Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

INTRODUCTION

OVER THE COURSE OF the past twenty-one years I’ve opened and operated five white-tablecloth restaurants; an urban barbecue joint; a feel-good jazz club; a neo-roadside stand selling frozen custard, burgers, and hot dogs; three modern museum cafés; and an off-premises, restaurant-quality catering company. So far, I haven’t had the experience of closing any of them, and I pray I never will.

My business is very much in the public eye; it’s highly scrutinized, and it invites passionate opinions from experts and amateurs alike. A debate between people about their favorite restaurant can take on the heat of a political or religious discourse. And if you want to persist and thrive, you’d better not rest on your laurels. Every time you look up, there’s another new, eager competitor trying to attract the attention and affection of the public and the media, each hell-bent on tasting and weighing in on the newest thing.

But there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I was born to go into business for myself—and I was destined to find a business that would allow me to share with others my enthusiasm for things I find pleasurable. My craving for the adventures of travel, food, and wine is what first compelled me to do what I do. In fact, like so many other entrepreneurs I’ve met, I’m not even sure I had much of a choice: a career in the restaurant business was going to tap me on the shoulder even if I hadn’t found it first.

All these years later, the delights of the table continue to stimulate me as I pursue my career. But what really challenges me to get up and go to work every day, and has also motivated me to write this book, is my deep conviction about the intense human drive to provide and receive hospitality—well beyond the world of restaurants. Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life: eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some food. We receive many other gifts in a lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four. That first time may be the purest hospitality transaction we’ll ever have, and it’s not much of a surprise that we’ll crave those gifts for the rest of our lives. I know I do.

My appreciation of the power of hospitality and my desire to harness it have been the greatest contributors to whatever success my restaurants and businesses have had. I’ve learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business—in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities enlightened hospitality. It stands some more traditional business approaches on their head, but it’s the foundation of every business decision and every success we’ve had.

Since the beginning, people have told me that in going into the restaurant business, I chose one of the hardest businesses in the world. True, a restaurant has all kinds of moving parts that make it particularly challenging. In order to succeed, you need to apply—simultaneously—exceptional skills in selecting real estate, negotiating, hiring, training, motivating, purchasing, budgeting, designing, manufacturing, cooking, tasting, pricing, selling, servicing, marketing, and hosting. And the purpose of all this is a product that provides pleasure and that people trust is safe to ingest into their bodies. Also, unlike almost any other manufacturer, you are actually present while the goods are being consumed and experienced, so that you can gauge your customers’ reactions in real time. That’s pretty complex, emotional stuff.

This is not a typical business book, and it’s certainly not a how-to book. I don’t enjoy being told how—or that—I ought to do something; and I’m equally uncomfortable doling out advice without having been asked for it. What follows is a series of life experiences that led to a career in restaurants, which has, in turn, taught me volumes about business and life. Along the way, I’ve learned powerful lessons and language that have allowed me to lead with intention rather than by intuition. In the process of writing the book, I’ve done no research, gathered no evidence, and interviewed no one else. But I hope that admission won’t stop you from enjoying it.

You may think, as I once did, that I’m primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

CHAPTER 1

The First Course

I’VE LEARNED MORE OF what I know about life from people than from books, and I’ve learned much of what I know about people from the food they eat. I’m on the road a number of days each year, solo, or with my family, buddies, or colleagues—and when I travel, the first thing I do in my first free moments in a town is visit its food markets, pastry shops, butchers, and grocery stores. I read menus posted outside restaurants. I watch the residents argue back and forth with the merchants over the virtues of their wares. When I meet people who look like locals, I ask them where they’d eat if they had only one or two days in town, as I do. Cultures that care deeply about food often care about life, history, and tradition. I’m constantly on the lookout for local idiosyncrasies, ways of eating that exist nowhere else. And I’m always energized by a hunt for the best version of any local specialty.

In towns throughout Italy’s Piedmont I’ve tasted a meringue-hazelnut cookie called brutti ma buoni (ugly but good). In Siena I’ve searched for the supreme panforte, a sweet cake. In New York’s Chinatown I walk into butcher shops—not necessarily to buy, but to observe how people select their cuts of meat and sausage. In Maine, of course, I cherish tiny wild blueberries. In northern Wisconsin I’m unable to resist perch, bass, pike, and Native American fry bread. In Miami, I look for Cuban counter restaurants. In Texas, there isn’t time enough to visit all the Mexican taquerias for breakfast. And the barbecue—within a thirty-five-mile radius of Austin in the Texas Hill Country lie five towns I revere, each with a distinctly different style of barbecue. The elements of barbecue are limited—ribs, brisket, pulled pork, chopped pork, minced pork, sausage, chicken, cole slaw, beans, and a handful of side dishes—but it has become an American culinary language with thousands of dialects and accents. I try to understand each variation. During one thirty-six-hour road trip through North Carolina, I tasted fourteen variations on chopped pork, each defined by subtle and dramatic differences in texture, the degree and type of smoke used, the amount of tomato or vinegar in the sauce, how much heat was applied to the meat, as well as how much or how little crackling got chopped up and tossed in. And that’s in addition to checking out the many styles of fried chicken, Brunswick stew, and hush puppies on offer.

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been eating with my eyes, nose, and mouth. When I was four I fell in love with stone crab at the Lagoon restaurant in Miami Beach. I couldn’t stop eating it (and apparently I couldn’t stop talking to anyone who would listen about the cwacked cwab). Over the next years I remember savoring variations of key lime pie in Key West; eating my first roadside cheeseburger somewhere in the hills outside Santa Barbara; trying Dungeness crab and saline abalone at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf; and having a lobster roll in Ogunquit, Maine. I devoured my first custardy quiche lorraine as a seven-year-old when my parents took us to the city of Nancy in France. I tasted bottled water (Evian and Vittel) for the first time in the town of Talloires, and I can also remember exactly how the water of Lake Annecy tasted as I swam in it. I discovered fraises des bois (wild strawberries) and crème fraîche at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence; I tasted a baguette with saucisson and pungent moutarde in Paris’s Jardin des Tuilieries. My writing improved because my mother insisted that I keep a diary of our trip. At the time, I hated doing this. But the diary turned out to be one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me. I wasn’t writing about the museums and churches we’d seen. Instead I chose to write about food.

Back in my hometown, St. Louis, I was no less curious about what people ate. When I brought my lunch from home to elementary school, I swapped and shared sandwiches, not because the other kids’ lunches were better, but because this was the best way I knew of to learn about another family. I had never heard of Miracle Whip until I traded my braunschweiger on rye with another kid for his baloney sandwich (one slice of Oscar Mayer and Miracle Whip on Tastee white bread). It tasted nothing like the Hellmann’s mayonnaise we used at home, and I began to understand something about families, solely on the basis of their preference for Hellmann’s or Miracle Whip. I was fascinated to discover that the household across the street used Maull’s, the thin, tangy classic St. Louis barbecue sauce, whereas my family was in the more mainstream Open Pit camp, using it as a base to be doctored with other ingredients. I learned that various brands of peanut butter tasted better with certain brands of jelly. I observed that some families chose Heinz ketchup, while others used Hunt’s or Brooks. I got to know and cared about the differences in the flavors of these ketchups.

These explorations of food not only taught me about myself and others but were central factors in how and why I chose to go into the restaurant business, and perhaps even in why the restaurants have fared so well. My discoveries have also convinced me that there’s always someone out there who has figured out how to make something taste just a little bit better. And I am inspired by both the search and the discovery. The restaurants and other businesses I have opened in New York City—Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke, Jazz Standard, Shake Shack, The Modern, Cafe 2, and Terrace 5 (our cafés for visitors within the Museum of Modern Art), plus Hudson Yards Catering—were all conceived and are all driven by a passion to add something new and compelling to what I call a dialogue between what already exists and what could be. When I decided to create Tabla, our Indian-inspired restaurant, I wrote a list of ten things that one could ordinarily expect of an Indian restaurant in New York—they included a predictable menu; ornate décor with background sitar music; and austere service and hospitality. Then I asked myself what Tabla might add to these expectations—what it could perhaps add to the dialogue New Yorkers already had with Indian restaurants. Although its earliest years were rather rocky—perhaps because we were trying to learn and educate at the same time—Tabla has more than exceeded my goals for it, pioneering new Indian cooking in America and building a solid foundation of loyal customers. Perhaps the surest sign of its success is that it has inspired derivative restaurants in New York and beyond.

Whether the subject is Indian spices, new American cuisine, the neighborhood bistro, barbecue, luxe dining, a big-league jazz club, the traditional museum cafeteria, or hamburgers and milk shakes, my passion is always to explore the object of my interest in depth, and then to combine the best of what I’ve found with something unexpected to create a fresh context. I then look at the result and ask myself and my colleagues what it would take to do this even better. Creating restaurants or even recipes is like composing music: there are only so many notes in the scale from which all melodies and harmonies are created. The trick is to put those notes together in a way not heard before. For us, the ongoing challenge has been to combine the best elements of fine dining with accessibility—in other words, with open arms. This was once a radical concept in my business, where excellent cuisine was almost always paired with stiff arm’s-length service. Sometimes, we’ve moved in the other direction, beginning with the casual atmosphere of a barbecue joint or a shakes-and-burgers stand, and then attempting to exceed expectations by employing a caring staff and using the finest ingredients. Our formula is a lot tougher to achieve than it sounds, but it can be applied successfully to virtually any business you can name.

WHERE DOES MY HUNGER for good food served with thoughtful care and consistency come from? Why am I so energized by seeking to uncover the best? The answer is my family, though its various influences on me have often been at odds. My three most important male role models were businessmen with profoundly different business philosophies, personalities, and styles.

My parents, Roxanne and Morton Louis Meyer, had spent the first two years of their youthful marriage in the early 1950s living in the city of Nancy, capital of the French province of Lorraine, where my dad was posted as an army intelligence officer. He was the son of Morton Meyer, a St. Louis businessman who had been educated at Princeton and ran a chemical company called Thompson-Hayward. Grandpa Morton was a visionary civic leader and a die-hard Republican—but one who understood the importance of working effectively with Democrats. For instance, he collaborated with Senator Stuart Symington to raise the funds and forge the coalitions necessary to build the St. Louis flood wall. He was a stoic member of the city’s establishment, and rarely talked to his family about his work, though he often talked to me about baseball and horse racing. There were no surprises with Grandpa Morton, and I loved him for that. He was in many ways the opposite of his flamboyant, entrepreneurial son, my dad, who also attended Princeton, where he demonstrated a flair for languages, having mastered French, Italian, and Latin (and, as the managing editor of the Daily Princetonian, English).

My mother too was the child of a privileged midwestern family. Her father, Irving B. Harris, was a singular man whose combining of social consciousness with business acumen was an enormous influence on me as a human being, and ultimately as a restaurateur. He graduated from Yale, and he made his first fortune before he was forty years old, having cofounded the Toni Home Permanent Company with his brother Neison. They sold it to the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1948 for what was then an enormous sum: $20 million.

Grandpa Irving’s piercing analytical business mind was radically different from my father’s intuitive entrepreneurialism. Morty, as my dad was known, always had an abundance of new, imaginative ideas for companies that he would run—or try to run—by himself. Irving, on the other hand, invested in or acquired other peoples’ businesses, especially when the ideas that defined these companies were compelling to him. His passion wasn’t to operate the companies, but rather to bet on the quality of their senior leadership. Evaluating human potential was every bit as important to him as any business idea.

I adored Grandpa Irving, and I was awed by his otherworldly business success. Through him I became aware of my own competitive zeal and began to believe in my own potential for winning. But for many years I suppressed my love for him and also muffled my own self-actualization, out of misguided deference to my father. Irving and Morty may have once loved each other, but as the years went by they grew to dislike each other intensely. If pressed for his true opinion, Irving would have described Morty as an unpredictable, irresponsible riverboat gambler. For his part, my dad considered his father-in-law an overbearing tyrant who couldn’t loosen his all-controlling grip on his daughter, or for that matter on anyone else in the family. Morty called Irving the boss. Their adversarial relationship turned out to be detrimental to my parents’ marriage, which would end twenty-five years after it began.

In 1955, at the conclusion of my dad’s overseas military service, my parents were still very much in love with each other and with Europe. Their knowledge of and fondness for France in particular was a powerful bond between them. From a very young age I was lucky to be taken abroad on family vacations, and it was on those trips that I was first immersed in the unaffected, timeless culture of gracious hospitality represented by European restaurateurs and innkeepers. In France we usually stayed in low-key, family-run inns where the welcome felt loving and the gastronomy was exceptional. Those trips left a lasting impression. The hug that came with the food made it taste even better! That realization would gradually evolve into my own well-defined business strategy—the core of which is hospitality, or being on the guests’ side.

Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions—for and to—express it all.

In St. Louis my father parlayed his love of all things French into a career as an innovative and successful travel agent. Among his prized collections were what must have been every back issue of Gourmet, Holiday, and later Travel and Leisure; he also built on a wide range of friendships he and my mother had established with French innkeepers. His agency, Open Road Tours, packaged customized driving trips, often in conjunction with Relais de Campagne, a network of lovely family-operated inns around France. (Relais de Campagne later evolved into Relais et Châteaux, now a prestigious international network of small luxury hotels. My dad remained active with Relais et Châteaux for years; he was enormously proud when his own small hotel in St. Louis, the Seven Gables Inn, became affiliated with Relais et Châteaux in the late 1980s.) This was long before such excursions off the beaten path became common in the travel industry. Dad exulted in planning these driving tours of the countryside; he’d note exactly where travelers would stumble upon a certain vineyard, a worthwhile museum, or a particularly good bistro. His clients loved his attention to detail, his business thrived and I was bursting with pride when I told people my dad had become president of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA), an important trade organization.

At home, too, he and my mom were Eurocentric: They often hosted cocktail parties and dinner parties for friends and business colleagues from France, Italy, and Denmark, who either were in town on business or had made a detour to St. Louis just to see us. For several years our house was home to the grown children of French innkeepers. By day these young people would help out in Dad’s office with translations and administrative tasks, and by night they would act as au pairs for my sister, Nancy; my brother, Tommy; and me. They became, for me, informal cultural ambassadors from a wondrous place called France. French was always being spoken around the house, either by our guests or by my parents (who used it at the dinner table especially when they wanted to discuss something not meant for our ears). Our neurotic, inbred French poodle, Ratatouille, was named after my dad’s favorite Provençal dish. To this day the pungent smell and sound of garlic, olive oil, and eggplant sizzling in a skillet will evoke powerful memories in me. There was always a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages on the table, and when dad and I cooked a chateaubriand on the grill and the fat-induced flames shot too high, he brought them under control in his own idiosyncratic fashion—by dousing the steaks with whatever bottle of red wine he happened to be drinking at that moment. Which, of course, caused more flames.

My father was unquestionably my childhood hero: a hedonist, a gastronome, and a man who cherished and passionately savored life. He loved the excitement and risk of the racetrack and gave me a taste for it, even when I was too young to place bets legally. Going to the track was a Meyer family tradition of long standing; my dad’s parents spent most of every August in Saratoga, New York, going to the track six days a week for nearly a month. Dad also took risks as a businessman. He was always coming up with exciting new ideas based on his love of travel and food, and on his constant drive to share his finds with others. At one point Open Road Tours had offices and staffs in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. Later, it opened offices all over Europe; and I’ll never forget the day he proudly showed off an Open Road stock certificate bearing the name of Ava Gardner as an investor. He had a publicist in New York named Ethel Aaron who promoted his business in fascinating ways, like having my dad cast as an imposter on To Tell the Truth. As an eight-year-old I was proud to boast to my friends that my dad was an imposter on television.

I never fully understood how or why, but sometime in the late 1960s, when I was still a young boy, Open Road Tours went bankrupt. I remember abundant tears and shame, but few details. I heard comments like, We expanded too quickly; and I had thoughts like, My hero failed. My paternal grandparents were torn apart too: their only two sons had been in business together—my father as president and his younger brother, my uncle Bo, as vice president. Whatever events had led to the bankruptcy had also driven a sharp wedge between the two brothers. I was crushed when my Aunt Lois, my Uncle Bo, and my first cousins—whom I loved dearly—moved from St. Louis to rebuild their lives in Washington, D.C. This was another confusing and painful consequence of the failed business. My mother was anguished, and her disappointment and disapproval were apparent. Business details were not openly discussed, but the family’s bruises were deeply felt.

In 1970, when I was twelve, my father leaped into the hotel business, in Italy. Despite the pleas of my mother and with Irving’s begrudging help in the form of a $1 million loan, he committed himself to long leases on one hotel in Rome and another in Milan. He was certain that becoming a hotelier would be his ticket to fortune. My mom—correctly—maintained that it promised nothing more than protracted absences from home. There was always some reason my dad had to go to Italy. Each time the hotel workers went on strike, he flew to Rome or Milan to help make beds. Business flagged and lagged, and although he was spending half a month at a time away from his family to address problems, it inevitably proved impossible for him to operate a hotel business across two continents. At an enormous financial cost and an even greater emotional cost, my father finally found a buyer for his two leases. He then went on to his next idea.

In 1972, still irrepressibly optimistic, my father created another new business, called Caesar Associates. This new company would sell packaged group tours at a deep discount for a very narrow niche of travelers known as interliners—airline employees and their families. As members of the International Air Transport Association (IATA)—an industry trade group—interliners could fly standby at unbelievably low rates. Dad’s business model was simple but original. He aggregated all the discounts to which members of IATA were entitled and packaged trips lasting up to two weeks. In addition to low airfares, he negotiated rock-bottom rates for hotels, ground transport, sightseeing, shopping, and dining. The value he added was to offer highly imaginative itineraries and use the underlying buying power of group travel to create an extraordinary rapport between price and quality. He hired sparkling young tour guides at each destination, and he kept his clients informed of travel opportunities by writing an endless stream of marketing collaterals. He was a terrific writer and editor, and his direct mailings inspired me—years later—to create my own newsletter as a way to reach out to and widen our base at Union Square Cafe. He was always after me to correct every grammatical mistake I made or delete every superfluous word I used in the USC Newsletter. (Doubtless he’d have some editorial comments about this book as well!)

Caesar Associates actually thrived for many years, with outposts in London, Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid, and Rome. But this success wasn’t enough for my father. Having failed to learn some critical lessons from his earlier business failures in the 1960s and 1970s, he gambled the fortunes of his entire business on another new one, involving risky and questionable real estate and hotel deals back in St. Louis. He eventually owned two hotels in St. Louis, one of which—the Seven Gables Inn, with its French restaurant, Chez Louis—met with critical acclaim. But the other hotel—the Daniele Hilton, with its mediocre London Grill—was a failure on every count. My father had leveraged his entire company to purchase these hotels, and also to purchase a medical building in Clayton, Missouri, which he planned to reimagine and redevelop into something big. However, by the time he had emptied the building of its existing rent-paying tenants, the bottom had fallen out of the economy. His funders dropped out, but not before suing him. Although Dad may have been an inventive entrepreneur, he did not have the necessary emotional skills or discipline, and he failed to surround himself with enough competent, loyal, trustworthy colleagues whose skills and strengths would have compensated for his own weaknesses. By 1990, shortly before he died of lung cancer at the age of fifty-nine, he was once again bankrupt. Once again, he had to inform his family—his second wife, Vivian, and his three children and their spouses—about a failure. We all had a painful sense of déjà vu.

LOOKING BACK, I REALIZE that gambling is a metaphor for how my father ran his businesses, and my deep fear of repeating his mistakes has always colored the way I run mine. Because each of his doomed experiences was marked by overly rapid expansion, I have always been afraid to expand my business too quickly. I’m not risk-averse, but I have tight self-control, and I am not ordinarily a gambler. I go to Saratoga one weekend a year, and losing even a $10 bet at the track there bothers me enormously. Still, I’ve been willing to make a $1 million bet on a new restaurant. I’m far more inclined to take risks when I’m essentially betting on myself, but I can do that only because I’ve surrounded myself with highly talented people of solid integrity. I’m also far more confident in my ability to handicap humans than horses. My father, on the other hand, never felt compelled to surround himself with people who were better or smarter at anything than he believed he was. He had a greater need to feel important, to be agreed with, to be the king. It was no coincidence that he named his company after Caesar. While I, too, love sitting in the captain’s chair, my greatest joy comes not from going it alone, but from leading an ensemble. Hospitality is a team sport.

There were, it must be said, many aspects of my parents’ marriage that kept them together for a quarter of a century, including shared interests that left a lasting impression on me and would later inform many of my own business choices. Both of my parents loved modern art, and each had a keen eye for collecting. Thanks to their wise selection and prescient purchases, I had the privilege of growing up amid works by Joseph Albers, Morris Louis, Jasper Johns, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Joel Shapiro, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Pierre Alechinsky, and Gerhard Richter. In 1968 Mom, along with a close family friend, Joan Loeb, opened Forsyth Gallery, a gallery of contemporary art that, for St. Louis, was groundbreaking. My older sister, Nancy; my younger brother, Tommy; and I were exposed to fine art through this gallery and through museumgoing and family conversation. Each one of us developed exceptional fluency in and appreciation for the world of fine art—and learned to share our enthusiasm with others.

My mother and father also brought to our home a shared joy and love for music. It’s difficult for me to remember sitting in our den at any time when the hi-fi was not playing the original-cast album for a show by, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hart, Loesser, Lerner and Loewe, Newley and Bricuse, McDermott, Kander and Ebb, Sondheim, Bernstein, or Gershwin. And when those records weren’t spinning, we were being treated to Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Peggy Lee, the Modern Jazz Quartet, or Oscar Peterson. Each hot and humid summer in St. Louis brought trips to see musicals at the outdoor Muny Opera (the highlight for me was drinking a refreshing half-pint carton of Pevely lemonade during intermission). During the winter, my parents would take us downtown to the American Theater for road versions of Broadway shows. A point of contention between them was that my father—who knew all the lyrics to all the songs—could not come close to carrying a tune. Whenever he had had too much to drink, he would sing off-key and with increasing drama and volume. This was occasionally amusing, but only for a while, and he rarely stopped when he should have.

And then there was travel. My parents took vacations alone together at least twice each year, and with us in tow another three times a year. The Christmas and Easter vacations were often spent in Florida (in or around Miami, where my dad could be within striking distance of Hialeah or Gulfstream Park so that he could bet on the daily double). Every summer meant a family vacation of up to three weeks. We went to California when I was six (Pea Soup Andersen’s in Solvang and sourdough bread and abalone at Fisherman’s Wharf made an indelible impression). We went to France when I was seven (everything made an impression: the hot chocolate at breakfast, so bitter that it needed two cubes of sugar; the yeasty baguettes; the sour crème fraîche; and the salty, deep yellow butter). We went to New England when I was eight (fried Ipswich clams, lobster rolls, drawn butter, creamy clam chowder, and golden Indian pudding).

But as the years went on, travel increasingly meant time that my dad was away for two or sometimes three weeks at a time. Understandably, my mother was lonely and upset during his absences. Though I rarely let on, I was sympathetic to her. We were fond of playing competitive games of Scrabble, and we sat down together each and every weeknight at five-thirty to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS Evening News. Like her, I was absorbed by the day’s events, reading the conservative Globe-Democrat every morning and the liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch every afternoon. Vietnam, the antiwar movement, civil rights, Lyndon Johnson’s beleaguered presidency, the return of Richard Nixon, and of course the St. Louis Cardinals then dominated the news. The two of us were on the same page politically, and those moments were a sanctuary in our relationship. But in those days I reflexively defended my dad for anything and everything, and as my parents’ relationship grew more and more strained, so too did mine with my mom. I found myself, painfully, in the middle of our family’s growing rift. But as the middle child, torn in every possible direction, I was developing useful skills for shuttle diplomacy, negotiating, and contending with adversity. These skills would later serve me well in business and in life.

Partly because of my physical development, and partly because of my insatiable hunger for new foods (and the comfort I got from eating them), I put on some weight at about age twelve. I remember my mother taking me to Famous-Barr to shop for clothes in what