Hospitality is at the heart of this restaurateur’s success
by Jim H. Smith
By the time Danny Meyer arrived at Trinity, he’d already experienced many of the benefits of a liberal arts education. Though he was born and raised in St. Louis, he had traveled extensively throughout Europe. His father, Morton Meyer, was a noted hotelier and travel business entrepreneur, and when they were old enough, Danny and his brother and sister each took a turn working for their dad as travel agents in Europe.

Danny opted to fulfill this “basic training” in Rome, where it was only natural that a man who would go on to become one of the most successful restaurateurs in New York City would fall in love with the cuisine. “My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking and to enjoy consuming good food and wine,” he says.

Yet, a culinary career was not at the front of his mind when he mapped a strategy for his undergraduate education. Instead, he was contemplating a career in government. “My dad’s attorney recommended Trinity to me, and it turned out to be the best thing I could have done at that point in my life,” Meyer says. “Trinity gave me a chance to explore myself and start defining success on my own terms. It was a really great experience.”

Value all experiences
Meyer’s major was political science, and it speaks volumes about the real urges and inclinations that would eventually define his career that he found an undergraduate opportunity to return to Italy. The late Professor Albert L. E. Gastman, he says, “really got me hooked on international politics.” So hooked, indeed, that Meyer enrolled for a semester of study at Trinity’s Rome campus. He already knew his way around the city from that summer job for his dad, a job in which he had already begun to intuit the ins and outs of hospitality that would undergird his career.

For a while, after he graduated, it seemed as though he might actually pursue a career in politics. The year he graduated, Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson mounted an independent campaign for the presidency. Meyer traveled to Chicago and signed on as Anderson’s field director in Cook County.

Anderson was a dark horse and failed in his bid, but for Meyer the experience was very valuable. After the Anderson campaign—which both demanded and enhanced strong salesmanship skills—Danny turned to a sales position with a company that manufactured tags to prevent shoplifting. One thing Trinity taught him, he says, was to value all experiences and be willing to try new things and continue learning.

He had found many avenues to such experiential learning at Trinity. Not only did he study abroad, but he became fluent in Italian. He nurtured his growing interest in jazz—and his verbal communications skills—as a WRTC disc jockey. He honed his leadership abilities and learned how to be a good writer. That skill came in handy when he wrote Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, his bestselling 2006 account of how he became a successful restaurateur in the highly competitive New York marketplace.

His restaurant career began, against not-insignificant odds, in the mid-1980s. Although John Anderson’s defeat had not disabused Meyer of his interest in politics, neither had politics replaced his lifelong passion for food and wine. So he decided to follow his heart, though he lacked the training and experience to be a chef. His entry point was the position of assistant manager at Pesca, an Italian seafood restaurant in New York’s popular Flatiron District. In 1985, after not much more than a year at Pesca, he invested his savings in a restaurant of his own. He called it the Union Square Café, and when it opened he was just 27.

His restaurant management experience was only a little deeper than his cooking experience. He had a few things going for him, though. There was, for instance, a lifetime of absorbing business wisdom from his family. His father’s father ran a chemical company and his mother’s dad founded a successful hair product company. Danny’s father was a brilliant man who, says Danny, really understood the hospitality industry, but lacked business discipline and team-building skills. The senior Meyer failed in business, twice. “I was determined not to make the same mistakes my father made,” says Danny. 

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