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Guidara: Emotional hospitality matters more to customers than flawless technical excellence

Will Guidara · The Hospitality Principles That Build Billion-Dollar Startups · Sep 30, 2025 · at 2:07

Restaurateur and author Will Guidara discusses the core philosophy behind his book 'Unreasonable Hospitality' with host Sam Parr.

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“It wasn't the pursuit of excellence that actually took the restaurant over the top. It was the relentless, unreasonable pursuit of hospitality, right? Like you push everything to get every detail so unbelievably perfect, and then you do these messy things at the end. To make people feel so very seen, whether that's obsessing over every single garnish on a plate of crazy uber fine dining food, and then recognizing that the thing that people will actually remember is a hot dog or whatever other random thing we did for people. And so it's this quest for perfection and the acknowledgement that the most human moments are perfectly imperfect. And those are the stickiest of all.”

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