What’s Your $2 Hot Dog?

One of my favorite books is Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality, and one of my favorite stories from the book is the tale of the $2 hot dog. If you’ve heard a podcast, read an article, or been told about Unreasonable Hospitality from a friend, there’s a chance you’ve heard the $2 hot dog story, because it encapsulates the heart of the book.

Guidara runs Eleven Madison Park in New York City, a restaurant with a staggering $500 per plate price point. Yet, one of the most talked-about anecdotes from Unreasonable Hospitality is not a $75 foie gras plate, but a $2 hot dog from a street vendor.

As the story goes, Guidara was in the dining room one evening and overheard a table of four European guests talking about all the places they’d eaten on their New York City food tour. Their only regret was that they never had a “street hot dog.” So Guidara did what unreasonable hospitality demands: he ran down the sidewalk to the Sabrett’s cart, brought it back to the kitchen and asked his executive chef to plate it, and served up the “dirty water dog” to the table with swooshes of mustard, ketchup, sauerkraut, and relish. That two dollar dog yielded more oohs and aahs from the table – more of a memory – than the eye-popping gourmet offerings from the menu.

So what?

For those of us in the church world, it can feel impossible (and altogether unnecessary) to draw an application from a restaurant where one meal can run as much as a month’s worth of groceries. But the question remains: In your ministry, what is your two dollar hot dog? What is the extra effort that you give to make your guests, your volunteers, your congregation feel like you hear them, you see them, and you want to honor them in a special way?

It’s not about the money.

It’s fascinating to me that in a restaurant where a $500 plate was the baseline, the $2 hot dog became the “Wow!” moment. A .004% increase in spending was the thing that made the meal stand out from the Europeans’ other experiences. I have a feeling that a gold leaf truffle for dessert would not have yielded nearly the memories as a couple of bucks did.

It is about the care.

Lets use your Volunteer Headquarters as an example. If your church is like ours, you have a rough budget of a specific dollar amount per volunteer. It could be one dollar or ten, for five volunteers or five hundred. But with that per capita spending, you kind of know what you’re offering up each week. More than that, your volunteers know what they’re getting each week. It could be a granola bar and a cup of Folgers or Eggs Benedict and pourovers (if you’re in that latter group and are currently taking applications for volunteers, let’s talk).

If you’re the granola bar and church coffee group, your two buck hot dog might be a build-your-own-grits bowl every few months. The increased cost is negligible, but the impact is palpable. That effort makes people feel like this was a customized experience just for them.

Or let’s pivot to your own personal leadership and the appreciation of your staff or volunteers. Sure, you can give people a $5 Starbucks gift card, because everyone loves coffee and everyone’s Starbucks order comes in well under five bucks (I may or may not be guilty of letting Starbucks gift cards cover a multitude of sins).

Or…you could translate that appreciation into a random voice memo, taking a minute to tell that person how grateful you are for them, the gifts of God you’ve seen in them, and specific ways you’re praying for them. That kind of communication – with zero agenda other than gratitude – costs you far less than five bucks and is worth far more than five bucks to them.

So again, the crucial question: what is your $2 hot dog? What is the tiny effort that yields deeper connections?

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Thanks to James Hensley, Guest Services Director at First Baptist Church, Midlothian, Texas, for the conversation that inspired this post.

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