Setting the Table summary

When you open a restaurant, you might decide on Italian food because of your heritage, or French food simply because you like it. Offering authentic food, however, isn't enough on it's own.

Meyer was also interested in Italian and French food (and others, of course), but he didn't want to just recreate what he'd seen in Europe. He wanted to adapt his food to his customers.

Good restaurants should pay attention to service, but fine dining requires top-notch service.

For Meyer, fine dining means not just having the best chefs or classically trained waiters who know how to pour wine and serve guests in the correct order. Fine dining centers around an entirely different concept of hospitality.

A restaurant can be perfectly designed and serve delicious food, but if the staff is unfriendly or the kitchen too slow, it won’t ever be considered great.

You have to find the perfect staff to make a restaurant excellent. Meyer follows a hiring strategy called the 51 percent solution for finding employees.

As a restaurant owner, you're only as good as your team. And importantly, your team has to be founded on and work with a sense of mutual respect.

No one should think they're the star performer. Meyer learned this the hard way when he encouraged employees to submit an essay describing the perfect waiter, as part of a national challenge. One of his employees won and was named “waitress of the year.”

No restaurant operates or is located in a vacuum. You should make sure to adapt your ideas and your business to your neighborhood; but to be really successful, you have to go even further.

A restaurant can only have lasting success if it becomes part of the neighborhood. Make your business fit in with the local community, no matter what cuisine you serve.

It's important that your business stands for the right values and is seen in a positive light. But how exactly can you ensure this?

First, your restaurant needs to maintain a solid reputation, and one way to ensure this is to influence your media coverage.

You might enjoy short-term success if you offer a dining experience that is new or creative, but long-term, sustainable success is much harder to achieve.

The first rule for lasting success is to give first, and give in abundance.

After you've established a successful restaurant business, your most difficult decision will be whether to expand.

For Meyer this was a dilemma, as he knew that his father's business failed when it expanded too rapidly. Eventually, however, he came to realize that expansion is good, as long as you do it correctly.