The Culture Code

by Daniel Coyle

  Each year around a thousand new restaurants open in New York City. All are launched with optimism, confidence, and high hopes for success. Five years later eight hundred of them have vanished without a trace, for various reasons that are, in essence, the same reason. A successful restaurant, like a successful Antarctic expedition, depends on ceaseless proficiency. Good food is not enough. Good location is not enough. Good service, training, branding, leadership, adaptability, and luck are not enough. Survival depends on putting all of it together, night after night. If you fail, you disappear.

  Within this unforgiving ecosystem, Danny Meyer has built a record that is not as unlikely as it is inconceivable. Over the past thirty years, he has opened twenty-five restaurants. Except for one, they are all successful—and not just a little bit. Union Square Cafe, Meyer’s first restaurant, has won the top spot in Zagat’s best-restaurant rankings an unprecedented nine times; his other restaurants routinely occupy as much as a quarter of the top twenty, and his restaurants and chefs have won twenty-six James Beard awards. Perhaps more impressively, each of Meyer’s restaurants is unique, varying from a tavern to a barbecue joint, to an Italian café, to a fast-casual burger chain called Shake Shack that is now worth $1.5 billion.

  The reason Meyer’s restaurants are successful is the warm, connective feeling they create, a feeling that can be summed up in one word: home. When you walk into a Meyer restaurant, you feel that you are being cared for. This feeling radiates from the surroundings and the food but most of all from the people, who approach each interaction with familial thoughtfulness. When I asked Meyer’s guests and employees for examples of moments where this feeling was created, they offered the following two stories.

  A young woman, recently moved to New York from the Midwest, took her parents out to dinner at 11 Madison Park to celebrate her new start in the big city—and to allay her parents’ fears about the difficulties of living in New York. Toward the end of dinner, as they looked over the dessert menu, the father pointed to a forty-two-dollar glass of dessert wine called Château d’Yquem and commented on how insanely expensive New York was. The waiter overheard the father’s comment and, moments later, reappeared carrying a bottle of Château d’Yquem and three glasses. The waiter said, “We are so grateful you came tonight. I heard you talking about the Château d’Yquem. This is one of the rarest and best dessert wines in the entire world, and we would love to offer you each a taste with our compliments.” A small explosion of surprise and delight ensued.

  Then there was the time a dining companion of Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey found a beetle in his salad at Gramercy Tavern. The next day Kerrey and his friends were eating at another of Meyer’s restaurants. After they were seated, a salad arrived garnished with a small piece of paper on which the word Ringo was written. The waiter said, “Danny wanted to make sure you knew that Gramercy Tavern wasn’t the only one of his restaurants that’s willing to garnish your salad with a Beatle.”

  If you mention that it’s your anniversary or your birthday, the restaurant will remember. If you prefer a table by the window, it will remember. If you prefer the crusty ends of bread, it will remember.* These tasks are not simple, because they depend on an unbroken chain of awareness and action. The waiter who brought the Château d’Yquem had to (1) be alert to the dynamic between the excited, hopeful young woman and her worried parents; (2) notice the father’s comment about the wine; (3) connect it to an idea; (4) be empowered to spend the restaurant’s money on a gesture; and (5) deliver that gesture with grace. At any point, the chain could have been broken, and no one would have noticed. But the chain wasn’t broken, and so it created the signature upwelling of warm emotion that has carried Meyer’s ventures to success. The question is, how does Meyer accomplish this so reliably at so many restaurants?

  —

  When you sit down across the table from Danny Meyer, his eyes lock on you in a mix of interest and empathy. His body language is relaxed and alert but unhurried. His voice is steady, with a midwestern earnestness that’s vaguely reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart. If you ask him a question—say, what’s the best hamburger in New York—he pauses before answering. He has devoted hundreds of hours to exploring this question, so he knows a great deal. But when he answers, that answer has nothing to do with his knowledge and everything to do with you.

  “Well,” he says. “What kind of hamburger you like depends on what kind of mood you’re in.”

  We’re in Maialino, one of his restaurants near Gramercy Park, and it’s breakfast. Around us the Meyerian universe is spinning contentedly: fresh flowers burst from ceramic vases, and happy diners chat with attentive waiters. We’re talking about how Meyer studied political science at Trinity College and how he worked for a presidential campaign (which helped him see every worker as basically a volunteer) when, behind me, a tray accidentally slips from a waiter’s hand, and several water glasses smash on the floor.

  For a microsecond, all the action stops. Meyer raises a finger, pressing pause on our conversation so he can watch what happens. The waiter who dropped the glasses starts picking up the pieces, and another waiter arrives with a broom and a dustpan. The cleanup happens swiftly, and everyone turns back to their food. Then I ask Meyer why he was watching so closely.

  “I’m watching for what happens right afterward, and I’m looking for their energy level to go up,” he says. “They connect to clean up the problem, and the energy level goes either up or down, and if we’re doing our job right, their energy level will go up.” He puts his fists together, and then makes an explosion gesture with his fingers. “They are creating uplifting energy that has nothing to do with the task and everything to do with each other and what comes next. It’s not really that different from an ant colony or a beehive. Every action adds on to the others.”

  I ask Meyer what a bad interaction looks like. “It’s one of two things,” he says. “Either they’re disinterested—‘I’m just doing my job’ kind of thing. Or they’re angry at the other person or the situation. And if I were to see that, I would know that there’s a deeper problem here, because the number-one job is to take care of each other. I didn’t always know that, but I know it now.”

  Meyer starts telling me about his background: his youth in St. Louis, the early fascination with food and travel, the emotionally distant father who was in the hotel and food business, Meyer’s last-second veer away from law school and into the restaurant business, and finally the mid-1980s and the early days of Union Square Cafe, where his education really began.

  “I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet,” he says. “I didn’t know how to manage flow or run a kitchen. I didn’t know anything. But I did know how I wanted to make people feel. I wanted them to feel like they couldn’t tell if they had stayed home or gone out.”

  To do that, Meyer relied on instinct. He hired midwesterners to increase friendliness. He trained the staff himself, playacting various waiter-diner scenarios. When service was slow, as it often was in the early days, he placated guests with free wine and gave the staff latitude to provide treats. He made a habit of gathering tidbits of information to help his guests feel more at home. He paid particular attention to language. He hated waiter-speak like “Are you still working on that?” (it’s not work!) or “Is everything to your liking?” (so impersonal!). Instead, he sought to create language that gave guests the feeling that the staff was on their side. For instance, when a reservation was unavailable, he would say, “Can you give me a range of times that work for you, so I can root for a cancellation?”

  Union Square Cafe was a huge success, with the ever-present Meyer working the door, busing tables, and cleaning up spills. Then in 1995 he opened a second restaurant, Gramercy Tavern. And that’s when things got difficult. Service started to slip. Food was inconsistent. Customers were unhappy. Meyer would split his time between the two restaurants trying frantically to boost performance, but it wasn’t working. “
It was a complete nightmare,” he says. “I was miserable. I was running back and forth between the two places, and neither of them was doing as well as I wanted. It was kind of a classic situation. I mean, this is why most people who open a restaurant open only one.”

  It all came to a head one day that fall at Gramercy Tavern, when a regular customer who was hosting a lunch for six ordered salmon. She ate about half of it, then told the waiter that she didn’t care for it—could she have something else? The waiter brought a new dish, then asked Gramercy’s manager whether the salmon should stay on the woman’s bill. The manager said it should. After all, the woman had eaten more than half of the dish, and there had been nothing wrong with the salmon. When the woman paid, she was handed a doggie bag with the remains of her salmon. When the woman got home, she wrote to Meyer, “I can’t believe how insulting and passive-aggressive this was, and it’s not what I would expect at one of your restaurants.”

  “She was absolutely right,” Meyer says. “And here’s the worst part: Everybody at Gramercy thought they were doing a good job. The manager thought they were doing a good job. The waiter thought they were doing a good job. Everybody stood there and watched this happen, and nobody stopped it. We had spent hours and hours training people not to do this kind of thing, but they were doing it, and we had no control. That’s when I knew that I had to find a way to build a language, to teach behavior. I could no longer just model the behavior and trust that people would understand and do it. I had to start naming stuff.”

  A few weeks later Meyer invited the entire staff to a Saturday retreat along the Hudson River and started a conversation about values: What were they really about? What did they stand for? Who came first?

  “That salmon incident was the Plymouth Rock moment,” says Richard Coraine, chief development officer of the Union Square Hospitality Group, the parent company for Meyer’s restaurants. “Danny realized that he needed to be in two places at once. Which meant that he had to find a way to deliver the signal. People will respond to what their boss feels is important. So Danny had to define and articulate what was important.”

  At the retreat, Meyer and the staff ranked their priorities:

  1. Colleagues

  2. Guests

  3. Community

  4. Suppliers

  5. Investors

  For Meyer, this was a breakthrough. “Naming these things felt incredibly good,” he says. “Getting all this out in the open. The manager who’d caused the salmon problem ended up leaving, and that’s when things started to take off, and I realized that how we treat each other is everything. If we do that well, everything else will fall into place.”

  In a similar way, Meyer then attempted to name the specific behaviors and interactions he wanted to create at his restaurants. He already had an assortment of catchphrases that he used informally in training—he had a knack for distilling ideas into handy maxims. But now he started paying deeper attention to these phrases, thinking about them as tools. Here are a few:

  Read the guest

  Athletic hospitality

  Writing a great final chapter

  Turning up the Home Dial

  Loving problems

  Finding the yes

  Collecting the dots and connecting the dots

  Creating raves for guests

  One size fits one

  Skunking

  Making the charitable assumption

  Planting like seeds in like gardens

  Put us out of business with your generosity

  Be aware of your emotional wake

  To get a hug, you have to give a hug

  The excellence reflex

  Are you an agent or a gatekeeper?

  On the surface, these look like garden-variety corporate aphorisms. In fact, each of them functions as a small narrative in itself, providing a vivid mental model for solving the routine problems the staff faced. Making the charitable assumption means that when someone behaves poorly, you should avoid judging them and instead give them the benefit of the doubt. Collecting the dots means gathering information about guests; connecting the dots is using that information to create happiness. Skunking is spraying negative energy into the workplace, as skunks do when they’re frightened. By themselves, these phrases are unremarkable. But together, endlessly repeated and modeled through behavior, they create a larger conceptual framework that connects with the group’s identity and expresses its core purpose: We take care of people.

  Meyer became more intentional about embedding his catchphrases and stating priorities in training, staff meetings, and all communications. He pushed his leaders to seek opportunities to use and model the key behaviors. He began to treat his role as that of a culture broadcaster. And it worked. In a few months, the atmosphere at both restaurants improved markedly. Meyer kept it up, steadily expanding and refining the language. “You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”

  A couple years after the salmon incident, an NYU doctoral student in organizational behavior named Susan Reilly Salgado became curious about why Meyer’s restaurants felt so different from all others. As she chatted with the waitstaff, she noticed that they all tended to describe their jobs with the same words: home, family, warmth. She approached Meyer and asked him if she could make the restaurant the subject of her research, and he agreed, provided she took a job there. Salgado worked at Union Square Cafe for six months. She watched the way the staff members interacted with one another and with customers, and she noticed what she called “micro-processes” that drove those interactions. Here is how she summed up her findings in her dissertation: “The results indicate that Union Square Cafe achieves its differentiation strategy of ‘enlightened hospitality’ through a synergistic set of human resource management practices involving three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers.”

  A simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers. Salgado discovered, in other words, that Meyer succeeded for the same reason James Burke succeeded with the Credo challenge. Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.

  —

  All of which raises the deeper question of how exactly this happens, how a handful of catchphrases and a list of priorities can produce such smooth and proficient performance. We can get an answer from an unlikely source: a tiny organism called a slime mold.

  Slime molds are ancient, bloblike organisms made up of thousands of individual amoebae. Most of the time slime molds are passive, sedate, and wholly unremarkable. But when food becomes scarce, the thousands of amoebae begin to work together in a beautiful and intelligent way. Back in the 1940s, a Harvard undergraduate named John Tyler Bonner photographed slime molds with a time-lapse camera and made a film, which he began to show to academic audiences. Word spread, and before long lecture halls were overflowing with enraptured crowds. Albert Einstein requested a private viewing. J. J. O’Neill of the New York Herald Tribune told Bonner that his work was more important than the discovery of the atomic bomb.

  The film’s first frames show a disconnected scattering of small gray blobs. But then, as if responding to an invisible signal, the amoebae move with single intent toward the center, where thousands of them fuse together into a single organism that starts to move. At the tip of the organism, another transformation happens as some of the amoebae crawl upward, forming a stalk. Other amoebae crawl over them, where they become spores, to blow off in the wind and reproduce. The whole thing is utterly magical and orchestral, as if some hidden condu
ctor were whispering instructions: You over here, now here, now all together. The film became a sensation because it embodied a profound mystery: How does this kind of intelligent group behavior happen with creatures that possess no intelligence?

  For years, researchers presumed that the behavior was a result of an “organizer cell” that functioned as a kind of biological drill sergeant, telling the others what to do and when. This organizer cell, it turns out, does not exist. What does exist is something more powerful: a simple set of rules called heuristics that drive behavior.

  “We assume that because we’re complex, that the way we make decisions is also complex,” says Madeleine Beekman, who studies slime molds at the University of Sydney. “But in reality, we’re using very simple rules of thumb. The slime mold shows us that it’s possible for groups to solve extremely complex problems using a few rules of thumb.”

  In the case of slime molds, these rules of thumb are as follows:

  If there’s no food, connect with one another.

  If connected, stay connected and move toward the light.

  If you reach the light, stay connected and climb.

  “Honeybees work the same way,” Beekman says. “So do ants and many other species. They all use decision-making heuristics. There’s no reason we wouldn’t use it too. If you look at these species, you can feel the connection. Like us, they all seek a collective goal.”

  Beekman and the slime molds give us a new way to think about why Danny Meyer’s catchphrases work so well. They are not merely catchphrases; they are heuristics that provide guidance by creating if/then scenarios in a vivid, memorable way. Structurally, there is no difference between If someone is rude, make a charitable assumption and If there’s no food, connect with one another. Both function as a conceptual beacon, creating situational awareness and providing clarity in times of potential confusion. This is why so many of Meyer’s catchphrases focus on how to respond to mistakes.