Meyer is the founder, executive chairman, and former CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group [1] — a group whose restaurants, as of Shake Shack’s April 2026 proxy statement, include Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, and Manhatta [2]. In 1985, at 27, he opened Union Square Cafe, his first restaurant [3]. In 2004 he and USHG founded Shake Shack, a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park that went public in 2015 [1][3]; he has chaired its board since January 2010 [2]. His outside public-company board service is finished rather than ongoing: Olo from 2015 to 2025, The Container Store from 2013 to 2017, Sotheby’s from 2011 to 2015, and OpenTable from 2000 through 2014 [2].
Meyer’s management thinking is set out in Setting the Table, published by HarperCollins in October 2006 [4] and a New York Times bestseller [2]. It is built on one distinction — “Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel” [5] — and two operating rules. Under “enlightened hospitality,” employees’ interests are “placed directly ahead of those of our guests,” because repeat business is won only once the team feels good about coming to work [5]. Under the 51/49 standard, “innate emotional skills for hospitality” count 51 percent against 49 percent for technical excellence [5], on the conviction that technical training “will then come far more easily” [5] — the direct precursor to MC’s Running interviews that predict performance.
Industry recognition corroborates that operating record rather than substituting for it. TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list of 16 April 2015 [6] carried Meyer under the header “Dining’s best boss” [7], in an entry written by chef Tom Colicchio [6] that credits “putting employees first” [7] for a business grown “from a single restaurant to a nearly $2 billion Shake Shack burger empire” without its core ever changing [7]. He won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Restaurateur award in 2005 [3], and in 2023 Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration selected him for its Cornell Hospitality Icon of the Industry Award [1], citing employee practices “adopted by restaurateurs around the world” [1].
Meyer sits close to the devoted end of the spectrum: forty years building and running hospitality organizations, not a lens borrowed in from an adjacent field. His word carries real weight on hiring philosophy, culture-building, and service standards — the domains a restaurant group actually runs on, which is why MC cites him for the 51/49 rule and enlightened hospitality rather than for strategy or finance. His own framing of the discipline — “the culture you have in your organization is the sum of all the wanted behaviors that you celebrate minus all the unwanted behaviors that you tolerate” [8] — is a claim about management, not about restaurants, which is what earns it a place here.