"Are you a blogger too? Give me your camera. I’ll take a really blurry, close-up picture of the grapefruit in my salad. When do you think people are going to start making fun of bloggers?" —Danny Meyer [via Dan D.]...
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The Washington Post's Joe Yonan has a short but great Q&A with NYC restauranteur extraordinaire Danny Meyer up today: "Let's say I get a salmon dish at Union Square Cafe, and it's not too salty, it's not under- or over-cooked. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but I'm disappointed with how it all comes together, and I think, "eh." What should I do?" "Tell me. Please tell me. And have the confidence to accept my suggestion for a solution. I have a choice. If it's a $25 entree, I have $8 or $9 invested in it. Would I rather save that $8 or $9 and have you go tell the world "eh"? Or do I make sure you leave the...
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Restauranteur Danny Meyer is best known for running eleven of the best places to eat in Manhattan, including Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern and the Shake Shack; his latest is Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business. 37 Signals has a great post up, Danny Meyert: Hospitality Is King, with excerpts from the book, an interview and a speech he gave at NYU recently: "The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard." Meyer said his business strategy is built on both good service, defined as the technical delivery of a product, and "enlightened hospitality," which is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient...
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We love chefs who write (Tony Bourdain, Michael Ruhlman). We love restaurateurs who write (Danny Meyer). We love farmers who write (Wendell Berry, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Andy Griffin, David Mas Masumoto, and our favorite Arkansas homeboy/Slavok Zizek devotee, Ragan Sutterfield). But we LOVE writers who happen to be all three rolled into one, and cute to boot. Dan Barber's latest in the NY Times: Amber Fields of Bland....
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First this was going to be a review of New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer's new book, Setting the Table. Then it was going to be a mouthwatering account of the food served at a party Monday evening that Danny and Audrey Meyer threw for their friends, colleagues, and extended family to celebrate the publication of the book. Then I realized that I could make this post about both those things and an exercise in shameless self-promotion for Serious Eats. First the book. Setting the Table is an uplifting, revealing account of Danny Meyer's journey from precocious product of a privileged Saint Louis upbringing in what sounds like a fairly dysfunctional but absolutely fascinating family. Meyer learned early that what...
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Danny Meyer's great innovation as a restaurateur is this: You can be serious about food without being pretentious, patronizing, and off-putting.
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