Kitchen Nightmares

Last night’s episode was the best yet, from the perspective of multilayered problems and being even more definitively a business show.  If you called it “Business Turnarounds” nobody would watch it, and it might be on CNBC or perhaps PBS.  Make it a Gordon Ramsay show specifically about restaurant turnarounds and it’s as popular as it’s possible to be opposite the excellent Bionic Woman, which we tape and watch immediately after.

This was the first episode on which the chef was clearly a huge problem, and on which the wait staff was anything but perfect.  It’s not the first example of a wimpy owner, but it was a great display of the personal being business, where you can’t emasculate your son and then expect him to be anything but emasculated.  I half expected the mother to get thrown out of the place too, as she didn’t appear to have a job there apart from making her son’s balls further dissipate while berating him for a lack of same.  We learn eventually that his father was worse.

You can’t work with, or raise, a kid and spend year after year making them feel useless.  If they are useless, you either find a way to bring them up to speed, or you treat them like any useless employee who doesn’t belong and needs to find a place they fit.  If they aren’t useless, well, you’re pathetic to chip away at them.

Kids working for parents can work, but it’s generally better if they don’t, or if they do so only after experience elsewhere.  You don’t pointedly make your kid incapable of running the business and then be surprised if, when the time for it comes, they can’t or won’t.

The head chef there was a real prize.  If he serves himself rancid pork, obviously he’s lost all sense of what he’s serving customers.  Then again, if I had to put up with the mother, I might turn into that much of a jerk too.

The followup indicated that he sold the restaurant months later.  I think that’s the best thing the owner could have done to get out of a clearly uncomfortable situation and away from his mother.  She could retire and he could have a nest egg and go on to do something else.

1. I agree on all counts.  That poor guy had such serious familial issues.  He wasn’t going to fix that restaurant without telling his mother to take a hike as well, which he clearly needed to do.

   I hope that guy manages to move on and find some success in life.  Selling the restaurant is probably the first step in the right direction for him.

   Posted by rob sama  on  10/11  at  02:43 PM  from 
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