Will Guidara, co-owner, Make It Nice

Hi, I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, editor-in-chief of Hospitality Design magazine, with HD‘s What I’ve Learned podcast. Today, I met Will Guidara in his apartment in Chelsea, New York. Inspired by his restaurateur father, from a young age, he always knew he wanted to be in the business and open a New York restaurant. He has done so much more. The Danny Meyer alum, along with chef Daniel Humm, took over and reimagined the Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park and reinvented the hotel restaurant, first with the NoMad New York, and since then, in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

SSR: Hi, I’m here with Will Guidara from Make It Nice. Will, thanks so much for being here with us today.

Will Guidara: I’m happy to be here.

SSR: And we’re in your lovely apartment in Manhattan, which is kind of a treat for us.

WG: That’s hospitality. Thank you for coming here. I appreciate it.

SSR:  Anything for you. So, let’s start at the beginning, your childhood. Where did you grow up? I know your dad was in the restaurant business, so, did he influence you to get to where you are today?

WG: For sure. I’m from Westchester, New York, actually born in the town of Sleepy Hollow, as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. My dad was a restaurateur, and he continues to be, but especially back then, he was just my hero. I feel fortunate that I’m one of those kids that had, and continues to have, a really strong relationship with him. And I was saying to someone the other day, it wouldn’t have even mattered what he did. He could have been a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, whatever. I would have wanted to do that. And being in the restaurant business, he worked a lot. And so most Saturdays, I would go to work with him and I would either be in the office with him setting up shop at someone else’s desk, who actually took the weekends off, pretending to be an executive, or hang out in one of the kitchens or in one of the dining rooms. I just fell in love with it. Well, I worked in a summer camp when I was a kid for one summer. Other than that, I’ve only ever worked in restaurants. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. And he definitely influenced everything: a) the choice to do it in the first place; b) He really guided my career since then; and c) he just gave me someone to look up to, someone who I wanted to emulate. And yeah, he’s had a big role in everything.

SSR: And what was it that you loved about restaurants? Were there any great memories of those summers working in restaurants or going to your dad’s work? Was there something that stuck with you?

WG: I think the thing that I love the most about restaurants is that you get to do a bunch of different jobs. Sometimes people ask me the question: tell me about what is a day in the life look like? And it’s really hard to answer that question because they’re all so different. I love people. I love creativity. I love aspiring to some level of excellence. And you get to kind of juggle all those things. So, whether it’s designing a logo or, as we’re clearly going to talk about today, designing an interior or working with a team, leading a team, designing systems, standard operating procedures, or serving people. I never wanted to be in the kitchen. I always wanted to be in the dining room because I just love the instant gratification of doing something for someone and seeing the look on their face when they experience whatever it is that you did. But I love it because I get to do so many different things, and I derive quite a bit of pleasure from all of them.

SSR: Every day is a little bit different for you.

WG: Yeah.

SSR: So you once told me you always knew you wanted to go to Cornell or that was always a dream?

WG: We’re going to talk about the Netflix thing later, but I told the story on that show, which is that my dad was always a very, very intentional person, like crazy intentional. He wanted me to have good eyesight. So, he once read that Ted Williams could read the words on the baseball as the balls were being thrown to him at the plate. And so, my dad would write big numbers on tennis balls and throw them to me, so that I could pick the numbers off, and when I got too good at reading them, then he’d throw those balls away and make the numbers smaller, because he just wanted to make sure his boy had good eyesight. And I actually do. It worked. Although I was talking to someone, and they were, like, that might be a little traumatizing.

He was always someone that believed in goal setting and being intentional about what you’re trying to pursue and achieve. He gave me a paperweight when I was really young, and it said ‘what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?’ Basically challenging me to have the audacity to ask that question. And whatever the answer was, to try to do that.

I think a lot of people are too scared to say what they want to do out loud for fear that they’ll let themselves down if they don’t achieve it. Anyway, to that point when I was like 12, we were probably in the car on our way home from SeaWorld or something. He’s like, ‘Will, we need to talk about your goals in life. What are your three goals?’ And I said, ‘I want to go to Cornell because I want to be in the restaurant business and if I want to do that, that’s the school to go do.’ He goes, ‘Okay. What’s next?’ I said, ‘I’d like to have my own restaurant in New York City one day.’ And he goes, ‘And?’ I said, ‘And I’d like to marry Cindy Crawford.’ So, I got two out of three. And on the third, I think I did pretty well, too. But yeah, from an early age, that’s what I wanted. And for a kid who wanted to be in the restaurant business to learn that there was an Ivy League school and you could go there and it would prepare you to do exactly that, I just thought it was the coolest thing. And so yeah, that’s where I went.

SSR: Did it live up to all your expectations?

WG: I think the thing with Cornell is they have you visit the school in the spring when it’s beautiful and then you fall in love with it. And then, when you get there like two months later, it’s the most snowy and terribly cold place on Earth, but I loved it. I grew up in Westchester. I spent a lot of time in the city, and so to be able to go to school in this little world that felt like an escape from the rest of the world was pretty cool. We talk a lot about in our restaurants the need to, or rather the opportunity that we have to create these magical worlds in a world that needs more magic. And Cornell felt like that to me, these beautiful old buildings. It felt like something out of a storybook. And just to be able to escape from the world into this magical world and really kind of grow up, not fully. I’d already done a lot of growing up, and I had a lot more growing up to do but there’s something in the air that really made me connect to it.

SSR: It sounds amazing. And how did you meet Danny Meyer because didn’t you work for him out of school?

WG: Yeah, so I was at a Cornell class, actually, called organizational behavior. And Richard Coraine, who continues to be one of Danny’s partners and was his partner for a really, really long time. Richard, actually, opened Eleven Madison Park way back in the day. He came up and did a class. And I didn’t know where I wanted to work after graduation. Again, my dad was intentional. I’d worked at Tribeca Grill as a server. I’d worked as a cook at one of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants. I worked as a busboy at Ruth’s Chris at the Tarrytown Marriott, but I hadn’t settled on where I wanted to be after graduation.

I don’t remember what Richard talked about at that class. In fact, another one of Danny Meyer’s partners was a guy named Paul Bolles-Beaven, who is just one of the most special people on the planet. He was the chief people officer. One of the things he would say during new hire orientation was this Maya Angelou quote, which is ‘People will forget what you do. They’ll forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.’

So, that point applies to that class. I have no idea what he talked about. But I remember thinking, oh my gosh, that’s the culture I want to be a part of, that’s the company I want to learn from. And so, I was really close friends with a guy named Brian Canlis. He’s one of my best friends at Cornell. His family owns a restaurant in Seattle. And it was Canlis restaurant. It’s been there for like 68 years or so. It’s one of the great restaurants on the planet. A few months before graduation, we went to New York City and we started all the way at the bottom and we went to every restaurant that we were inspired by, all the way up.

So, whether it was Nobu and Tribeca Grill to Gramercy Tavern to Alain Ducasse to Daniel, and we’d either have like a little snack or whatever it was. I’d already been fascinated by Danny Meyer’s company. We went to Eleven Madison Park and Tabla. And this was right after Eleven Madison Park was on the front cover of Wine Spectator. It was a big article. It was this beautiful picture of the room. And I fell completely in love. And so, I interviewed with Richard Coraine, who passed me on to a guy named Randy Garutti, who’s now one of my closest friends and was the GM at Tabla. Randy hired me, and that was the beginning of my journey with Danny.

SSR: What did you do at Tabla?

WG: At Tabla, I was the maître d’ basically, which was the coolest thing in the world. It was like first time I got to go out and buy suits. I remember going to the Century 21 and like getting a Zegna suit on discount for like 300 bucks or something and feeling like the man. I had a business card and the graphic design of those business cards was so cool. And I worked there for about a year and a half, and I loved it. I loved the culture of the company, the ability to take ownership over projects, and have the support in the leeway to take them to completion. I remember one day, the walls at Tabla, they weren’t just painted. It was one of those artistic paint jobs that someone had to come in and like meticulously detail. And I worked there after 9/11, and Tabla being an Indian restaurant was hit hard. It was not a good time for that restaurant.

In restaurants, walls get nicked. It’s an inevitability, and we couldn’t afford to have the artistic painter back. So one day, I went in early and I went to the Home Depot and bought a bunch of pants and I was working in one of the back hallways to try to figure out how to emulate or replicate the thing, so I could do it myself. And Danny came in and he just grabbed me on the shoulder and looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’ It was one of my first interactions with him, but just the idea that someone who did what he did, he was as busy as he was, took time out of his day to acknowledge some random person on the team and say thank you for trying a little bit harder than I needed to.

It was that part of the culture of that company that I knew then I either wanted to work in forever or at the very least continue to like preach from the mountaintops. And so, I worked there for a year and a half until my dad made me quit. By the way, at this point, whatever he told me to do, I would have done. And he described the world of restaurants as falling into one of two types of companies: restaurant smart and corporate dumb or corporate smart and restaurant dumb.

And what that meant to him was where are the most highly paid people were working. Were they working in the corporate level or in the restaurant level? And at Union Square Hospitality Group, they were on the restaurant level. There was real autonomy. They had the most talented and highly paid people at the restaurant level, which meant that the restaurants were amazing, but the system’s behind them on the corporate level weren’t that refined. And so, he made me quit to go work for Restaurant Associates, where it was the opposite. They had amazing systems. I went from working night and wearing my fancy suits and had my cool business cards, to working from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. I did all the purchasing for three restaurants in the morning and all the accounting for those same restaurants in the afternoon. Definitively less sexy, but there, I mean, that was like a graduate degree. And after a couple years, I realized that I loved what I was learning there, but I really belonged with Danny. And I ran into Danny and we had an email exchange and that’s how I ended up going back to work with him.

SSR: Did you end up back at Tabla?

WG: No, at that point, he sent me an email saying, ‘Hey, we just got the contract to do all the restaurants at the Museum of Modern Art and I’d love to talk to you about it.’ And so, I went to talk to him. Sometimes you have to marvel at your younger selves, just absurdity. I said, ‘I’m ready to be a general manager.’ I was 24 years old. ‘But I don’t want anything to do with fine dining. I hate fine dining. It’s stuffy. It’s boring.’ And so, I became the GM of all the operations within the museum, not the Modern. So, Cafe 2, Terrace 5, the coffee cart, the in-house staff dining and all of that.

And that was one of the great experiences of my life: to get to like really lead the design of a piece of MoMA. I got to pick the paint that went on the wall at Cafe 2 at MoMA. That’s one of those things, when you’re 24 years old, that you’ll never forget. And I got to work with the most amazing China glass and silver producers, because I wasn’t just some guy calling from a restaurant. Oftentimes, the really high design porcelain or glassware, you can never afford at a restaurant. But when you’re calling them from the Museum of Modern Art and saying that you’d like to put their pieces in the museum, suddenly the price has dropped considerably. And so, we had everything from Rosenthal to Herman Miller to Iittala to Gubi. The chairs we’re sitting on actually were from Cafe 2 at the Museum of Modern Art. It was an amazing experience.

SSR: And it was the first time that museum really brought in fine dining and amazing restaurants? So, it was a great time for the industry as well.

WG: For sure, or at least the first time in a really, really long time. I think way back in the day, it was the case. But yeah, it was just a really exceptional experience. One of the funny things is I was the first person to actually have an office at MoMA, because I was one of the project managers. And so, my first office at MoMA was on the fifth floor. It was an office about half the size this room, which is a pretty big office, with windows overlooking the sculpture garden.

And I was like, ‘This is too cool.’ Like literally like Starry Night was leaning against a wall before it was hung when I was walking the halls there. And then, the museum staff started coming back as the museum was getting ready to reopen. I went from the fifth floor to the third floor. My office got a little bit smaller. And then, more people moved back in and it went from the third floor to the second floor. Two years later, when I left, I had an office that I was sharing with seven people in the sub cellar, which is where restaurant people I guess normally are and probably are supposed to be, because our offices are truly our dining rooms, but it was cool for a minute.

SSR: It was a good run.

WG: Yeah, it was a good run while it lasted.

SSR: And so, you’re there for a couple years and then did you decide to want to do something else?

WG: No, Danny came to me and was trying to reinvent Eleven Madison Park. And he had just brought on a new chef, Daniel Humm, and needed someone who had experience with the company, who understood the culture of hospitality, to work with him. And I said, ‘Danny, I told you I don’t want anything to do with fine dining.’ I really wanted to be at Shake Shack. That was my dream. I just thought what they were doing there was so cool. My dad again, said, ‘Hey, if you want to grow with them, and if you want them to be there for you when you need them, you need to be there for them when they need you.’ And so, I took the job at Eleven Madison Park with the understanding that I’d be there for a year. And a year later, Richard Coraine set me down and said, ‘Hey, are you ready to move on?’ I said, ‘No. I’m actually loving this.’

SSR: And what was it like meeting Daniel? You guys have such a special relationship now and we’ll get to where you guys have taken it, but meeting Daniel …

WG: We just hit it off. And between the two of us, I think it wasn’t like the dining room served at the pleasure of the chef there. It was truly a team effort. And I’d never worked at a 4-Star level before, and given a bit of autonomy and learning the rules of service in fine dining, but then being allowed to challenge them and break them, and taking what I’d learned from Danny and then combining it with everything that Daniel had learned coming up in three Michelin-starred restaurants, we found that we were able to create this new approach that for me and the dining room was really fun.

I don’t think it’s possible to be good at what you do unless two things are true: One, you believe in the importance of the work, because to be the best at anything is exhausting. And so, if there’s not something bigger than just succeeding that’s getting you out of bed in the morning, like some sense of nobility in what you’re bringing to the world on a daily basis, I think it’s hard to continue giving so much of yourself. And I always loved making people happy. So, the importance of the work was there. But I also think you need to have fun doing it, or at the very least, derive some level of significant and genuine pleasure out of it. And being able to be as creative with the way we were serving the food or interacting with the guests as the chefs got to be in creating the food, suddenly there was a whole creative process that I was really enjoying. I was hooked.

SSR: For those that haven’t dined at Eleven Madison Park, can you talk a little bit about how you changed it and what you guys did differently or how you approached service?

WG: The thing that I tell the team all the time is we need to take what we do seriously, but we shouldn’t take ourselves that seriously. I remember one of the first things, and there were people that were working at Madison Park who had been hired prior to me in advance of the transition who had much more fine dining experience than me, they were appalled because I went over to a table and I put my hands on the table and leaned in to talk to the guests, which is a no-no in old-school fine dining service. You never touch the table. That’s not your property. It’s the guest’s property.

And one of them in as respectful away as he could to his boss said to me like, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I don’t care if that’s a rule. My role is to try to establish some level of genuine connection with the people I’m serving, and by breaking that barrier, it puts me more on their level and gives us the opportunity to see one another and connect with one another.’ And that kind of thing just kept on going. We have a team of dreamweavers, which the name came because one of my favorite songs in high school was DreamWeaver by Gary Wright. If you haven’t heard it, it’s on Spotify. Go check it out as soon as you finish listening to this podcast.

And they are people that are there to help us create improvised moments for the people that we are serving. And it started on a very, very simple level. I’ve told this story plenty of times, with the first one was that we were serving a group of people and they had been to all sorts of restaurants in New York. They were on their way to the airport after their lunch, and I overheard them saying something to the effect of, ‘We’ve been to Momofuku and we’ve been to Daniel and Per Se, and the only thing we missed was a hot dog from the street.’

So, we went out and we bought a hot dog and we cut it up and we placed it perfectly in the plate with a canal of mustard. And we served it to him as a mid-course. The look of surprise, the look of hilarity, like they started laughing. They felt seen, and we gave them something not because we were desperate to serve a hot dog, but because that’s what we knew they wanted to receive. And that feeling of looking at their facial expressions when that happened, it became an addiction.

So, now, the dreamweavers, they’re artists, they’re metal smiths. Actually, where my relationship started with Andrew Fried from Boardwalk Productions, who did Seven Days Out, was he was having dinner and we overheard him saying that he was leaving the next morning to go home. And his daughter, the only thing she wanted from New York was a stuffed teddy bear, and he forgot to get it. And the dreamweavers took the kitchen towels that we use in the back and actually cut them up and sewed them into a teddy bear for him, which they can do stuff like that all the time. I mean, you’re in New York City, right?

So between FIT and Parsons, we can hire some incredibly talented people. The dreamweavers are there so that when captains or sommeliers or food runners have an interaction with the guest and come up with an idea on how to go off script, that we have a team of people to help bring those ideas to life. And by the way, the first time that you have one of those ideas as one of the people that works there, and you don’t just have it but actually work to bring it to completion and then you see the look on their face, then you become hooked, too. And so, if we have an entire team of people that just derive so much pleasure out of making other people happy, and then we give them the resources to do that at an unbelievable level. These days, maybe 1 percent of those things are my ideas, and it’s so fun to be so inspired by the ideas of the people that work for you. And that’s one of the most fulfilling things about my job.

SSR: It seems so simple, yet it’s so intelligent. I haven’t really heard anyone else doing that.

WG: Thank you.

SSR: It’s amazing. So, you’re at Eleven Madison Park and Danny offers it to you and Daniel to buy. Why did you decide to take that leap of faith?

WG: Because we weren’t done. I think anyone who’s ever given a lot of themselves to any project, you know when you’re only halfway through. And we knew we had a long way to go. And the idea of stopping halfway, it just wasn’t an option. And so we said, “Yeah, we’re going to buy the restaurant.” We had no idea how to buy the restaurant and then I had to let go on a crash course on how to get financing and debt and how to start a company and all of that stuff.

There is this amazing guy who has since become like a second father to me, named Ernesto Cruz, who kind of took me under his wing. You know the scene from Rocky where Mick is on the bike and Rocky is like running next to it? I felt like that was me and Ernesto, where he taught me what an ROI was. And taught me how to put together a deck and taught me how to pitch. And it was a crazy year. Honestly, it’s a little bit of a blur looking back. And then suddenly, we woke up one day and we’re going to work in our own restaurant.

SSR: How did that feel?

WG: Well, the thing I’ll say. I mean, I put Danny on as much of a pedestal as I put my dad. Neither of them likes when I say I put them on a pedestal, but I just think he’s amazing and the interest he’s taken in my personal success is nothing short of extraordinary. And as a boss, I learned a lot from him. I think our approach to service and hospitality is built on the foundation that he gave me, for sure.

But he also in the way that he managed his people, he gave everyone a true sense of ownership. And so yeah, to answer your question bluntly, it felt really, really good. But because he had given me such a sense of ownership in the restaurant for so many years before we actually owned it, it didn’t feel all together too different. And it’s one of the words in our welcome guide to people that join our team. The more we can all do, almost like trickle-down economics. Like if I give ownership to the people below me, and then they give ownership to the people below them, the more people that feel like owners and really feeling like they have a say in the direction that things are going, the harder we’re going to work to help us achieve those ideas. I think it’s important to not just follow a set of instructions, but to always feel like you have a say in what you’re trying to achieve.

SSR: Which is easier said than done. But amazing when it happens. All right, so we’ll get to Netflix. So, Netflix did this series called Seven Days Out, where they look at different events seven days before they happen. So, the Westminster Dog Show, the Kentucky Derby, and the reopening of Eleven Madison Park, which everyone should watch it. Why did you decide, a) first to renovate Eleven Madison Park, shut it down and reopen it? And b) why did you decide then to bare your soul, so to speak, on a Netflix show, because opening restaurants is not the easiest thing in the world to do, especially Eleven Madison Park?

WG: Well, why do we decide to renovate? After however many years, again being goal-driven, we wanted to become the No. 1 restaurant in the world. That was the goal. We talked about it every day for seven years straight, and we achieved it. I guess it was two years ago now, we were named the No. 1 restaurant in the world.

SSR: And by the way, I love that you got that award and everyone got to watch it on TV.  You whole team got to watch the staff.

WG: And we were in Australia, so they were there at like 6:30 in the morning in the private dining room watching it happen.

SSR: Yeah, and they all cheered. It’s quite a moment.

WG: And there are a couple things. After that, we realized that we needed to take a step back and take a look at the restaurant, and say, ‘Okay, we’ve achieved that, now we need to refocus and set new goals.’ And the restaurant had been opened as a brasserie. And we’ve been tweaking it slowly and steadily over the years to make it feel as right as possible for what we were serving in it, but it was time for the room to catch up to the experience.

And also, we wanted to make it ours. We were running a restaurant in a room that someone else had designed. And we wanted to feel like we’re walking into work, that it was ours. And now walking into Eleven Madison Park, I look around and there’s a lot of stuff that came out of my brain and a lot of stuff that came out of Daniel’s brain. And just to know that that room will now forever be a reflection of who each of us is individually and who we are as a team. There’s just something symbolic about that.

Why did we decide to let people in and record the whole thing? You know, a) Andrew Fried and I had developed a really good relationship at that point. And you meet people, and there are certain people that you just grab onto and you hold onto and you just want to have them in your life. And that takes work, because life moves so quickly that you can suddenly wake up and find that special people are no longer in it anymore.

But there’s also those people that you just know you want to work with at some point, and he was one of those people. And so, he approached me about doing that show at NoMad LA. And he didn’t yet know that we were closing and reopening Eleven Madison Park. And the reason I brought that up and the reason Daniel and I agreed to do it … You know, restaurants, it’s a craft, but it’s also an art form. And the difference between restaurants and other art forms, whether it’s a painting or music or photography, whatever it is. All of those forms of art will be forever experienced in the way that they were intended.

I can listen to an Elvis Presley song and it sounds the same to me as it did when he listened to it in the recording studio. The difference between those and restaurants is that they only exist in the memories of the people that ate there. And when all of those people die and the restaurant closes, the restaurant is gone forever. And that at once beautiful, but also for the person behind it, it’s a little bit sad. And so, the idea to memorialize this moment in our lives at that restaurant, it’s pretty cool.

Like my wife just had an episode of Chef’s Table. And now, I have this episode of Netflix. And the idea that one day maybe after we’re both gone, our grandchildren can like … Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to see your grandparents, and actually see what they were like when they were our age? It’s just a gift, I think, for the team, for the restaurant, but also for our families. Not to take away from the fact that it’s scary, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what footage they’re going to use and you have no idea how you’re going to react in certain moments, but we trusted them and we trusted the process.

SSR: And since we are a design magazine, in terms of the design, is there anything you specifically running a restaurant really looked for, wanted to change, or wanted to imbue into the space? Who did you work with again for the design?

WG: His name is Brad Cloepfil His design firm is Allied Works. And I think picking him was a really, really important choice. It was really important to us that the person who redesigned the restaurant already loved the restaurant. Because we didn’t want someone to come in and just want to impose themselves upon it. We wanted someone who had already fallen in love with what it was and wanted to work to maintain it and make what it was better, as opposed to different.

And Brad was a regular in our bar. His daughter, Hannah, had worked for us as a host and he had become a really good friend. I’ve already said it. We wanted someone to come in who loved it. And so, we started working with him. And also, we didn’t want to change a ton of stuff. We just wanted a tweak it a little bit. And I think one of the things about great designers though is they can in a five minute conversation make you hate something that you’ve always loved.

And it’s truly an unbelievable skill. We were just kind of looking to redo the floors and the upholstery and repaint the walls and just kind of give it a facelift. And he walked in, and in our first design meeting, suddenly the changes we were making were much more significant than we had ever imagined, because he pointed out things in the room that didn’t make sense to him, that we had never questioned. And so, I just think it’s amazing whenever you’re working with anyone who’s super passionate about what they do, where they can get you to look at the world through a different set of eyes and see it in a whole new beautiful way. But when it comes to service and the hospitality of the things that we think about, it’s all about the smallest nuance.

One of the things we try to do is we’ll say all the time that we want dinner at Eleven Madison Park to feel like you’re coming home or going to a friend’s house for dinner. Now, that’s a ridiculous concept in many ways, because I don’t know what friends have a house like that. And inevitably, it’s transactional. So, there’s an element of it that you’re paying for something. It’s not a friend’s house, but we try to remove as many of the transactional elements as humanly possible. So, when you walk into that room, there’s no podium. You’re not walking up and saying your name to someone and they’re poking at a computer screen, and then taking you into the table.

And so, part of the design is the podium is hidden away and we have a system where there’s two maîtres d’. They have sign language that they use to communicate with each other, so you can walk in, you’re having a conversation with one person, then someone else magically comes over and brings you to the table. And there are no computer screens anywhere in the room.

The service bar. You know when you go to a bar and there’s all the servers waiting at the end of the bar to pick up drinks? I hate that. It feels transactional. And so, behind the bar there’s actually this Lazy Susan that the bartender’s put drinks in and push the Lazy Susan that the drinks go into another room where people are waiting for them.

I think in an experience like that, the number of steps of service, it’s kind of absurd. I mean, there’s a 100, 200 steps of service. And so, the amount that we can do to make the execution of those steps as efficient as possible just gives the people that work for us more time to be present at the table doing what they’re supposed to do, which is engaging with the people they’re serving. And so, a lot of the design is just thinking as much as we possibly could through every step of service and figuring out how to streamline things in such a way where that would be possible.

SSR: But for those that watch the show, the punch list a couple days before you open is quite immense. But you open without a hitch.

WG: The punch list wasn’t done for a few months, but a lot of those things on that list are … You know, sometimes we say that we spend about 90 percent of our effort on things that only 10 percent of the people there will ever notice. And it’s half for the people were serving, but it’s also half for us. Like, you need to know that your closet is cleaned to feel like a sense of composure when you step onto the floor. But yeah, the punch list was long.

SSR: Okay, so we spent a lot of time on Eleven Madison Park, but you also have a whole other set of restaurants with this the Sydell Group and NoMad, so take us back to NoMad New York. How did that come about? How did you meet Andrew and the team?

WG: That’s a whole crazy story. We were introduced by a kitchen designer. And ultimately, deciding to do NoMad New York is what led to us purchasing Eleven Madison Park, which is perhaps too long a story to tell here, but what we wanted to do at Eleven Madison Park was create the fine dining restaurant for our generation. What we wanted to do at NoMad was to create the grand hotel for our generation. If Eleven Madison Park is the place that you go to once a year for a celebration, whether you’re celebrating something or the meal is a celebration on its own, NoMad was meant to be like a night on the town, an urban playground, where you walk in from the outside and everything outside falls away and you can almost get lost in it.

Andrew Zobler, who’s our partner at NoMad, had already been working with Jacques Garcia for quite a while and we engaged in the process. I just love NoMad. I love all the NoMads. The library in NoMad New York is one of my favorite places on Earth. It’s where I spend a good majority of my time. And what I love about the design of that place is that during a time in New York where people were running away from luxury, running away from sommeliers and reservations and all of this, and all of the restaurants uptown that started were closing. And it was all about reservation lists, restaurants downtown. What David Chang started, which is amazing and I love his restaurants, but it was almost like you had to choose. It was almost like the restaurant world felt like you could either have that or this.

And so, the mission statement at NoMad was we wanted it to be where uptown and downtown intersected, which it was geographically. But we wanted it to be the kind of place where you felt like you were somewhere cool. The music, maybe you’re listening to The Rolling Stones, and there was a great cocktail list. And the person that came over to greet you wasn’t doing it with any sense of formality, but all the technical precision was there and we had a big beautiful wine list. And the food was done with exceptional French technique. And in the design, where everything was stripped down reclaimed barn wood and all of that and all the other restaurants are opening at the time, it was mahogany and deep burgundy fabrics. It was giving people a taste of a bygone era.

Nothing we’ve ever done has been successful right from the beginning. We’ve always opened it and had to tweak it and figure it out, because it’s amazing no matter how many years you spend conceiving an experience, the day you launch it to the world is the first time you see how many things you got wrong, but we were overwhelmed by the reception and inspired by the degree to which people connected to it.

Hotels back in the day were where everyone went to see and be seen and to connect with others. And at a certain point, suddenly people didn’t want to have restaurants in hotels anymore. And so, the idea that it’s all called NoMad. That it’s a celebration of the New York grand hotel. It was just so amazing to be a part of. And then watching that as it’s been translated in Los Angeles and then in Vegas. It’s been a hell of a ride.

SSR: Yeah, I remember when you were opening, what year was it?

WG: 2012.

SSR: Everyone was, ‘Oh my God, it’s gonna be called the same as the hotel and how can the restaurant and the hotel have the same name.’

WG: By the way, it was different, and we struggled with it for a long time, too. But it’s one idea where you’re sleeping, where you’re drinking, where you’re having breakfast, where you’re having dinner. That you can have fried chicken and a beer, or roast chicken with truffles and a glass of Burgundy. Or check in for a couple nights and order a club sandwich, that the same philosophy, the same care, the same finesse, the same general approach is brought to each one of those moments, it was freeing.

I think the other thing that’s cool about having a restaurant in a hotel where they’re integrated so completely is you just have space. There’s all these little nooks and crannies that you can use to create really, really cool stuff. There’s a conference room on the second floor, and we turned it into a magic theater, where Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays, we have a magic show there. We talk about creating magical moments in our restaurants and we’re like, hey, let’s just do a magic show. And we had already worked with these guys to do this card trick at the end of the meal at Eleven Madison Park. And Theory 11, Jonathan Bayme, Dan White. And I think the hardest seat in our entire company to get is the magic show. Not any one of our restaurants actually. But being in a space like that, it brings with it this endless world of possibilities, which for people who do what we do is one of the coolest things of all.

SSR: What was it like taking that from 28th Street in New York to Downtown Los Angeles, which is undergoing its own sort of revitalization. But what was it like translating that, especially into that building in LA?

WG: The building in LA is exceptional. It’s the Giannini building, which was the Bank of Italy. It’s where that started. And the Bank of Italy is someone at some point came along and said, hey, I think Americans will be more comfortable giving you their money if you change Italy to America, so that’s where the Bank of America started, which is pretty cool.

I mean, there were some things that were obvious. The building in Los Angeles, obviously with Giannini, there’s an Italian inspiration there and it’s bigger windows, it’s lighter and brighter and it’s Los Angeles. And so, there are all the things that come along with that, instead of deep red burgundy fabrics. There are these tall beautiful green curtains that hang from the ceilings.

I think in LA, we didn’t get it right from an experience perspective in the beginning. And we had heard so many times people saying, oh, we need what you guys do in LA. And we recreated at least the level of formality that we did in New York in LA and very quickly realized that what is a weekly experience in New York becomes a special occasion restaurant in Los Angeles.

But again, we’ve never gotten anything right from the beginning, and so I guess we were ready for it. And so, the experience has transformed itself dramatically over time. And we used to do more of like a upscale restaurant upstairs on this mezzanine overlooking more of a casual experience downstairs, and we realized that there needs to be a place for the food, is brought out at as it’s ready, and it’s more communal and it’s more lighthearted and it’s not necessarily healthier. Everyone tells you people in LA want to eat healthier. That’s not actually the case. People want to eat the same, but they want it to feel different. So, when we looked at the neighborhood Downtown LA versus what has now become referred to as NoMad in New York, the feeling between the two was so similar. I mean, these were both neighborhoods that were once just unbelievably beautiful. If you looked side to side, they looked pretty rough. But when you look up in both neighborhoods, you are just astonished by the beauty of these old buildings.

They were both two unbelievably celebrated places that had been long forgotten. And being in New York and being able to be a part of the revitalization of that neighborhood. I mean, there’s as much nobility in that as in serving people. And so, to get to do that again in LA is really, really cool. The thing about LA is it’s just much further away from the rest of the city than it is in New York. New York, we’re just like three blocks away from Madison Square Park, so it didn’t take too long. And there, it’s going to take longer, but you start to look around in the things that are happening. Year to year, it’s just incredible how much a place can evolve and change when enough people get excited about being a part of that change.

SSR: Right.

WG: And then Vegas, in its own small way, it’s pretty similar. So, we’re in the Monte Carlo.

SSR: The old Monte Carlo.

WG: The old Monte Carlo, which has been there for a long, long time. And rather than tear it down and start anew, there was a desire to just reshape it. And so, the Monte Carlo slowly transitioned into the Park MGM, and instead of a McDonald’s in a subway, suddenly, there’s Roy Choi and Eataly and Brendan Sodikoff with Bavette’s, and On The Record by the Houston Brothers in LA just opened, and we got to bring a NoMad.

And so again, it was part of rebirthing a neighborhood, because in Vegas, one of those buildings is its own world. And to do it there with so many people that we consider to be really, really close friends has been amazing. I think the dining room in NoMad Vegas is just one of the most beautiful rooms out there. And I can say that in a non-self celebratory way because that was Jacques Garcia’s vision completely.

But you walk into that room and it’s just a really, really special place. And I have to tip my hat to our partners at MGM, who one of the concerns when you do something in Vegas, there are places there that look like they’re almost like set designed. But the care and the precision and the detail-oriented way in which they made every part of our world there feel beautifully executed, it just brings me a ton of pride to go to work there. Like I was saying before, I think that’s really important.

SSR: Yeah, did you ever think you’d have a restaurant in Vegas?

WG: I fell in love with Vegas a long time ago. My dad had a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Vegas. He ran Wolfgang’s company after he left Restaurant Associates. And he brought me there to the opening of the Wolfgang Puck café at the MGM Grand, and then took me O by Cirque du Soleil. And my gosh, there’s something about that city where things get to exist there that will never get to exist anywhere else. You talk about magical worlds, like, I mean, the whole place, it shouldn’t exist. It’s in the middle of the desert, and then suddenly there’s this place where people go to have fun. When you’re serving an experience, it’s half what you’re serving and half the grace that people are giving themselves to receive it.

If someone is coming into the restaurant after a really hard day at work and they’re not in a good mood, no matter what we’re doing, it’s going to be hard for them to have a good time. If you go to a city where every one is there to have fun, it’s that much more fun to serve them. And what we want NoMad there to be is an oasis within that oasis, where you can step out of the doors and be a part of this crazy place that is like the true embodiment of mind over matter. Or you can step back in and kind of feel like you’re in this big warm hug and a safe from it all, a little bit as well.

SSR: And when you talk about doing restaurants and hotels, that you get other spaces. I mean, in LA, you get to have a rooftop. In Las Vegas, you have more space. Has that been exciting for you to expand what NoMad means?

WG: For sure. Well, in Nomad Vegas, we have a little casino, and so just to reshape what that experience is. I think the next thing that we’re opening, which is something I’m so excited about, is we’re opening the NoMad pool in Las Vegas, and that’s going to be coming in a month or so. But it’s kind of two experiences in one. So, it’s the pool for the hotel and everything, Monday through Thursday. But then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we’re doing our version of a Vegas day party. I believe there’s a need for something in between like the crazy pool party is in Vegas and a boring pool experience for everyone who’s just reading a book. If I’m in Vegas, I want to go to a pool party, but I’m way too old to go to the pool parties that exist. But I want have a DJ playing great music and great cocktails, and I want to have fun. And so, we’re trying to fill the space that exists between those two extremes, and that’ll start in April. It’s called JEMAA, is the name of the party we’re doing.

SSR: What’s behind the name?

WG: The design inspiration of the pool is the Majorelle Gardens, and so it’s a just playing off the Moroccan design inspiration.

SSR: So, you’ve opened LA and Vegas within a year of each other, in the same year.

WG: Yes.

SSR: So, it’s been a crazy run.

WG: It’s been a crazy run. Yeah.

SSR: But looking back, has there been any great takeaways or things you wouldn’t imagine happen that happened that you’re excited about?

WG: There’s a Winston Churchill quote that I read the other day, which is, I forget exactly how it went. It was success is about going from failure to failure, with no loss of enthusiasm, or something like that. I marvel at times how our enthusiasm hasn’t waned a bit in spite of the fact that not everything always goes exactly as we wanted it to. That’s true of Eleven Madison Park. We almost closed our doors before we got our 4-Star rating. It’s true of NoMad in New York, where we got a bunch of bad reviews because we had a tasting menu in the beginning and people didn’t think we were able to differentiate NoMad from Eleven Madison Park enough. It’s true of Made Nice, where we got a bad review in the beginning. It’s true of LA, where we had to reshape the entire experience. And it’s been true of Vegas, where we’ve had to change a lot since we first opened. I think the lesson that I’m learning right now is that if we can always remember why we’re doing what we’re doing, which is not for the reviews or the external validation, but for the sheer love of the game. Then when things don’t necessarily go our way, it’ll be that love that motivates us to figure out how to get things right. We’re never as good as our best review. We’re never as bad as our worst review. I think the thing I’m learning the most is just to remember what got you to do what you decided to do in the first place, and find a way to reconnect with that as often as possible.

SSR: Well, thank you so much. This has been amazing and such a pleasure.

WG: Thank you.

SSR:  I can’t wait to see what you do next.

WG:  It’s really nice to see you. Thanks for coming over to my house.

SSR: Yeah, anytime. I’ll come back.