The restaurant industry is certainly tough—has been and will always be. More times than not, when I’m speaking with a chef or operator in the studio for This Is TASTE, once the mics are turned off, there is some batshit story to share about the ballooning cost of whole dorade, an influencer behaving badly, or a scary McLawyer letter followed by an aggressive shakedown attempt. These sessions can sometimes feel like therapy, followed by a double check that the mics aren’t still live. It’s also true that every working restaurant today was built on a foundation of bad decisions just barely resolved. Seasoned, well-reviewed restaurants are constantly overcoming blind-side sacks and comical self-owns to make it to fry another basket of Brussels sprouts. “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes,” Oscar Wilde once said, possibly referring to his favorite cucumber sandwich seller. (Apparently he had a thing for veggie sandwiches paired with Champagne.)
Danny Meyer’s new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, arrives 20 years after the publication of Setting the Table. Hospitality professionals and executives in every corner of business have considered STT required reading, and doors keep opening for Meyer because of it—several of them documented in this very book. The new book is written as a compelling, page-turning memoir—crisp, no bloat—with sections that switch stylistically into how-to-succeed-in-business voice.
Broadly, the pitch is a book about scaling Meyer’s legendary gracious hospitality. Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) has grown to 700 businesses across 24 countries—a staggering level of expansion from where things stood the last time we saw the author writing about his business. Classic Meyerisms get explained, like DFS (“Don’t fucking settle”), “Change your grip,” and “Think like a winemaker.” There’s plenty of great behind-the-scenes material, too, like the time he nearly went into business with the infamous former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, plus the lead-up to the Shake Shack IPO in early 2015, when shares in the company more than doubled in its first day of trading. There’s some New York Times restaurant critic commentary and a cinematic scene involving a Sam Sifton visit. It’s great fan service for New York City restaurant nerds, and I would stress again that the memoir portion is page-turning fun, not unlike Drew Nieporent’s terrific memoir from last year. But the book hits hardest in the sections where Meyer details his failures, many of them publicly for the first time.
The shuttering of the highly acclaimed Tabla opens the book, and Meyer admits to waiting two years too long in making the dreaded decision to do so. That’s a big admission, and it sprawls over several pages in painful details that likely still haunt the author today. Then there’s the failed cold-pressed juice company, Creative Juice, a collaboration with Equinox that was dead on arrival. His partnership with the chef Nick Anderer, who put Roman pizza on the NYC map with Marta, flamed out with the fast-casual Martina, and Anderer soon left the company. Add an ill-advised fine-dining restaurant in Chicago (located on the 18th floor of a hospital—lol) and struggles with the opening of the Financial District’s Manhatta.
Going back even further, the book touches on Meyer’s fraying relationship with Tom Colicchio over the future of Gramercy Tavern and addresses his big swing (and much-discussed miss) in shepherding the restaurant group toward a universal no-tipping policy that faded into the background during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book covers several reorganizations and leadership changes, some graceful and others more forced, and a few really candid admissions over infighting among USHG executives—all under Meyer’s watch. There are Italian cafés that bombed and creative missteps like caving to blogger opinion in 2013 and switching Shake Shack fries from frozen crinkle to hand-cut fresh—which was reversed back a year later.
Of course, for all these missteps, there has been incredible success for USHG and for Meyer personally. Daily Provisions keeps growing; Meyer’s investment arm, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, has made smart bets in hospitality tech and consumer packaged goods; and the restaurants themselves are for the most part well reviewed and as packed with customers as ever (I’m personally excited for the reboot of Maialino in 2027).
Danny and I recorded a podcast episode last week that will soon air, and I asked him about the experience of writing about the failures. Danny being Danny, he preferred to talk more about the positives, but I think we landed on the agreement that the restaurant industry needs to be reminded that even the Danny Meyers of the world can fail. What Could Possibly Go Right? will be celebrated in different ways, but my biggest praise is for Meyer putting all these wrong steps on the page for the industry to see. That, to me, was the right move.
I recently found a 2005 interview I did with Anthony Bourdain. We talked many times over the years, but this is probably my favorite. Tony brought two large duffel bags of this stuff to a Murray Hill photo studio, and we talked about it all, including:
✔️ A pile of foreign currency that got the stories flowing 💵💴💶
✔️ Some GREAT early 2000s tech 🎧
✔️ Stories about Peru, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam that took me back to the No Reservations era ✈️🎥
✔️ His love of cinema, writing longhand, Depeche Mode, and cigarettes ✍🏻
This is truly from a bygone era. I hope you dig it.
Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for this, Matt. Stoked to dive in.
Waiting two years too long to close Tabla. I came to food from corporate banking, and I know that exact silence.
Same disease there. Nobody wants to write down a position they defended in public. Admitting it early costs almost nothing and admitting it late costs everything, and people still pick late nearly every time.
Restaurants just have the added cruelty of doing it with a staff who can see it coming.