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Book club 📖 Book Review - Unreasonable Hospitality

michaelskis

michaelskis

Sawdust Producer
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Sometimes you see a book recommendation and think, sure, I will give it a shot even though the industry that the book deals with is not your own. This is one such book. The author Will Guidara goes into great detail his journey with Eleven Madison Park, a fine dinning restaurant in New York. While the stories that he tells revolve around his passion to get the restaurant to be named the #1 restaurant in the world, the steps that he took as it relates to hospitality, and customer service go well outside of the boundaries of a food establishment. He talks about empowering staff to be creative, going way beyond the basics, making sure that your fundamentals are locked down, challenges, response to criticism, and the ability to pivot outside of your comfort zone to do what is right.

As it relates to our industry, there are a lot of truths that I am going to be implementing with my staff and they way we interact with our citizens, developers, and elected officials. Same goes for the way we structure our applications, regulations, and even elements that we might include in our long range plans. There is a lot that we frankly cannot do because of political limitations, regulatory standards, and ethics. But overall, I would absolutely recommend this book for anyone who deals with the public... not just those in the food industry.

 
From 2024's How to be Sommelier Supreme in a Crowded Post-Covid Market list of annual award nominees, is this helpful training tome, almost won, by gosh, back at February's convention in Omaha as documented in this marvel written by the industry's elite modern thought-leader hospitaility-sector training gurus - The Restaurant Customer-Interface Innocuous Sayings Uttered Cheerfully So As To Appear Submissive to Ensure No Negative Yelp Comments Training Guidebook:
  • "How's everything tasting?"
  • "Awesome!"
  • "Not a problem!"

Every fricking time. Mostly the fresh meat, they're not experienced enough yet to think I their feet. I get it. But it is super-irritating.

Makes me wonder if there ever could be a Planner version of this? We're not exactly known for being in a profession that's particularly sensitive to the vagaries of citizen whims:
  • "Your neighbor is 100% compliant."
  • "It's our job."
  • "We had to issue the permit."
Gets close, but lacks that cheer we find so off-putting and transparently insincere [special thanks to mendelman].
 
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