A great restaurant doesn't distinguish itself by how few mistakes it makes but by how well they handle those mistakes.
Interpretation
Great restaurants succeed not by avoiding mistakes, but by effectively managing them.
This quote highlights the importance of resilience and problem-solving in achieving success, especially in the restaurant industry. Rather than striving for perfection in every aspect, it emphasizes that the true mark of excellence lies in how a business responds to challenges and utilizes mistakes as opportunities for improvement and customer satisfaction.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing quality assurance, this quote could be used to emphasize the value of customer service.
My history has been to grow the roots as deeply as you can before going on to the next thing. That's why it took 10 years to go from Union Square Cafe to Gramercy Tavern, and another 10 years to go from Blue Smoke's first location to its second, and five to go from Shake Shack 1 to Shake Shack 2.
The most important thing you can do is make the distinction between customer service and guest hospitality. You need both things to thrive, but they are completely different.
In an age when so many groups are rolling out restaurants faster than your local baker makes donuts, my goal is that each restaurant feels hand-crafted. That they have their own soul.
Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions - for and to - express it all.
The story of my billion-dollar business starts like this. I borrowed $1,000 from a friend.
My career was exploding at the same time that social media itself was expanding. But when my online videos were taking off, I didn't think, 'Oh, great! I'm going to be able to parlay this into a career!' I just wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to perform live.
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
Luck is a component that a lot of people in the arts sometimes fail to recognise: that you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck you will not have a successful career.
If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.
The thing to do with money is to put it back into yourself, into your work, into the thing that is important, into whatever you are so much interested in that it is more important than money.
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