Danny Meyer

Danny Meyer is a New York City restaurateur, the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, and the founder and chairman of Shake Shack. Born in St. Louis in 1958 and raised around a family hospitality business, he graduated from Trinity College in 1980 and briefly worked in politics before opening his first restaurant, Union Square Cafe, in Manhattan in 1985 at the age of 27. That restaurant became the foundation of a hospitality group known as much for its culture as for its food. Over the following decades, Meyer built Union Square Hospitality Group into a portfolio of celebrated New York restaurants, including Gramercy Tavern, The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, Maialino, and Blue Smoke. In 2001, he set up a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park to support a public art installation and the park's conservancy. Its popularity led to a permanent kiosk in 2004, and that kiosk became Shake Shack, which grew into a national and international chain and completed its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2015. Meyer serves as its founder and chairman of the board. At the center of everything Meyer has built is a single idea he calls Enlightened Hospitality. In his 2006 bestseller Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, he argues that a company should prioritize its stakeholders in a deliberate order, employees first, then guests, then community, then suppliers, and finally investors. The logic is a virtuous cycle: take care of your people, and they take care of your guests, who come back and reward every other stakeholder in turn. His well-known "51%" hiring philosophy follows from the same belief, that emotional and hospitality skills matter more than technical ones because the technical can be trained. In 2017, Meyer founded Enlightened Hospitality Investments, a growth-equity fund that backs high-growth, employee-centric businesses, extending his philosophy well beyond restaurants into companies across retail, food, and technology. In 2022, after 37 years leading Union Square Hospitality Group, he stepped down as chief executive and became executive chairman, with Chip Wade succeeding him as CEO. Meyer's influence reaches across the industry. His group trained a generation of hospitality leaders, among them Will Guidara, who went on to write Unreasonable Hospitality and extend Meyer's ideas in his own way. Widely honored for his work, Meyer and his restaurants have been associated with a long record of James Beard Awards, and he was named the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Restaurateur. He lives and works in New York City, where he continues to speak and write about hospitality as a business strategy.