Unreasonable Hospitality in Unreasonable Times: A Book Review

Will Guidara’s leadership wisdom is valuable — until you realize some people don’t need unreasonable hospitality. They need consequences. What happens when fairy-tale service philosophy meets fascist reality?

I was reading Will Guidara’s *Unreasonable Hospitality* during the week the U.S. government shut down, when millions of people who work full-time in food service — the very industry Guidara celebrates — were about to lose SNAP assistance. The cognitive dissonance was jarring. Here I sat, absorbing wisdom about creating $2,000 magical dining experiences while my social media feeds filled with posts about families wondering how they’d eat. Outside my window, a political operative was calling for people to “strap up” because food assistance recipients would be “chimping out” once their benefits disappeared.

The juxtaposition felt obscene.

And yet I kept reading, because Guidara’s book contains genuine leadership wisdom — the kind that translates beyond fine dining into the grittier work of making magazines, managing teams, and trying to maintain institutional integrity during a fascist creep. The trick is separating the valuable from the privileged, the practical from the fairy tale.

What’s Worth Keeping

Guidara built Eleven Madison Park into one of the world’s best restaurants through relentless attention to culture and team-building. His core insight — that taking care of one another must take precedence over everything — feels revolutionary in workplaces where crisis management masquerades as strategy. I scribbled notes in the margins, thinking about my own magazine team navigating institutional dysfunction.

The thirty-minute daily meeting concept alone is gold. Guidara writes that “a daily thirty-minute meeting is where a collection of individuals becomes a team.” These aren’t status updates; they’re cultural rituals where team members share examples of excellence, build shared language, and create belonging. I’ve seen versions of this work. When you give people room to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they show up differently. They care.

His approach to delegation resonates too. He gave ownership of the beer program to a young food runner who spent his off days in Brooklyn beer gardens, who knew obscure hops and aging processes. That runner ended up securing a Pappy Van Winkle barrel for an exclusive Brooklyn Brewery collaboration. The lesson: “The more control you take away from the people on the ground, the less creative they can be.” In too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information. Guidara flips this, insisting that frontline workers often see solutions invisible from corner offices.

I also appreciate his framing of persistence. “No one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable,” he writes. Ambition is a nuclear reactor, and you don’t reach the top by taking no for an answer. Magazine work requires this — the willingness to pitch the ambitious feature, to push for the redesign, to advocate for the story that makes people uncomfortable. Reasonable people produce reasonable work.

And his father’s wisdom about happiness hit home: “The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.” I’ve built my weeks around this principle — Record Store Day pilgrimages, football Saturdays, the countdown to European trips still months away. These small anticipated joys sustain us through the grind.

The Privilege Problem

But heck, there’s a massive blind spot running through this book like a seam you can’t unsee once you notice it.

Guidara grew up going to fancy Manhattan restaurants with his dad. His customers spent thousands on single meals. He operates in a rarified world where the baseline assumption is that everyone deserves to be spoiled rotten, that every diner arrives in good faith, that unreasonable hospitality will always yield beautiful results.

I spent years waiting tables — not at Eleven Madison Park, but at places where you work for tips and hope the drunk guy doesn’t grab your ass on the way to the bathroom. I remember the man at Good Eats who nearly popped a vein demanding I refill his soda for the fifth time, right that second, while I was mid-conversation with another table. Who did I think I was? There were the tables who ran you ragged and left you a dollar on a sixty-dollar check. The ones who expected you to work for free.

Guidara never addresses what to do when customers are cruel. What’s the reasonable response to unreasonably rude behavior? As a former server, I know it happens. As a woman, I really know it happens. Men may have the luxury of always assuming good intent, but there’s a reason women stay on guard.

The book also never grapples with class. Many food service workers labor full-time but still need government assistance to eat. They’re the ones making Guidara’s magic possible — the porters, the prep cooks, the bussers who work doubles and take the bus home. When he writes about saving the best wine for your worst days, I think about people who’ve never had a “best bottle” to save. This investment in creating fairy tales feels toxic when economic inequality yawns wider every year.

Guidara fired a server who “dragged the team down” and clashed with corporate overlords about flower arrangements, so he clearly has boundaries. But he never articulates where the line is between unreasonable hospitality and being a doormat. Between making magic and enabling entitled behavior. Between excellence and excess.

When Hospitality Becomes Complicity

I kept thinking about the fascist operative attacking my institution — calling specific Black women “racist,” demanding they be fired, inciting his followers to flood our social media with vitriol. This man doesn’t need unreasonable hospitality. He needs to be held accountable. He needs someone to say: No. This behavior doesn’t get rewarded with magic.

Guidara’s philosophy assumes everyone operates in good faith, that kindness begets kindness, that going above and beyond will soften hearts. But what happens when someone uses your hospitality as a weapon? When they exploit your generosity to demand more concessions, more capitulations, more proof of your subservience?

Right now, institutions across higher education are genuflecting to theocrats and white supremacists, terrified of being targeted next. We’re removing Pride flags and scrubbing diversity language and tiptoeing around anything that might anger the mob. We’re choosing “peace” over principle, confusing hospitality with complicity.

Sometimes unreasonable times require unreasonable courage, not unreasonable hospitality. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is hold the line. Get in the trenches with everyday people — the ones losing food assistance, the ones being targeted for their identities, the ones whose boats won’t be lifted by trickle-down fairy dust.

I’ve kept Guidara’s leadership lessons. The thirty-minute meetings, the delegation philosophy, the insistence on building culture through language and ritual. I’m better at my job because of this book. But I’m rejecting the Disney-fied worldview underneath — the notion that everyone deserves to be catered to, that unlimited generosity always yields returns, that we can hospitality our way through a reckoning.

Some people don’t need more magic. They need consequences. And some situations don’t need hosts — they need organizers, advocates, people willing to make the powerful uncomfortable instead of making the comfortable more powerful.

The real question isn’t “How do we create unreasonable hospitality?” It’s “Who deserves our energy, and when does hospitality become complicity?”

That’s the book Guidara didn’t write. That’s the conversation we need to have.

Writer and editor. 13+ years of daily morning pages. I explore culture, creativity, and institutional survival at the pivot age. Based in Texas, dreaming of mountains.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​