Long Island Aquarium, and Seaside Grill

Daniel Lanieri

Daniel Lanieri is the Food & Beverage Director at Atlantis Banquets & Events, Long Island Aquarium, and Seaside Grill in Riverhead, New York, where he oversees banquets, catering, and dining operations. This article is adapted from his forthcoming leadership book.

Most people in this industry use the words “service” and “hospitality” interchangeably. After nearly three decades in restaurants, resorts, and banquet operations, I’ve learned they are not identical. The difference can determine whether a business simply survives or becomes one people truly love.

Service fulfills an expectation. Hospitality exceeds it.

Service is technical. A server, who takes an order correctly, delivers food promptly, and presents the check professionally has provided excellent service. That server has met the expectation. Hospitality goes one step further. It’s remembering a guest’s name. It’s asking how their daughter’s graduation went because they mentioned it last time. It’s walking a bride outside to take a breath because she’s overwhelmed before the ceremony.

That distinction explains something every operator has seen but struggled to name: two restaurants can have identical food and identical service and still achieve completely different outcomes. One serves customers, while the other hosts guests. Service creates satisfaction; hospitality creates loyalty. People remember good service, but they return because of the hospitality and the feeling that they were treated as more than a transaction.

I can teach someone how to carry a tray or set silverware. Those are skills. It is far harder to teach someone to genuinely care whether a guest feels welcome. That comes from culture, and culture begins with leadership. This is why I've never liked “people who work for me.” I say “people who work with me.” If you want a team that treats customers like guests, you have to first treat your team like people who matter to you, not just their shifts.

You're Not Selling the Product. You're Selling the Memory.

Many organizations believe they're selling food, or weddings, or hotel rooms. They're not. They're selling memories. People rarely remember every detail of the meal. They always remember how you made them feel.

That's why I still walk the dining room every shift. Walking the room isn't about checking on service, it's about creating hospitality. It reinforces to every guest that someone noticed they were there. None of this works without a team led well, and two repeatable practices do more for culture than almost anything else I've tried.

Praise Publicly. Coach Privately.

When someone does something well, celebrate it where others can hear it. Corrective conversations go the other way; coaching happens privately, almost without exception. The goal isn't to embarrass someone, but to help them improve while preserving their dignity.

The Rule of Three

Knowing when a reminder becomes a performance issue is one of the hardest calls for any leader. The first request is simply a request: “When you have a chance, could you take care of this?” The second becomes a directive: “Please start this right away.” The third becomes about accountability: “I need you to deprioritize everything else and give this your immediate attention.”

But before I move from the first request to the second, I ask myself two questions: Was I clear? Did I provide what they needed? My first instinct is always to ask, “Where did I fail them?” before assuming someone ignored me. That doesn’t weaken the Rule of Three. It makes it stronger by ensuring accountability starts with the leader.

That instinct extends beyond unfinished tasks. When something goes wrong, the first move isn’t to find out who’s responsible. It’s to understand what I, as the leader, contributed to the situation. Only after I’ve answered that honestly does it make sense to look outward and address what others need to own.

Never Relax a Standard, Not Even Once

You can never relax a standard or accept substandard performance, even once. Cutting a corner one time doesn’t stay a one-time thing. The moment substandard work is allowed to slide, even “just this once,” that lapse quietly becomes the new standard and opens the door for the next one to slip further.

Cut a corner once, and it stops being the exception. It becomes the standard.

Holding the line isn’t about being rigid. It’s about protecting everything the culture is built on. Hospitality, consistency, and trust cannot survive if the standards behind them are negotiable.

That belief in consistency connects directly to what I see as the heart of hospitality. If someone asked me, after three decades across restaurants, resorts, banquets, and more weddings and events than I can count, what truly separates one hospitality philosophy from another, this is my answer: we are not in the event business, the restaurant business, or even the hospitality business. We are in the relationship business.

The weddings, the food, the cocktails, the ballroom—all of it is simply the setting where those relationships are built. Service is completing the transaction correctly. Hospitality is creating a relationship people want to return to. Everything I’ve tried to build comes back to that one idea.