“Culture was the sum of all of the wanted behaviors that we celebrate for our team minus all the unwanted behaviors that we tolerate.”
Arch Eats · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Asked to define culture in a couple of sentences. Meyer says hospitality got his restaurants growing but didn't tell him what to do once there were many of them and he couldn't be in each one. His test of a company's culture is how it consistently feels when the boss isn't there.
Transcript
When I write a book, I'm primarily writing it as a self-discipline to try to understand what makes me tick, what's in my heart, what's in my mind. And I look back at 20 years. I started writing, this book basically took me four years to write. So you might say I've been looking back on 16 years. But I'm always asking myself what was working and also what was not working. But the underlying ethos, whether something worked really, really well, like Shake Shack and some of our restaurants, or whether they didn't work out so well, the underlying ethos was that I do begin every day by asking that question, what could possibly go right? Because any good thing that's ever happened always started with that question. There's no great thing that we ever did that started with the question, what could possibly go wrong. It just doesn't get you anywhere. I do think it's important to have a realistic understanding that sometimes things do go wrong. But even when they do, when you bring an ethos and a perspective, that even when something goes wrong, we could actually do it better. And so there's a chapter in the book called Crossing the Bridge during the pandemic, which is we didn't cause a pandemic, but we were faced with it. And it was not easy for anyone, not for anyone in any industry. That didn't mean that we were not responsible for how we would act and behave and treat people during that time. And we were also responsible for imagining who do we want to be when and if this thing is ever over. And it took that what could possibly go right mentality to get us there.
A lot of it involved hospitality, but a lot of it involved what you call culture. And a lot of this book is basically scaling the culture to your business. And hospitality is a fairly easy to define word. Culture is a little bit tougher. It's a little bit more nebulous. And you spent an entire book defining, how would you define it in a couple sentences that you could? And then why is it so important to restaurants these days?
Yes, well, setting the table continues to be the guidepost that we use in all of our restaurants, and it works. People definitely respond well when you make them feel welcome. Okay? Not rocket science. But it has worked so well for us that we started to grow our business. I never had done anything more than once. There was one Union Square Cafe, one Gramercy Tavern, on and on and on. One Shake Shack when I wrote Setting the Table 20 years ago. Unbelievable. Now there's over 700 in 22 countries. And we've opened many, many more restaurants. We've also closed some restaurants. And what I started to think about as I looked at 20 years was that hospitality was a fantastic beginning, and it will always be. But setting the table didn't, it enabled us to grow, but it didn't teach me what to do once we did grow. And I wanted to make sure that we didn't lose that something special that had gotten us there. And I needed to figure out how do we scale the way it feels to work here? How do we scale the way it feels to dine here across many restaurants when I can't be there? So if you ask me to tell you what I think culture is, you can tell the culture of any business, whether it's an airline or a restaurant or a hardware store, based on how does it consistently feel when the big boss isn't there, whatever her name is. So you could go to any of our restaurants this minute and I'm not there because I'm with you. And my question is, what's the culture of those restaurants? How does it feel to you to work there and how does it feel to you to do business with us even when I'm not there? How do we do things around here? That's culture. And ultimately what I figured out was that culture was the sum of all of the wanted behaviors that we celebrate for our team minus all the unwanted behaviors that we tolerate. That will ultimately be our culture.
And you spent a lot of time thinking about this. You started something called the Culture Code. You did a feedback forward platform. You constantly solicited your employees for their input. That's something that I think only recently has come to fruition. It's really important to listen. It's really important to act. And all this is part of this culture movement.
No question about it. By the way, Daniel Coyle wrote a great book called The Culture Code. He features us in the book, but I give him all the credit for that entire concept.
I started the book. I looked at the chapter titles, and that's where I really got hooked. Culture is like a shark. No spoilers here, but that's a very apt metaphor. Change your grip. A simple tennis analogy from long ago that you applied system-wide and company-wide. And this one I really liked. It's called One Foot on the Accelerator, the Other on the Braid. And I thought, oh, I know this one. If you ride a car or a motorcycle, if you keep your foot, if you keep on the accelerator and the brake, you've had extreme balance, extreme control, no sudden starts, and no sudden stops. And I thought, God, this is brilliant. I wonder how Danny applied this. And that wasn't the concept at all. You took it in a different direction.