"Where's the bathroom?"

A seemingly innocuous question that we all ask our first time in a restaurant. How restaurant staff choose to respond is one of the clearest signals of the calibre of hospitality they're cultivating. It's natural to think that simply pointing is a sufficient response. Simply pointing is unacceptable if a restaurant cares deeply about the customer's experience.

The best restaurants in the world feel like a symphony orchestra. There's an army of people playing their part in perfect unison. The host seats you at your table. Your server introduces you to the menu and takes your order. The sommelier guides you in ordering the perfect wine for the occasion. Food runners prance through the dining room and set every plate down at the same moment.

Every team member walking the floor has a role, a route, and a mission. The team brings you through the journey they've cultivated, deliberately. So when a guest stands up to aimlessly ponder where the bathroom may be, the orchestra goes out of tune for a brief moment.

Hospitality teams are trained to handle these moments and weave them back in. Someone catches the bewildered guest's eye before the guest has to go looking for it. As the guest asks the question, they're met warmly with "let me show you." This is the moment that separates answering a question from crafting an experience. Anyone could take a couple of steps, bring the guest near the bathroom, and point them the rest of the way. But the best restaurants ensure this moment is met with as much love as the entrées the chef serves. They walk the customer directly to the bathroom and show them exactly where it is with the same enthusiasm as showing them to their table for the first time.

Unreasonable Hospitality, the title of Will Guidara's bestselling book (he was co-owner and general manager of Eleven Madison Park), has now been thrown around by companies as the newest moniker for "customer obsession." In fact, it is one of Gigi's values. We define it as follows:

"Commonly, companies will cite they are customer-obsessed. This is a mere baseline at Gigi. We actively seek out moments to be unreasonably hospitable to our customers. This means we work to identify opportunities to delight our customers at every single touchpoint and every experience our customers have with our product. We put painstaking efforts into details because we know it will accrue to customer delight."

We pride ourselves on the experience we create for our customers. Every pixel is there for a reason. Every line of code was built because we uniquely believed it would add value to our customers. Our customers come to Gigi to experience magic, and they only come back when we deliver that magic.

We're often asked by our customers, "what if we instruct Gigi to do something wrong and it hurts our business?" It's a natural question in the new world of agentic AI. If their business is hurt, our business is hurt. We've done our job only when our customers are able to delight their customers. When we see an influx of silent failures in our customers' tasks, our engineering team stops new feature development to ensure tasks are completed 100% of the time. Our entire team reads every single prompt our customers give Gigi. When we're unsure if Gigi's output was optimal, we ask what they were trying to achieve, and then we rewrite the prompt into a structured task that spells out the context they assumed, the constraints they left implicit, and what a good answer looks like.

We're not Eleven Madison Park. Not yet. We're the hot new restaurant in the cool part of town still finding its groove. We have regulars. We have new guests coming to experience Gigi's magic for the first time. We have a lot of work to do before Gigi feels the way we want our customers to feel.

But one thing you can be sure of: at Gigi, we walk our customers to the bathroom.