All, One Size fits one, and One Size Fits some. One size fits one is the bottle of champagne where you are present in the moment. You pick up on little things, and you respond to those things in a way that would only make sense for that individual. One Size Fits some is a way to scale that philosophy such that you can create more magic more frequently. And it relies simple pattern recognition, looking for the things that happen over and over again. Decid, what's the most awesome way to respond every time that thing happens? And then creating a system through which that response happens consistently, where you make it as easy as possible for your team to deploy it. An early version of that was this is back in the day when people still used coins in parking meters and when you had to refill the meter when it expired. And so it was a recurring moment in our restaurant that people would get up halfway through their meal to go fuel their meter. I think of a restaurant and the right experience, if we do everything well, we are creating a little bubble around that table where we allow them to put the world on pause, such that they can lean in and fully connect with the people they're with. And feeling the pressure of time to go refuel a meter. Well, that kind of messes it up. So we built a system around it. When we were walking people to their table, we'd ask them how they got there. If they said they drove, we'd ask them where they parked. If they said they parked on the street with a meter, we would just offer, hey, if you tell us where your car is, we'll refill the meter while you're here. It was a simple gesture. It cost us what, a buck? A buck fifty? I've talked to a couple people who dined with us all the way back then. They don't remember a single thing they ate. But they will never forget how we made them feel when we did that one small, simple gesture.
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The gesture is almost cost free. It wouldn't even appear on a profit and loss statement for a fine dining restaurant. And yet it will stick in the customer's mind. It works because it's unexpected. Customers haven't done anything to deserve this favor. They didn't ask for it. Yet unexpected favors given without any obligation tend to be the most effective. Cialdini writes about this in his book Pre suasion on page 154. He cites a study with hotel guests in the United States for the experiment. Guests encountered a card in their hotel room asking them to reuse their towels. A very popular way of testing guests. I think lots of studies have been done around these cards. Anyway, for this experiment, the variant was really interesting because some were told via the card that the hotel had already made a financial contribution to an environmental protection organisation in the name of the guest. They had done it prior to the guest even getting into the room. Others were told that they would make a contribution after the guest had reused their towels. It turns out that giving before the act, the before the act donation, as Cialdini calls it, was 45% more effective at increasing towel reuse then giving the donation after. In other words, give first without a forced obligation and customers will respond positively. Will applied this at his restaurant, not just with low cost gestures, but with high cost surprises as well. To enable this to make it something that the whole company could follow, he created the 95.5rule. In his book, Will writes that the rule of 95. 5 is to manage 95% of your budget down to the penny, but spend the last 5% down foolishly.
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Yeah, so the rule of 95.5 is an important one to understand when you're thinking through all of this stuff I'm talking about right now because some people like to skip the rule and go right to the fun Part saying, all right, I'm just gonna start spending more money. And yes, you should, but you need to earn the right to spend it. The rule of 95.5 is how I've always managed my businesses, which means you manage 95% of your dollars like a maniac. I mean, no expense is too small to be poured over. And you do that so that 5% of the time you can spend foolishly. But I put foolishly in air quotes because I think that spending is some of the most impactful spending that there is. But you do need to earn the right to spend it because you need to save money such that you have money to deploy. And gosh, you better earn it because if you are not spending that last 5% Foolishly, I think you're being financially reckless. You're investing so much into today dollars that you're not thinking enough about tomorrow dollars.
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Will applied this rule in many parts of his business. But the example that stands out in the book is how he applied it to the restaurant's wine pairings.
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The wine pairings is a way that I, in the book, tried to paint the picture of what I mean in a restaurant, a fine dining, tasty, mini restaurant. Many people order wine pairings, they pay a fixed price for, call it 10 small pours of wine. And every restaurant has a budgeted wine cost, as in what percentage of what they sell wine for are they allowed to spend on that wine. Most restaurants, when they think about pairings, they will take the amount that they are able to spend on 10 pours of wine, divide it by 10 and spend accordingly. Rather, what we would do was really do everything in our power to be as frugal as humanly possible on nine of those pours. Use connections, resources. Find undiscovered wines that perhaps by virtue of being less popular, although just as good, were a little bit less expensive than an alternative. But we would do that not so that we could spend less on the pairings. Generally we did it so that we could spend foolishly on that 10th glass. Because I've been to so many restaurants and had the pairings and I don't remember a single wine I tasted. Whereas if you have pairings and one of those pairings is a little taste of Romanee Conti or a first growth Bordeaux or just something remarkable now you'll remember it just requires managing your money a little bit differently, saving so you can spend foolishly.
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This is a wonderful modern day example of the von Restoroff effect. Hedgwick von Restorff proved in the 1930s, that distinctive items stay in our mind for longer. And one study from 2007 on, students from Baylor College proved this. In the study, 84 participants were forced to view sets of image and asked how long did each image appear on the screen? Eight of the images were monotonous and similar, all very similar looking types of brown shoes. But then for the ninth image, the two researchers would show a surprising different image. In this case, it was an alarm clock. Now an alarm clock isn't naturally distinct, but it is compared to eight images of brown shoes. And that difference stuck in the participants minds. The participants believed that the alarm clock was on screen for 12% longer than it actually was, simply because it was distinct. In the book, Will writes how if you love fine wine, it is always exciting to drink a Grand Cru Burgundy. But the chance to do so almost never happens during ordinary wine pairings. So imagine how excited the guests were when they did it. The rule of 95.5 gave them the ability to surprise and delight everyone that ordered those pairings, making it an experience they would never forget. It's a smart idea backed by behavioural science, which made the restaurant visit more memorable. But Will didn't just focus on the end of the customer experience, he focused on the whole experience, including the very first thing a customer sees when they walk in the restaurant.
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You walk into a restaurant and you're greeted by a person standing behind a literal barrier who says, do you have a reservation here? Code? Do you deserve to be here? You give them your name, they thumb around, bathed in the glow of an iPad, finally find your name, whisper to the host, take them to table 33, and then you're. I always joke, moved through the room like cattle, which I. It's not like that. At least in many restaurants, it's more elegant than that, but still it's just ripe for improvement. Or there's opportunity to make it better. Magicians when they create a new trick, and I know this because I've worked with them now many times, you'll be working with them and they'll be like, oh, what if we do this? And I'll say, how do you do that? They're like, I don't know. But if that's the desired outcome, now we'll figure out how to make it happen. The idea was I want people to walk into the restaurant to be greeted by someone who already knows their name. And then that person just says, take them in and that person knows where to bring them. Just to basically recreate the experience so that it Feels like you're going to a friend's house for dinner. You open the door, they're greeted with a hug and you're welcomed right in. And so the team and I figured out how to do that. And there was someone on the team whose job I said, hey, let's do this. They said, how? I said, I have no idea. Figure it out. And they did. And it was very, very complicated. There was another podium around the corner. They used sign language between the two. The person greeting people at the front door had Googled a list of everyone coming in. If your picture had ever been on the Internet, you looked anywhere close to the person in that picture, we could greet you by name. We broke reservations up from every half an hour to every 15 minutes. So fewer people were coming in at once, which meant there were less people we needed to remember. We had these little pieces of paper with the pictures and the names that the maitre d could refamiliarize himself with, who was about to come in every 15 minutes. And it worked.
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We know that first impressions anchor your entire experience. The first piece of information you see or read or hear about a product or service will influence how you feel about that entire product and service. The anchor is so strong that it influences professionals. I've shared on the show before how an expert wine sommelier who is given a white wine that is simply coloured red with food colouring will often not notice that the wine is red wine simply because they are so influenced by the anchor, which obviously in the wine's case is the colour Will's customers are getting the best possible anchor in unreasonable hospitality. Will writes that walking into a fine dining restaurant can be really intimidating. However, being immediately greeted by someone who you talked to on the phone only a couple of days before made it much less intimidating. And because the real point of this process was to learn something about the guest in advance, the greeter would be able to celebrate that as they walked in. So the maitre d would say, happy birthday. Thank you for celebrating with us now. Will writes that obviously eliminating the podium added a few steps of service. And beside the googling and all the non verbal communication, it also took a strategist working the schedule to ensure that the maitre d who had confirmed your reservation would also be working on the night. But focusing on that first point of contact, change the anchor. And that anchor had the potential to change the whole perception of the meal.
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Here's the thing about that. Sometimes when something is done so well, people don't even recognize it as being significant. It's just they forget how it was always done and they just kind of move through the motions and don't ever pause to be like, wait a minute, there wasn't a podium. They knew my but it's the culmination of all those little things that adds up to something extraordinary. And if you only invest time and energy into the things that will blow people's minds right away, I think you're losing out on the opportunity to do the most significant things.
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I argue that Will didn't just create unreasonable hospitality. He created this idea of unreasonable effort. He writes in his book, we needed to be operating at a high level of precision all the time. We trained people setting the dining room to place every plate so that a guest flipped it over to see who made it. The LEMOS stamp would be facing them right side up. That is ridiculous, right? It is utterly unreasonable. Maybe one or two guests would flip the plate in a month. Most nights nobody did it. Even if they did, would they even guess that the placement had been intentional? And some people would also turn the plate in a way that they would not anticipate. So the manufacturer manufacturer's stamp would be faced up at all. But Will writes, that was okay because whether someone flipped it or not, that perfectly placed plate had already done what it needed to do. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And we found over and over that precision in the smallest of details translated into precision in the bigger ones. 11 Madison park became the world's best restaurant not through a couple of massive innovations, but through thousands of tiny, small improvements. Some improvements you might not even notice, like, for example, being served the table water you asked for before the server you told even left your table. This seemingly small gesture required staff learning an entirely new sign language. Here's Will to explain.
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When I was a kid, my dad would always say, keep your eyes peeled. And what he meant when he said that was there is inspiration all around you all of the time, if your eyes are open wide enough to see it and if you're organized enough to hold onto it once you do what you're referencing started at a baseball game. I was I don't remember whether it was the Yankees or the Mets, but I was at a baseball game in New York City and I was watching the catcher give the signs using sign language to the pitcher to communicate what pitch they were going to throw next. And I was just inspired by the idea of sign language. Here's the reality in a fine dining restaurant, and it's the case with many chaotic environments you need to place importance on economy of movement. The less people have to move, the less chaotic the room will feel. And not only will service be more efficient, but the experience for the guests will be more elevated. It. So I was like, huh? How can we use sign language to help us achieve that goal? And water service was where we landed on first. And it ended up having the added benefit of creating a bit of magic where you go to the table at the beginning of someone's meal, and we would say, do you want ice water, sparkling water, or bottled still? And up until that point, now the captain had to go track down their assistant server, communicate the water preference, and the assistant serv would then get the water go there. It would take longer to get water in people's glasses. And it's a metric that most fine dining restaurants would be pursuing, which is get something in the glass as quickly as humanly possible. Here I would just have my hand behind my back and I would be giving a sign to the assistant server who knew I was going to greet the tables. They were watching me such that before I'd even left that table, you were being poured the water you had asked for efficiency, elevating the calmness of the room and creating a little bit of magic all in one shot. Simply because my eyes were open wide enough at a baseball game and the team and I were able to come up with a cool thing to do with that inspiration.
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In his book, Will writes that it is well known that at the very beginning of the meal and at the very end, time seems to slow down. In those moments, the guest has a heightened sensitivity to any delay. We can all relate to the feeling like we've been waiting hours for that first glass of wine. Just like getting a personal greeting, Will and his team put unreasonable effort into improving this experience. Will would wiggle fingers for bubbles, he would do a straight chop for still water, and he would twist his fist for ice. The guests wouldn't see this, but a second server would, and they could pour their water while Will continued the greeting. This again, kind of seemingly insignificant deed changed the anchor, removing any possible frustration from the start of the meal and instead make it for those paying attention, really quite surprising and delightful. All right, it's time for a quick break, but stay tuned because after the break, Will shares some of his management techniques, including how he made all of his staff start at the restaurant by running food from the kitchen to the dining room. Hear why after this quick break, the podcast I'd like to recommend to you today. After you finish listening to nudge is the Hustle Daily Show. It is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Hustle Daily show brings you a very healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat and informative takes on business and tech news. If you'd like an interesting episode to get you hooked on this podcast, there's a recent episode called the AI App that makes your dream vacation a digital reality. If you want to listen to that, just go and search for the Hustle Daily show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Notch with me, Phil Agnew. Now it's one thing to apply a lot of smart psychology inspired tactics to your business like Will did, but it is another to build a culture around this type of continuous improvement and unreasonable hospitality. To build that culture, Will had a few interesting company policies, including this one. Everyone they hired started as a kitchen server, running food from the kitchen to the dining room.
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Here's why I did that for a few different reasons. The technical reason. I mean, at a restaurant like that, when you are the captain and the captain is the name of the position that is truly guiding people through their entire experience, the amount you genuinely need to know to be very good in that role is far more than any human being could ever be expected to learn in two, three weeks. We were trying to operate at a level that you knew everything about the wines and the food and the steps of service and the history of the restaurant and the culture of restaurants generally. Not to mention all the other little things, whether it was about the plates and the glasses and the art. It takes time to collect that much knowledge such that it can be easily doled out and confidently wielded in the room. But more importantly than that, it takes time to fully absorb a culture. I say culture cannot be taught, it can only be caught. And I hedge that because you can teach it to a certain extent. And in fact, more people should invest more time trying to teach their cultures. But it's only through passing the seasons within the same four walls that you can fully understand what right looks like there. And for that reason we hired people from the bottom so that they could pass the seasons within the walls of that restaurant before they were ultimately the person solely responsible for guiding people through a meal that we were hoping would be a once in a lifetime experience.
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There are multiple benefits from this. Like Will says, it teaches culture and even helps every new staff member learn fast. But as he writes in his book, it also helped with the sort of weeding out process. He writes, if someone was going to balk at starting out as a kitchen server, they probably wouldn't ever be a good fit. I was pretty certain after hearing WorldTalk that I'd read a study about how employees respond better to managers who had done their job before. I remember the study proving that managers with direct experience of the role that their subordinates were doing made that manager more effective. I spent a good few hours yesterday searching for that study and I couldn't find it anywhere. So who knows, maybe I made it up. But I'm sure it's a Will study, and I'm sure it suggests that Will's policy not only installs culture, weeds out bad hires, but actually also makes the new managers more likable. Which leads us onto another policy of Will's. It is called the ownership programme. And it became something that eleven Madison park became very well known for. But the idea came from an experience Will had at a competitor restaurant.
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There's a book by Simon Sinek, the Infinite Game. One of my favorite parts of that book was choosing a worthy rival. Our worthy rival at the time was Percy. I'm not sure they would have thought of us as their worthy rival, yet we were trying to make our way up and they were the best. And for that reason, I would dine at that restaurant at least twice a year to see what they were doing, to try to learn from all the many things that they were doing well. And I did that for a couple years. It wasn't until this meal I finally noticed something that they were doing poorly, which was at the end of an unbelievably perfect, perfect meal. I ordered coffee and it was just fine. And it was one of those insight moments where, listen, if per se wasn't doing it well, it meant no one was doing it well. And the reason no fine dining restaurants were doing coffee well was because at that point anyway, fine dining restaurants cared about service, food and wine. Everything else was unnecessary or peripheral. And yet at that point, the mission statement of the restaurant was to become the four star restaurant for the next generation. And the next generation didn't just care about wine, they cared about beer and cocktails and tea. And so I that night, journaling about that meal, I thought about why it was the way it was. In most fine dining restaurants, there was a beverage director, someone who was in charge of all the beverage programs. And yet that person was someone who was passionate about wine. And so beer, cocktails, tea, all of that stuff sat at the very, very bottom of their to do list. And yet, at the same time, there were people on my team, younger busboys, food runners, who were so passionate about coffee and tea and beer and cockt. The next day, we flipped the entire program on its head in our restaurant. To that point, managers held keys to programs. Hourly employees did not. And we gave these hourly employees the keys to these programs, matching their passion with opportunities, and took the coffee program and the tea program and the beer program, the cocktail program, off the wine director's hands, put it in their hands, and a year later, it was remarkable what happened.
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Will writes about Kirk Kellaway, a Cornell grad who was fascinated by beer. He was just 22 years old when Will gave him ownership of the beer menu. He got a budget. He was taught how to manage it, how to do inventory, how to order. And Will writes that Kirk attacked every aspect of their beer service, from how they stored beers to the glassware they used to the technique they used to pour it. He read every trade publication and hunted down the most rare and obscure beers. All this extra work was driven purely by his passion, his youthful eagerness, and it enchanted the producers he worked with, who'd find ways to sneak him a couple of highly allocated bottles that they'd only made a few dozen of. Will writes that he was thrilled but not overly surprised when a year into Kirk's reign, eleven Madison park was listed as one of the best beer programs in America in a number of different publications.
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I don't say this bombastically. I say this genuinely. Every one of those programs, those secondary and tertiary beverage programs in the restaurant, we were acknowledged as being best in class. But the wine program also got better because the wine director was no longer distracted by things he didn't care about. But more importantly than either of those things, the people that had taken on those ownership programs, well, they were so much more inclined to work so hard to help the restaurant succeed because they had a genuine hand in helping to determine. Determine what the restaurant was. That's the case with every human being I have ever met. If they feel even the smallest opportunity to contribute to what the thing is, they're going to work that much harder to help it succeed. And the more people that feel a genuine sense of ownership in what you're trying to do, the more people will be out there screaming from the mountaintops.
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It is so wonderful to hear about marketing, psychology and behavioral sciences, not from an academic or research point of view, but from the point of view of a practitioner. Will has been applying principles of behavioral science to every aspect of his restaurant, and it has worked, skyrocketing his restaurant to number one in the world. He anchored the customer's experience with a seamless personal greeting. He surprised with instantaneous water pours. He instilled reciprocity with surprising gestures like topping up the parking meter. And he created a culture of excellence through the ownership program. But that is not all. Will went on to tell me about an important change he made, which was backed by behavioral science.
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At that point, we were doing kitchen tours where we were bringing people on a tour of the kitchen just to see it, because we knew it's just cool to see the kitchen. People really enjoyed it. And yet the way it was at that point, you'd walk into the kitchen and you'd feel uncomfortable. You were in everyone's way. And so we said, okay, how do we keep on doing kitchen tours but draw inspiration from the kitchen table?
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And you can hear about that right now in today's bonus episode. To listen to the bonus episode for free right now, all you have to do is click the link in the show notes of today's episode, enter your email address. You'll be taken straight to the bonus episode where Will talks about how he revolutionized the kitchen tour. This bonus episode is produced just like a normal episode. It is fully cited. I think it's really good, so please do go and listen to it. Click the link in the show notes and you can listen to it right after this. Nudge Newsletter subscribers, you already have a link to that bonus episode. You just have to click the link in today's email. I can't praise Will enough. His book is fantastic. Definitely go and read it if you haven't already. And if you want more from Will, here's where you can find him.
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I have a newsletter that I send out every two weeks that I really enjoy. It's how I continue my practice of writing. It's called Premiel and you can sign up@unreasonablehospitality.com and this April, my next book, Unreasonable Hospitality the Field Guide, is coming out. And if Unreasonable Hospitality was the why, this is the how. And it's really a great step by step journey that we go on together around how to bring these ideas to life.
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Links to all of those resources are in the show notes, as is the link to today's bonus episode. So if you want to hear more from Will, go and listen to the bonus episode now. But that is all from me. Thank you for listening and I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Bye Bye.
Podcast Episode Summary: Nudge with Phill Agnew
Guest: Will Guidara
Episode Title: “Here’s how I built the world’s #1 restaurant”
Date: March 16, 2026
In this insightful episode of Nudge, host Phill Agnew interviews Will Guidara, the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park—crowned the World's Best Restaurant in 2017. They explore how Will used principles from behavioral psychology and marketing to build a culture of “unreasonable hospitality,” turning small, memorable gestures into a systematic, organization-wide philosophy that reshaped fine dining and propelled his restaurant to global acclaim.
Defining Unreasonable Hospitality
The Foundational Story: The Champagne in the Freezer [03:02]
Categories of Gestures [07:01]
Behavioral Science Backing
Culture of Precision [19:26]
Sign Language for Service Efficiency [20:55]
Every Employee Starts as a Kitchen Server [25:21]
The Ownership Program [28:11]
For more, listeners are encouraged to visit Will's website, subscribe to his newsletter, or tune into the bonus episode via the show notes.