The front door is the first signal that you get when you go to a full-service restaurant as to whether this is going to be a transaction—i.e., 'Give me your name, and I'll give you a table. Give me your order, and I'll give you food. Pay your bill, and we're done.' It could either be that, or it could be recognition, eye contact, a smile, a sense that I'm happy to see you, a sense that I do see you, a sense that you matter.

We use the expression 'excellence reflex' ... Doing something as well as you can do it and learning to do it even better tomorrow is a journey ... I'm not the least bit interested in perfection—it doesn't exist. It's a recipe to be pretty unhappy in life. I'm very, very interested, on the other hand, in the notion of excellence—and I do believe that excellence is a journey ... Excellence is honoring the work you did yesterday, all the mistakes and everything, you gave it your best, but dammit, figure out how you could do it a little bit better today.

If somebody writes you an email, you don't just write them back; it's inexcusable not to figure out something about them before you write them back. Does that take extra time? Yes, of course it does. However, it's going to most likely lead to a much richer opportunity if a good opportunity exists at all.

To have an enduring business built to last, it needs to become essential in the lives of people. It needs to be the kind of business that makes your life better because it exists.

My notion of mistakes is that they are the greatest renewable resource on Earth—there's always another one. You're never going to run out of it—ever, ever, ever. As long as the human race occupies parts of the Earth, there will be mistakes.

If you're part of an organization that wants to compete to win, you better surround yourself with people who want to win themselves.

To make it your favorite restaurant, we not only had to be really good at what we did, but we had to be even better at how we made you feel. We had to make you feel like we were on your side, which is hospitality, but then take it a step further: we had to really make you feel like you belonged.

We're looking for people who have six emotional skills at a very, very high level: kind optimism, curiosity—intellectual curiosity, amazing work ethic, highly empathetic, highly self-aware, and a high degree of integrity. Those are the six emotional skills.

Most leaders have a vision for where they're trying to take you, and good leaders not only have a vision, but they're able to communicate it.

I think really strong leaders need to be really good at not only having a vision and communicating the vision, they have to be equally good at persuading people.

I feel like leadership is about setting priorities and then exemplifying the behaviors that you want to see in other people.

ABCD simply means 'always be collecting dots,' so you can always be connecting dots.

I think restaurants, especially full-service restaurants, really exist for the purpose of creating a place to belong to.

I think people also want to connect with people, and we look for things that we have in common, which is the root of the word community, which we're all craving.

The best talent I know in the world would love to buy into a vision and then sort of be left alone to do their best work, and not have a micromanager at every step of the way saying 'Do it this way, do it this way, do it this way.'