The heritage of our service began with a rebellion. Peter Canlis was a revolutionary restaurateur. He was fed up with the surly and self-serving style he observed among waiters in the world's best restaurants, and he swore he would achieve something completely different. From the start, he insisted that his staff treat his guests as though they had been invited into the Canlis home (which, in fact, was the case, since Peter lived upstairs). Eschewing formal French service and the "Captain System" approach, he expected his servers work as a team and put their guests first, above all.

To help the staff realize this vision, he established a tip-pooling and profit-sharing system, one of the earliest methods of its time. Since then, every staff-member's livelihood has been linked to our overall success at serving guests. It was decisions like these that helped create the high level of impeccable and unparalleled service that is associated with Canlis today. And, although restaurants around the world now replicate our "team-styled" service system, no one has been able to do it in quite the same way as Peter first taught his staff so many years ago.