Preorder [11/24/26]: Pre-Meal (Will Guidara)

For years at Eleven Madison Park, Will Guidara gathered his team before every lunch and dinner service for pre-meal, a thirty-minute meeting to share a story, teach something, and get everyone fired up to go take care of people. When he sold the restaurant, it was the thing he missed most.

So in 2023 he started Pre-Meal, a twice-monthly newsletter that keeps the practice alive. Each piece starts with a single moment Will noticed out in the world: a ten-foot Post-it note at the Portland airport, a self-storage sign in Tacoma that turns into “Elf Storage” every December, a laminated menu of free extras in the back of a Sydney Uber. This zine collects fifty-two of his favorites. That’s a year’s worth if you bring one to your own team each week.

Every story is paired with a photograph by Mackenzie Canlis, and all fifty-two were taken within one mile of the Unreasonable Hospitality offices in East Nashville. They show ordinary people in ordinary moments: a handwritten sign in a window, a child’s hand being held, someone walking through a pocket of light.

Why a zine? Will collected them obsessively as a teenager hanging around a record store in Yonkers. In his words: “There’s no business case for it; in fact, there’s a pretty strong case against... Sometimes, the right reason to make something is simply because you want it to exist.”