Books for Restaurant and
Hospitality Workers

The best books for restaurant and hospitality workers are Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, Setting the Table by Danny Meyer, Work Clean by Dan Charnas, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, and The E-Myth Restaurateur by Michael Gerber. Guidara is where to start, and Charnas is the one that changes a shift.

An industry that reads its own books

This is one of the few working lists on this site where I did not have to go looking outside the industry for good material. Hospitality writes about itself well, probably because the work is dramatic and the people in it are unusually verbal, and because the question at the center of it, what it means to make a stranger feel taken care of, is genuinely interesting.

So the list divides cleanly. There are two books about what hospitality actually is, one about surviving the physical chaos of service, two memoirs that tell the truth about the life, and one about the fork almost everybody in this industry eventually faces, which is whether to open your own place.

The thing worth naming before the list is that this industry has been changing what it tolerates. The kitchen culture of twenty years ago, the one that treated exhaustion and abuse as a rite of passage, is not gone but it is no longer defended in public, and a couple of the books here are documents of that older world rather than models for working in it.

Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

The current standard, and the book most likely to be on your GM’s desk. Guidara ran Eleven Madison Park through its rise to the top-ranked restaurant in the world, and the argument he makes is a clean one. Service is the technical delivery of a product, and hospitality is how that delivery makes the person feel, and the two are entirely separate skills.

The stories are the point. The hot dog he served at a table that had eaten everywhere in the city except a street cart is the one everybody quotes, and the reason it works is that the extravagant gesture cost almost nothing and required only that somebody was listening. Useful whether you are running a room or working a section in it.

Setting the Table by Danny Meyer

Older, quieter, and in some ways the deeper book. Meyer built Union Square Hospitality Group, and his central idea is enlightened hospitality, meaning the order of who you take care of runs employees first, then guests, then community, then suppliers, then investors, in that sequence and not another one.

Guidara worked for Meyer, and reading them in order shows you where the ideas came from. If you are a manager, this is the more useful of the two, because Meyer is specific about hiring and about what he calls the hospitality quotient, which is his answer to why technical skill alone never produces a great room.

Work Clean by Dan Charnas

The most practical book here and the one nobody outside the industry knows about. Charnas takes mise en place, which every cook already understands as a kitchen discipline, and treats it as a complete system for organizing work, attention, and time.

What makes it unusual is the direction of translation. Almost every productivity book asks you to convert advice built for an office into something usable on a line. This one starts in your world and moves outward. If you have ever been buried in the middle of a rush because of decisions you made during prep, this is the book that explains what happened.

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

The best written book on this list by some distance. Hamilton opened Prune in New York and had an MFA before she had a restaurant, and it shows in every paragraph.

It is a memoir rather than a manual, moving through a strange childhood, years of catering work, and the grinding reality of opening a place with no money. It also offers something the male-dominated shelf around it mostly does not, which is an honest account of doing this work while having a family and a life that keeps making demands the schedule cannot absorb.

The E-Myth Restaurateur by Michael E. Gerber

Read this a year before you sign a lease, not a year after. Gerber’s argument, which he has made about several industries, is that being excellent at the work and running a business built around that work are unrelated skills, and that most owners discover this only after committing everything they have.

He calls the moment of confusion the entrepreneurial seizure, when a talented cook reasons that since he is doing the work anyway he may as well do it for himself, and then finds he has bought a harder job with worse hours and a bank covenant. Repetitive and formulaic in places. Correct about the thing that matters.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

The famous one, and worth reading with its date attached. Bourdain published it in 2000, and it remains the most honest writing anybody has done about what the back of house actually feels like, the heat and the profanity and the peculiar loyalty of a crew that gets through service together.

It also romanticized a culture around drugs, exhaustion, and who was made welcome in a kitchen that the industry has spent two decades moving away from, and Bourdain himself became critical of parts of it in later years. Read it as a document of a world rather than as a description of how to live in this one.

Which one to pick

If you want one, read Unreasonable Hospitality. If you want the one that changes what next Friday feels like, read Work Clean.

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