Today I went live on Substack with my friend, the author of one of my favorite books, restaurateur, and one of the best gift givers I know: Will Guidara.
He started by telling me that he was actually taking the call from his wife Christina Tosi’s desk, and that his favorite thing to do when he’s sitting at her desk is to leave her love notes and add a task about him to her to-do list. This led to a hilarious conversation in the chat wherein I polled our community about the best “aggressive love notes” they could write. My personal favorite might have been “I will hug you so hard until the stuffing pops out of you.”
Will has spent his career bringing the human back into fine dining, and reminding people that service is noble. But what we talked about today wasn’t just about restaurants. We looked at where and how you can host and make meaning everywhere (including an airline pilot on a delayed airplane).
It’s a beautiful conversation and you can now watch it by clicking on the video above.
Here are six takeaways from our conversation — small ways to practice hospitality in the places you already live.
1. Love the ones you’re with.
Will hosts a really great conference every fall in New York called The Welcome Conference. It’s a gathering for industry folks in the restaurant business: chefs, staff, waiters, soms, restaurateurs, and others. And it is basically a giant hug to the industry. Each year, Will invites a dozen or so speakers from all walks of life. And he realized that if he can create, host, and truly love on the speakers before they ever enter the room, that energy spreads to everyone else. So the night before the conference, he hosts the speakers at his home (or a friend’s), serves Chinese food family-style, and then gathers everyone into the living room for a kind of gift-giving ceremony. But these aren’t just any gifts. He and his team spend six to seven months researching each speaker, then give them something unreasonable. When I was in that circle, Will introduced me not through my bio, but through what shaped me: growing up, I spent my summers in New Delhi in my cousins’ houses, playing carrom, and I’ve always been a gatherer. My gift? A handmade cherry-wood carrom board carved in the shape of my book cover. To this day, it’s one of the most meaningful gifts I’ve ever received. Take a listen to the Live to hear about all the other brilliant, creative, delightful gifts he gave the other speakers. He loved on us, and then we felt safe to love on each other, and outward.
2. “We have an opportunity, maybe even a responsibility, to create a little bit of magic in a world that needs more magic.”
His advice to anyone managing anyone? Whatever you do for a living, whether you manage people or not, take the time to name why the work matters, how it impacts other people, and how it makes a difference. And this is where Will’s conviction comes in: there is nobility in service. When you serve other people, you give them something to look forward to. You might help them put down what’s heavy, even if just for a few hours. His line that stayed with me: “We have an opportunity, maybe even a responsibility, to create a little bit of magic in a world that needs more magic.” The assignment isn’t grandiosity, it’s care.
3. Hospitality is pursuing relationships with creativity and intention.
“Hospitality is pursuing relationships with creativity and intention. Neither one on their own is sufficient,” Will shared with us. Intention alone can become earnest-but-flat. Creativity alone can become clever-but-empty. You need both. His definition also pulls hospitality out of “the restaurant category” and puts it inside every relationship, every family, every gathering, every plane ride, every Tuesday dinner.
4. One size fits one and one size fits some.
No significant relationship comes to life if you apply the same move to every person. But in organizations, scaling “one size fits one” is hard, so you look for patterns: what happens over and over again, and what’s the most awesome way to respond every time? Will shared that when he ran Eleven Madison Park, they began to realize that there were a lot of engagements happening at their restaurant. “Of course you can pour free champagne, that’s good hospitality.” But once you see it’s a recurring moment, you ask: How do we make it more awesome? He walked across the street to Tiffany & Co., knocked on a bunch of doors, met the Head of Marketing and convinced them to give them 1,000 champagne flutes in their famous blue boxes to keep in the restaurant. When couples would get engaged, he would pour the champagne in these flutes and then gift the washed flutes to the couple after the meal. They now have the champagne glasses they toasted to on their engagement for the rest of their lives.
5. Treat the not-great moments with hospitality, too.
Will tells the story of being on an airplane that’s delayed on the tarmac. Everyone’s grumpy. The pilot comes out of the cockpit, walks over to families with kids, and says, “Hey, you wanna come see the cockpit?” Delight. Then, once he’s gone through all the kids, he gets on the loudspeaker and asks the adults, “Okay, who wants to see the cockpit?” Pure joy. The flight attendant tells Will he does this every time.
6. Don’t skip the daily “pre-meal” with your team.
Turn your “pre-meal” (AKA your daily huddle, or really any time with your people) into micro doses of daily leadership, team-building, and meaning-making. In a restaurant, Will says the pre-meal is “the 30-minute meeting that restaurants have every single day right before they open the doors and go into service. And it’s a meeting that most restaurants have, and yet it is one that is mostly wasted… It’s a leader’s greatest opportunity to lead, when you focus on the how and the why, when you share moments of inspiration.” If you have any kind of team, family, or community that gathers regularly, don’t waste your “pre-meal.”
Take a listen. I hope you’ll find some magic in it.
As always,
Priya
P.S. On Wednesday, December 10th, at 12pm ET, I’m going Live with Katie Riley, Deputy Campaign Manager of the Zohran Mamdani mayoral race, to unpack how strategic gathering shaped Zohran Mamdani’s recent NYC mayoral win. For the first time ever, Riley will share publicly how the campaign intentionally designed every gathering to be transformative — rallies that felt like cultural events to neighborhood walks and DIY merch that built identity. Riley helped turn these political moments into places where people actually wanted to show up. We’ll break down the choices behind it all and what any group can learn from that kind of momentum and intentionality.
