Cam Guendner ’30
Staff Writer
On Wednesday night, one of Trinity’s most notable alumni told a packed Washington Room that getting waitlisted, rejected and bombing the LSAT is what propelled him to success later on.
On Oct. 14, students, faculty and members of the community filed into Mather Hall’s Washington Room for the inaugural TrinTalks event featuring Trinity alumnus Danny Meyer ’80. Meyer is best known for co-founding the modern burger chain, Shake Shack, and his New York Times best-selling book, “Setting the Table.” He is the founder and the executive chairman of Union Square Hospitality group. Meyer found his way “back home” to Trinity while in the midst of a lengthy promotional tour for his new book, “What Could Possibly Go Right?” Meyer, the restaurateur and entrepreneur, sat down with President Daniel Lugo for a conversational interview that shed light on his professional experiences during and after his time at Trinity as well as the writing process behind his new book.
President Lugo began the interview by asking Meyer about his early days at Trinity, to which Meyer quickly replied that he is forever grateful for the admissions officer that got him off Trinity’s waitlist. To the audience’s surprise, Meyer’s college acceptances did not reflect the career that he would later go on to create. Meyer emphasized that being waitlisted by Trinity and rejected by two other schools only spurred him to further take advantage of the opportunities presented to him while in college. “That Danny Meyer was a spring that was completely compressed and didn’t even know it,” Meyer said when asked about his freshman self. “And it was when I got to Trinity that I was finally ready to let go of it.”
When President Lugo posed the question as to how he made the jump from a bachelor’s degree in political science to a career as a restaurateur, Meyer revealed that contrary to popular belief, his first loves were writing and politics, and that he initially was deciding between law and journalism school for post-grad. Yet, he later told the crowd that his dreams of law school were cut short due to his poor LSAT score. Although his college journey began with some setbacks, Meyer looks back on these failures with admiration, “It didn’t seem like anything was going right when I got rejected from two colleges and waitlisted here, and yet nothing could have been more right then how it all turned out.”
Throughout the course of the interview, Meyer recounted the extensive number of jobs he worked before finding success in the restaurant business: a tour guide in Rome for his father’s travel business, a top salesman at a company selling electronic shoplifting prevention tags and, right out of college, field director for John B. Anderson’s 1980 presidential campaign in Cook County, Chicago. Meyer described these early experiences as not a waste of time, but rather opportunities to learn more about people and how to make them feel seen.
He stressed how important it was that things didn’t go his way, as he would have never found his passion in the restaurant industry. Despite early setbacks, Meyer described his mid-20’s as a time for development, and attributed these years to his later success in the field of hospitality. Connecting his time managing political campaigns with his early years in the restaurant business Meyer said, “The only way I could motivate people who were volunteers was via the common purpose we were all working towards, which was to get this guy elected…so from the get-go I treated all of our employees at Union Square like volunteers.” This valuable lesson he said he took from being the boss of twenty volunteers right after graduating from Trinity.
Without spoiling the premise of his newly released book, Meyer delved deep into his business philosophy. He recounted his early adaptations of typical hospitality practices and the eventual creation of his model, “Enlightened Hospitality”. The key topic that he focuses on in his 2006 book, “Setting the Table,” “Enlightened Hospitality” is what Meyer said he attributes to all of his restaurants’ success. Meyer stated that this logic is anchored on the idea that, “Our first customer is my employees because our paying customers are not going to have a better experience eating here than these people are having working here.” After Meyer gave the crowd a sneak peak into what they may encounter within “What Could Possibly Go Right” and answered a few questions from the crowd, Meyer finished the talk by answering one last question from President Lugo: “If you could give your college senior self a piece of advice, what would it be?” Meyer answered simply, “Try to make wise choices, because every time you make a wise choice you open windows of opportunity.”
