Setting the Table by Danny Meyer - Review

Shake Shack has been building a presence in my home city in the past few years, and I’ve remained conflicted about it.

I do like the food. I think the burgers are tasty. I’m a sucker for the custard shake, and the cheese fries are a guilty pleasure of mine.

I don’t like that everything is ordered à la carte and therefore everything requires me to check my financial situation just to confirm that I do indeed “have it” that day to afford a meal at Shake Shack.

But beyond that, one thing I’ve been particularly struck with in any Shake Shack I’ve ever been to is the mediocre service I’ve received—borderline rude, inconsiderate, slow, inconsistent. And it doesn’t really match the price point customers pay. It’s a lot of money to pay for the staff to be uninterested, unorganized, and inattentive. I expect that from my local Taco Bells or KFCs. At those prices, it barely registers. But Shake Shack positions itself as an upscale burger and fries brand. You would expect a little bit more.

None of this ever struck me as particularly noteworthy. All I really knew about the restaurant was what I knew—expensive food competing in the same niche as Five Guys or Smashburger. That is until I discovered Shake Shack was founded by Danny Meyer, the famous restaurateur and founder of Union Square Hospitality Group who wrote Setting the Table.

Danny Meyer’s memoir is about his career as a successful New York City restaurateur. Beyond that, though, it’s a collection of anecdotal stories to support his dogmatic view about what he calls “enlightened hospitality”: the responsibility he and his restaurants feel is necessary to develop a successful ecosystem for his staff, his guests, his community, his suppliers, and his investors (specifically, in that order).

One such story in the book that really turns heads is one in which a couple was dining at his restaurant, Eleven Madison Park (yes, that very same Eleven Madison Park), and they realized that they had left a bottle of champagne in their freezer. They talked to the sommelier about the likelihood that that bottle could explode. And in going the extra mile for their customers, the restaurant actually sent someone over to the couple’s home (with their permission, of course) to go inside and remove the bottle from the freezer while the couple continued their dinner undisturbed and with peace of mind.

The book is a fascinating read on a guy who really seems to have figured out what it is that makes a restaurant end up successful. It’s like he’s dialed into the exact right configuration of behaviors to ensure that his restaurants can rebound from mistakes and can nimbly roll with the punches. It’s a playbook that he’s devised and he makes it seem like a cinch. I guarantee in practice, part of the special sauce that doesn’t get accounted for when others try the same thing is that they aren’t Danny Meyer, successful New York City restaurateur.

One of the key components of his playbook is hiring the right staff—what he calls 51 Percenters. The thesis: emotionally intelligent individuals who have an innate understanding of great hospitality can learn the technical 49% of the job. It’s easier to train technicalities than it is to train emotional resonance with guests.

That’s why I’m so struck by what I see with Shake Shack. Don’t get me wrong: the business has been incredibly successful. It saw $1.45 billion in revenues in 2025. They are growing incredibly fast as evidenced by the two or three stores in my city alone that have cropped up in the last few years. They are doing something right. But it seems like the philosophy that Danny Meyer espouses has not consistently translated into the customer experience of his biggest restaurant brand. It’s all over their site in the same corporate jargon one would find about any company’s generic set of values, but racking my brain on all my anecdotal experiences after the fact, I find the frontline execution is lacking in any elevated hospitality (In fact, for the sake of this review, I visited a location again and went the entire visit without having been spoken to or checked in on by any member of the staff).

There’s probably many reasons for that. Chief among them of course is that Shake Shack is a public entity that absolutely does answer to its investors. And my guess is not after the employees, the guests, the communities, and the suppliers have their say.

It’s also not lost on me that growing a company of that magnitude likely requires sacrifices along the way that make sticking to the principles of Enlightened Hospitality difficult at scale. I certainly don’t expect a Shake Shack employee to break into my home and remove a bottle of champagne from my freezer. But there’s levels to the service one would expect to see from an ownership group that talks such a big game. A general acknowledgment of your customers when they walk through the door would be a good start.

I do want to be clear that if you are interested in what it means to holistically serve, this book can be an inspiration for you. There are a lot of really interesting nuggets among the pages, and I found myself thinking of how I could find ways in my own life to step out on that branch.

I have taken a rather cynical view on his approach to be sure. And I think in all fairness there is good there. But I question whether his most financially successful endeavor is meeting the same standards he sets in his book.

Setting the Table is a compelling account of what it means to serve people holistically. But Shake Shack raises a question the book cannot fully answer: Is Enlightened Hospitality an operating system that can be reproduced at scale, or does its success depend upon the presence, judgment, and exacting standards of Danny Meyer himself?