The Improvising Restaurant: Made (Up) to Order!

I was struck by an account I read in the book A Perfect Mess (by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman) of a New York restaurateur named Danny Meyer – a classic Daily Improviser who has shaken up the very concept of dining out with his various (and wildly varying) Manhattan eateries.

Abrahamson and Freedman describe the loose operational philosophy instituted by Meyer for his enterprises – an approach, say the authors, that runs against the traditional notion of the top chef as “absolute, heavy-handed ruler, if not raging tyrant” in the kitchen. As they describe it: “Meyer wants the kitchens of his restaurants to be scenes of rampant and collegial improvisation, not dictatorial consistency and rigidity.”

This improvisational spirit applies even more to the wait staff, who interact engagingly with patrons and make spur-of-the-moment offers such as free samples of menu items (to help the wavering diner decide) and complimentary bottles of wine.

Sounds like a total “just-wing-it” sensibility as applied to an organization, right? Well, not exactly – because, as the authors observe:

“[A] restaurant can’t run well as a glorious mess of improvisation…. [D]ishes have to be completed and delivered to tables with impeccable timing – a mechanically complex process that, if marred in any way, will ruin a dining experience no matter how brilliant the menu or engaging the waiters.”

So how do improvisation and structure coexist in Meyer’s restaurants? As the authors say, Meyer realized that spontaneous “happy surprises” could only be delivered to customers in the following way:

“[W]aiters would need to be able to rely on a highly ordered, highly predictable system of preparing and delivering food, leaving them free to improvise with customers on everything else. And that notion of a measure of randomness supported by a layer of order is the final pillar in [Meyer’s] philosophy.” [emphasis added]

This “layer of order” in Meyer’s restaurants can be found in exhaustive, explicit systems for preparing dishes and assigning waiters to tables, with processes facilitated by an expediter who manages the interfaces between the randomness and the order. As an associate of Meyer's says, "Danny's model for a restaurant is a jazz ensemble. There's a background theme that's predictable, and the instruments can improvise around it."

For the leader who may be skeptical of how improv relates to the business world, Danny Meyer's restaurants serve as a model for what the improvising organization can look like. In a business organization, "layers of order" can include company mission statements, core values, processes and procedures, and other structures that serve to point the organization's members in a common direction. Those structures, however, just serve as the unifying theme within which people can improvise to serve the needs of the moment. Within the improvising organization, the leader can see her role as being an "expediter of the interfaces between randomness and order," thus maintaining the flexibility-within-a-framework approach that leads to "happy surprises" for customers and employees alike!