I think that with any restaurant that is struggling like the those on KN it’s not really about the bad food, horrible decor, bad service or bad business practices. It’s really about the people at the centre who are the cause of those conditions.
I think where Gordon Ramsey really shines is in his quick and shrewd observation of where people are psychologically falling short.
With so little time available to him, he has no choice but to fearlessly and brutally target the living shit out of those shortcomings with a crash course in hard reality with the intent to shock them into facing who they are and who they need to be.
I think that is very hard to do. If you don’t push hard enough in the right direction then you get nowhere, and if you push too hard in the wrong direction they categorically reject your efforts as a matter of course. For all its brutality, it’s really a delicate process.
And that’s why I watch the show. Forget the over-produced TV bullshit. Forget the redesign of the menu or the facilities. Forget the “kumbaya” ending. The show is all about the quality of Ramsey’s assessment and the style of his his execution. When he gets the the target to flip and I see the light bulb come on I say, “There it is.” and I shut the TV off. Show’s over.
No need to apologize, the link was fine. That was just my Ramseyesque way of subscribing to this thread. Ramsey’s been a mini-meme in our kitchen for a while. My 12 year old son does a wicked imitation of his rants.
You see a restaurant on television serving chicken so old that its green. A famous television chef spends 3 days at the restaurant and yells at the owners and staff. the restaurant is supposedly “turned around” and is (supposedly) no longer serving green chicken. Of course famous television chef and the cameras are gone, and the people that let the restaurant get to this point are still there. Would YOU eat there?
Green chicken? Probably not. But for other problems, I might. Kicked out a lazy-ass chef who made mediocre food and got an absentee owner back on track to managing the place? Probably. I saw one (now I’m blanking on whether it was Restaurant Impossible or Kitchen Nightmares - probably the former) recently with a Mexican restaurant where after some prodding, the owner went in the kitchen and cooked her family recipes, and got showered with praise from the host, and you could just see her and her husband light up, finally.
There was a two-parter on Kitchen Nightmares over the past couple weeks and judging by what an absolute pathological liar the owner appeared to be, there’s no way in hell I’d go to his restaurant after the change, and I haven’t even seen the second half off my DVR yet. I know that editing can do a lot, but the first episode starts with Ramsay meeting the owner at his farm, where he says he raises a lot of meat for the restaurant and does it all himself, and seeing bison and goats and all those animals there? Ramsay should have been looking like his bullshit alarms were tripped immediately, yet he just kind of smiled and cooed over the farm and everything. There’s no way that a single farmer/restaurant owner could handle all that livestock on his own unless he’s neglecting the fuck out of the restaurant. Turns out that most of his farm-to-table stuff is bullshit, as employees show photos of frozen store-bought meats, and the owner still blathers on defending his place as if you’re telling him that the sky is orange instead of “your food is crap and you are lying to people about where you get your ingredients.”
Different show, but after a panel of “experts” spent an entire season choosing America’s Next Great Restaurant (Soul Daddy) it rather quickly closed two of it’s three locations (NY & LA) to focus on it’s Mall of America location. That one closed soon afterwards lasting less than 9 weeks.
I’ve only seen a few episodes of Bar Rescue because I think the show and its host are either a complete scam or are just so divorced from what I think of when it comes to bars that I just don’t live in the same world as them. Now, coincidentally one of the 3-4 episodes of Bar Rescue I’ve seen was the Pirate Bar in Silver Springs, and I could tell after about two minutes into the episode that was an absolute terrible bar with a terrible theme. However, the weird “Corporate” theme the Bar Rescue guy gave it as a replacement was honestly just as stupid and off putting.
I just feel like in the few episodes of Bar Rescue I’ve seen the host wants to turn every bar into these weird, hyper-sanitized “theme” bars with stainless steel and weird decor everywhere.
To me the perfect bar is like a baseball glove or pair of shoes that fits just right. It’s not some strange anti-septic place with shiny everything and organic menu items. It’s a place that has a worn-in, homey look and feel. A proper bar is a place you don’t go once just to look at the spectacle but a second home. It’s not dirty but it’s not reminiscent of a hospital ward either. The staff are polite but aren’t boiled-down automatons of stiff servility like you’d find in a fine dining restaurant. I don’t think you can just wave a wand and create a place like that, a proper bar is built over many years of quality service and providing a home for its regulars.
If I’m traveling away from local and well known bars the last place I’d want to go into is a bar redone by some professional “bar turnaroud guru” who makes all of his bars look like they came out of the same design catalog as a Chili’s or TGI Friday’s.
I just watched that two-parter with great interest because the town that place is in, is about 20 minutes from my mom’s house. There was a scene in part one where Ramsey asks a server where he could get something decent to eat (after tasting much of what they had to offer there). I want to check out the place that server recommended, not the restaurant that was actually featured.
Ramsey did a piece in my town, Montclair, NJ, at an italian restaurant that I had gone to in the past. The Mrs. and I chose to go there before the show came in and found the food pretty lousy, much worse than when we had gone years before. Unfortunately, I haven’t been back since, though I should make it a point to. If I do get to go back, I’ll dig up this thread. I did hear that the head chef was subsequently fired, I think that’s probably a good sign.
I have eaten at the restaurant mentioned by gwendee, The Cafe Hon, before and after the Gordon Ramsay appearance. The purpose of involving Ramsay was exactly as gweendee described: the owner, having capitalized on an existing piece of Baltimore lingo combined with a set of images popularized by John Waters in the various incarnations of Hair Spray, created a PR disaster for herself via the copyright fiasco. Ramsay was her way of announcing to Baltimore that she had dropped the whole thing.
I like the food at Cafe Hon a bit better than gwendee does, but it doesn’t appear to have changed much before and after.
And I have to add, as someone who lived in Baltimore from 1954 until 2000, that it really tickles me to see Hampden referred to as a “touristy section of town”. I know that is probably accurate in its current incarnation, but it still makes me laugh.
We had eaten at Oceana in New Orleans before Kitchen Nightmares did their piece. The place used to be average before the crazy brothers took it over (we only went there because it was kinda kid friendly and we had the family with us). I was staying next door at Le Marias a year or two ago and one of the producer was in the lobby and asked if I’d ever eaten there. I got invited to be interviewed, but alas, my flight left the next morning (and I don’t have a strong desire to be on TV, films yes, but no TV).
Bar Rescue is just terrible (I mean, I watch it, but it’s terrible). I don’t think there was one place that I would go to after the transformation. I’ve recently seen him install video jukeboxes and those trivia boxes. I thought that shit died years ago.
I looked at the list not expecting to find any…and truthfully didn’t…but one place my wife and I have TRIED to go multiple times was on there. Capri in Eagle Rock. Each time we’d get there and find that it wasn’t open that day or was closed for a private party.
What’s always shocking to me on these shows is how little the people actually understand about the finances of their own restaurants and bars.
I think it was restaurant impossible where the owner was selling some breakfast at a loss, almost a dollar a plate. He was given a new menu with proper pricing and the guy was skeptical because the dish he lost money on was so popular. Well duh. He loses money on every sale but he makes up for it in volume…or something like that.
OK, so I’ve only seen one episode of (what I think was) this show.
A man owned a bbq restaurant and his “secret sauce” was a one-gallon bottle of some store brand with some extra hot sauce or something added in to make it ‘secret’. The host of the show about had a cow.
So the host help him create a recipe for a true secret sauce.
Anyway… I always wondered if that one was still opened. Does anyone know?
This New York Times link pertains to Restaurant: Impossible, not to Ramsay, but your point is validated:
One of the interesting cases involves an Italian restaurant in Missouri, where Robert Irvine got the owner to stop using frozen pastas and canned sauces, and start making fresher, better quality food. And he DID… for a little while. But then he switched back.
Why? Because his OLD customers LIKED the frozen pasta and the canned sauces! They didn’t like the new menu, even though it seems far superior to most of us sophisticated SDMB folks.
Thing is, making radical changes to a restaurant is just as risky as opening a brand new restaurant. Even if you make WONDERFUL food, there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’re going to find enough paying customers who appreciate what you do. It may take months or years to build up a customer base, and you may not be able to stay in business that long.
In this case, restaurant owner John Meglio had attracted a steady clientele who liked his lousy food. When he started serving the GOOD food that Robert Irvine recommended, he alienated his old customers but just didn’t attract many new ones.
His restaurant is STILL in big trouble, but he figures he can hang on a while longer with his lousy frozen canneloni and his old, unsophisticated client base. He COULDN’T hang on any longer, waiting for new customers while his old customers were leaving in droves.