I’m talking about one of the restaurants featured on Kitchen Nightmares.
If so, how was it?
Never been to one, this article says that it’s probably difficult to (because in reality almost all of them still go out of business after he leaves!)
Fucking subscribing.
I haven’t, but this lists the current status of a lot of them. (It’s a Quora page, you do not have to register to view the first answer which has all the statuses.)
There are a few of the ones that have been open awhile since they were on the show that I’ve always said I’d probably check out if I ever happened to be nearby.
People sometimes point to this fact that a lot of these restaurants close as some evidence that the show is a “fraud.” I don’t really feel that way about it. I think that you can start a restaurant, get the food right, the location right, and run it as best as it can be ran and still fail. Restaurants are probably the scariest business venture I could imagine, because sometimes it doesn’t matter if you do everything right–you can still fail.
With Kitchen Nightmares, you almost universally do not have restaurants that are well run but unlucky. You have poorly run restaurants with generally bad food, ran by people oftentimes with no restaurant experience at all prior to opening the restaurant. That’s a recipe for abject failure that a week of help from Gordon Ramsay can’t realistically save. But the ones that have stayed open I think definitely in large part owe it to the redirection and attention they got from being on the show. They get a lot of free publicity and a free renovation for participating on the show, two things that never hurt any restaurant.
And really Gordon’s advice is usually just common sense stuff. For example he sometimes points out menu-items that actually cost more to make than the menu price. That’s just crazy that a business owner would be selling restaurant meals at a loss. (Loss-leaders might make sense in some scenarios, but not usually at the kind of restaurants Ramsay goes to.) He also advises simplifying the menu, improving cleanliness standards, buying better quality food etc. Most of that stuff will, all things being equal, make a restaurant produce a better product and provide better service. But when even good restaurants fail, helping a bad restaurant run a bit better is never going to be enough to change the game.
Man, season 2 was a bad time to be featured on that show!!
I went to Luigis D’Italia in Anaheim. Terrible. The fettuccine Alfredo tasted like nothing more than cream of mushroom soup. That was the only time I’ve ever said anything negative when they come by to ask how it is. The owner was very apologetic and took it off the bill, but man was that bad.
Good bread, though.
I watch almost all of these “rescue-a-train-wreck” shows (Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, Hotel Impossible, etc.) because they’re fabulously entertaining, and I always say the same thing: it’s really not that hard to figure out what they’re doing wrong. They all have exactly the same problems, as you’ve already outlined.
Pretty much anyone could walk in, quickly diagnose, and fix the major issues, and with enough resources, get them back on their feet, at least briefly. The reason they ultimately fail anyway is that the real problem can’t be fixed: the clueless owners/management who dug the hole in the first place. It’s rare, if not unseen, that the problem is not the owners/management.
I much prefer the BBC version of his show but he really does offer practical advice. It’s not his fault that many of the restaurants are doomed regardless.
The BBC version has less confrontations and is more about the business of running a restaurant.
I’ve never watched the show, but I’m willing to bet that most of them, within days of him leaving, go right back into their old routine. Part of the problem that a lot of small business owners have (especially with restaurants where the owner does everything) is that they tend not to follow through. They’ll have a great idea but only implement if for a few days. Could be out of laziness or too swamped to get to something that requires more work or just like the old way better, but I’ve seen happen enough times.
Another problem may be that they have bad employees but can’t bring themself to fire someone that’s worked there for 15 years because they’re like family at that point.
I assume he doesn’t get into the bookkeeping at all. If the place is bleeding money or up to their eyes in debt, it takes a lot to dig out of that.
Someone up thread mentioned food cost. I’m always surprised at how many people have a hard time figuring out food cost. The tech school near me offers an entire class on food cost as part of it’s Culinary Arts degree. I have a friend in the bar business that asked me for help costing out his homemade pizzas. I guess it’s because numbers just sort of click for me. Either that or I’m doing it wrong. But if you’re pricing things out below cost or not using the proper restaurant margin (about 70%), you’re in trouble before you even get started.
Also, something else to consider. A restaurant owner, that’s owned their place for 20 years and it’s been circling the drain for the last 7 or 8 years is tired. It’s exhausting work when times are tough. For some of them, they may just be ready to close up shop.
I mean, it’s exhausting when times are good, but waking up every morning to see the bank balance in the red, seeing the credit card company come up on Caller ID and knowing that you’re a week past your payment date, venders that put you on COD…it’s a lot of work.
Yeah, and I really can’t blame them when they go to Plan Z. It’s deadly.
I ate at Cafe Hon in Baltimore before it was featured on the show. It’s a touristy kind of place in a touristy section of town. I found the food completely unremarkable.
Unlike (I believe) a lot of the other restaurants on the show, the owner had stirred up a lot of ill will in the community by trademarking the word “Hon” and then sending all sorts of people cease and desist letters regarding its use.
She was pilloried when she did it.
On the show Ramsay addressed that, and that more than anything I suspect, is how she got the word out that she relinquished the trademark. Honestly, it was big news locally when she got the trademark. If I hadn’t seen the show I’d never know she’d given it up. Never heard a word about it on any news.
For those of you who don’t know, and haven’t seen a Barry Levinson film, “Hon” is a commonly used form of address in Baltimore. Regardless of gender, race, age, or any other way you could differentiate yourself, you will be called “Hon” by strangers. It’s pronounced Hun. It’s Honey without the -ey.
I agree that the UK version is far better. It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t seem to be doing any new episodes of it, though. I assume that Fox pays much more money than the UK broadcaster.
And yes, his advice seems pretty obvious. After watching episodes of this and similar shows (e.g., Restaurant Impossible), I could walk into a restaurant and offer much the same advice, and I don’t know anything about the business:
- Clean the dining room, kitchen and the refrigerators. (I had a minimum wage job at Chuck E Cheese out of high school and we had to leave the kitchen spotless before leaving every night. Not even a stray slice of pepperoni or loose olive on the floor.)
- Get rid of the kitchen sink menu. Simplify it to just a few dishes, made well. And if your restaurant is ethnic or specialized (steakhouse, for example) don’t make stuff out of your comfort zone. Don’t make stuff in advance and freeze it for days or weeks. Food in the freezers and refrigerators is supposed to be marked with dates. Food left out (steam tables, for instance) has to be kept within certain temperature ranges. Serve local produce.
- And of course price stuff correctly. I think the formula is that food costs should be 33-35% of the price charged.
I’ve been to a Kitchen Nightmare. it was before I had seen the show - when it came on I realized I had eaten there.
It was “The Black Pearl,” a seafood restaurant in Manhattan At the time I found it overpriced (even by NYC standards) and mediocre. It wasn’t egregiously bad. My recollection was their problem wasn’t disgusting food/sanitation (though Ramsey found the lobster roll bland), it was a warring triumvirate of owners.
IIRC it was replaced by a Virginia style BBQ joint which was sucessful despite the fact that there’s a 2-story well-liked Texas style BBQ place across the street, called Hill Country.
I’d been to “Jack’s Waterfront” a few times, I can’t remember if any of them were after he was there. they went bust not long after but the restaurant had long been know to change ownership every couple of years so nobody was surprised.
Sorry. I’ve linked cracked.com several times and I don’t think you have to subscribe, you’ll just occasionally get one nag screen that closes w/o much trouble.
I’ve never been to it, but on Bar Rescue they came to a place in Silver Spring Maryland called Pirates Tavern or some such. It’s like two blocks from where I work. After the guy came in they changed it to some other type of restaurant with just as stupid of a name. They’ve since gone back to being the Pirate Tavern. I still haven’t gone in.
I was thinking this would be a great topic for a thread and almost started it myself this week.
Anyway, my wife and I were watching an episode of Restaurant Impossible when we looked at the screen then looked at each other. We had both recognized the same ugly orange formica countertops, strange layout, panelling on the walls - it was a small BBQ restaurant in Memphis, but when we were there, we thought the food was excellent.
Turns out it was named Arnold’s when we were there, and they shortly afterward sold the site and moved to a new location. The filmed episode was about the clueless new owners (who thought BBQ shouldn’t take more than an hour to smoke), along with a simple remake. So we can say we were close to eating at one of those restaurants! I don’t know how the restaurant is currently doing.
My feeling is that there’s little that can be done. Once a restaurant gets a bad reputation, it’s extremely difficult to turn it around. Even if they start doing everything right, the word of mouth about the place before it was on the show is terrible. Same for the online reviews. It takes a lot to turn things around if people say the place has terrible food, either online or in conversation.
Being on the show isn’t going to help. It may even hurt, since people are more likely to remember the “before” than the “after.”
Hah, we wanted to go to this place with our kids who live in the area. They said it was a completely horrible experience because the “Pirates” wanted to be treated like “Pirates” and were rude to all the customers. Fun I’m sure.:rolleyes:
I live 5 minutes from there.
I was taken there several times, pre-Bar Rescue, and it was total shit. The food was godawful, the “grog” was terrible, the rail drinks were wildly overpriced, and the employees’ pirate schtick gets old after about 30 seconds (and completely insufferable after that). I’ve not been in since.
I’m shocked they continue to stay open, especially after all of the negative attention they got from the show, not to mention that since it first opened it was, and remains, by far the worst establishment of any type in all of Downtown Silver Spring. There’s an awesome bar right across the street (Quarry House).