Food has always been super important to me.

Most of my personal relationships grew from the dining table - my mom's homemade cooking, meeting my best friends in the college cafeteria, and meeting my future in-laws for the first time at over pasta.

As a child, I remember how much I experienced the world through food. The first bite of American Doritos on a summer camp in the US, how bright red it was and how it was much saltier than the ones back home.

In college, my friends Kyle and Iris hosted countless elaborate dinners where we'd spend weekends grilling, drinking, and listening to progressive rock over occasional bursts of laughter.

Little by little, food shaped how I related with people I knew. How I thought about places. And more recently, how I showed affection for my partner through cooking.

I'll admit: I still fantasize about retiring, putting my computer keyboards down and starting a restaurant. Just so I can host loved ones over "family night". Setting the Table was a satisfying read because it demistified two things I always wondered about myself: what life could've been if I'd gone into the restaurant business, and what running a restaurant actually entailed.

To nobody's surprise, it's really hard. It was fun to get an inside scoop of Meyer's food and hospitality journey; how his parents' cooking shaped his worldview and his thought process of opening his first restaurant with no experience.

Meyer explains his philosophy for what makes a sucessful hospitality business, beyond "just" a restaurant. As someone who had only worked in the tech industry, this was a refreshing perspective. Not sure how much of it translates to my business, but I loved the overall human touch of it all:

• Service and hospitality. Service is a technical delivery of the product, like your particular way of setting the table. Hospitality is the soul behind it - approaching customers with empathy, thoughtfulness, and active listening. It takes both to be great.

• Empathy. "Empathy is not just an awareness of what others are experiencing; it’s being aware of, being sensitive to, and caring about how one’s own behavior affects others". Software engineers, take note!

There are many more tidbits he shares, but these are the core ideas. Overall, it struck me how much care and attention he put into every detail, like noticing a customer as soon as they get fidgety, proactively asking about who people are to make their dining experience more personalized, and creating a team around empathy as its north star. In his words: the secret to being at the top is to care about people, a lot.

While I enjoyed the book overall, the messaging did get reptitive towards the end, hence the 3 stars!

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Random tidbits & quotes I liked

Random fun fact - the first ever Shake Shack in MSG was by Danny Meyer! I remember going there all the time during my time in NY.

On what he expected of every employee. I love his take on "personal weather reports":

Self-awareness and integrity go hand in hand. It takes integrity to be self-aware and to hold oneself accountable for doing the right thing. I want to work with people who have a handle on what makes themselves tick. Self-awareness is understanding your moods (and how they affect you and others). In a sense, it is a personal weather report. Is the mood dry or humid? Is it raining or stormy? Is it warm and sunny or chilly and cloudy? The staff members’ individual and collective moods influence the customers’ moods; and in the intricate, fast-paced dance between the kitchen, dining room, and guests during a meal—when hundreds of people are served—it’s crucial for my staff members to be aware of and accountable for their own personal “weather reports.”

No one can possibly be upbeat and happy all the time. But personal mastery demands that team members be aware of their moods and keep them in check. If a staff member is having personal trouble, and wakes up angry, nervous, depressed, or anxious, he or she needs to recognize and deal with the mood. It does not serve anyone’s purposes to project that mind-set into the work environment or onto one’s colleagues. We call that “skunking.” A skunk may spray a predator when it feels threatened, but everyone else within two miles has to smell the spray, and these others may assume that the skunk actually had it in for them. It’s not productive to work with a skunk,

Tips for connecting with strangers:

I’m constantly reminding our staff members to initiate a relationship with our guests whenever it’s appropriate. For example, it’s amazing how powerful it can be simply to ask guests where they are from.

The old game of “Do you know So-and-so?” is a classic example of turning over rocks to further human connection. And it works.

As a founder, adding your spin on your business:

The founder of any new business has an opportunity to initiate the first expression of that business’s point of view through a compendium of aesthetic and philosophical choices. The minute the business hangs its shingle on the door it is not only open for business, but open to public feedback and scrutiny. Effective businesses remain true to their core, but also know how to hear, respond, and adjust to constructive feedback.