Why the restaurant world hates beer drinkers

I’ve always thought working in hospitality is like getting a free MBA – but one rooted in the real world rather than theory. So it didn’t surprise me to discover a brilliant business idea in a book about the restaurant trade. In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, star restaurateur Will Guidara describes his quest to take Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park from number 50 in the San Pellegrino restaurant rankings in 2010 to the number one spot in 2017.

To check out the competition, Guidara takes a group of employees to the top restaurant on the list. Unsurprisingly, the experience is superb, and his team busily spot ideas they could copy. But Guidara isn’t interested in these. At the end of the evening, he asks them a completely different question. ‘What features of the experience were disappointing?’ They settle on two: the coffee was merely OK, and the beer drinkers received scant attention compared with the oenophiles.

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(This resonates. Beer lovers are pariahs in restaurants. ‘I’d like some wine, please.’ ‘Ah, monsieur, let my colleague gently fellate you while we talk about varietals.’ ‘What beer do you have?’ ‘One on draught and two in bottles.’)

So Guidara, like a true game theorist, goes back to his own restaurant, and appoints one employee (a single-origin coffee nerd) as the ‘coffee sommelier’; a craft-beer nut in the kitchen is correspondingly made ‘beer sommelier’. Beer drinkers expecting ‘Uh, we’ve maybe got Sam Adams’ are amazed to be brought a menu of artisan beers and food pairing suggestions. It works upstream too. Craft brewers are so chuffed a top restaurant is taking beer seriously that they send endless sample cases.