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Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares
2004 · TV series · 44 min episodes · 5 seasons
Ramsay visits a failing restaurant and acts as a troubleshooter to help improve the establishment in just one week. Ramsay revisits the restaurant a few months later to see how business has fared in his absence. Episodes from series one and two have been re-edited with additional new material as Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Revisited; they featured Ramsay checking up on restaurants a year or more after he attended to them.
3 positive2 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
As a point of fact, there are plenty of episodes of Kitchen Nightmares where the main reason for failure seems to be the owner meddling too much with the people who are actually doing the work.
I'm always amazed at the naive optimism of people when I see them open restaurants in "hot" markets. I see this in NYC where the first year failure rate for new restaurants is something like 80%.
Gordon Ramsay has a lot to say about running a restaurant as a business. I'm kinda amazed that there are people (this being a general comment, not directed at the OP) who would actually learn something just by watching a few episodes of:
- BBC's The Restaurant Man [1]
- Kitchen Nightmares (US or UK)
Gordon Ramsay has a pretty simple formula for a restaurant. When you divide up your revenue you need to be looking at:
- One third for food
- One third for labour
- One third for gross profits
If your plan doesn't look like that, throw it away and start again.
A few things stuck out to me, not just about the post but from several other comments here:
1. This is commercial rent. As opposed to residential rent, a commercial lessor provides the property as-is where-is. The lessee is responsible for maintenance and any improvements they want or need to do. If you didn't factor in the cost of improvements then that's really on you.
2. As someone else mentioned, you can sell $60 chicken but it needs to belong in an area that can support it (eg in NYC terms, open such a restaurant in the Upper East Side not Flatbush). Likewise the decor and the service need to be to a standard that someone ordering $60 chicken demands.
3. Gordon Ramsay really harps on the point about controlling food costs and gives some pretty good examples of dishes that might have 2-3 pounds in ingredients that people would pay 10 pounds for where the restauranteurs want the "best ingredients" that might cost 15 pounds... for an appetizer. Now I don't mean this in the sense that you use cheap/bad ingredients, just that not everything has to be white truffles.
4. Marketing is super-important. The UK Kitchen Nightmares has some pretty good examples of this. Holding a sign up in a tourist area saying "5 Euro Vegetarian 2 course lunch" generating hundreds of covers. Handing out free samples at a commuter train station as people come home from work. I think a lot of people play the "review game" and rely on an audience magically happening. It's bizarre.
5. Finding a good chef is hard. When you do, you want to keep them, even build the restaurant around them. This isn't just about cooking good food. It's about consistency, building the kitchen staff and managing a kitchen. You probably want to give such a person, if you find them, a share of the business. As in you want a cofounder not an employee.
6. Boring is good. Another commenter mentioned this. Hot markets are high risk but high reward. People get captivated by the high reward part. Years ago, I came across a cafe in a suburban main street. No amazing location or anything like that. Just a nice atmosphere, good food and a captive local market where the residents liked to go there regularly. Friends of family owned it and I was surprised to learn that place had a gross profit of $13,000/week.
Anyway, this is the interesting part about working in tech. You see how much money you can make either by working for one of the tech giants or even working for yourself and it's nowhere near as stressful as running a restaurant but the rewards are so much higher that it makes doing anything else or running almost any other sort of business a complete financial nonstarter and basically a lifestyle choice yet these can be really good options for many of those outside tech.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t7vm5
I would generally agree with this, but the one exception I would make would be for the original British version of Ramsay's show. (It was called "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares"; they cut the title to just "Kitchen Nightmares" for the US version.)
That show, especially in the first couple of seasons, skipped the usual reality-show tropes and really dug in to the nitty-gritty elements of running a successful restaurant -- which it showed pretty clearly are the same as the elements of running any successful business: know your customers, watch your money, care about your work. There was real human drama in that show that you just don't see very often on TV.
Of course, then they brought it to America and threw all that insightful stuff out to make room for trumped-up shouting matches and canned sound effects of rattlesnakes. What a disappointment.
Both versions are up for streaming on Netflix, if you want to see what I mean; make sure to look for "Ramsay's" in the title to get the UK version. Watch the first episode of the first season and you'll understand the difference.
This looks neat. Here is how discover the world online.
- I start with some travel show or a foodalogue to see what people look like there, what is their ethnic makeup, what do they eat, how rich/happy are they, how advanced is their society. I would probably watch gordon ramsey's kitchen nightmares to get the first glace at britain.
- then I watch something about the current affairs of the country. Putin's russia ( Aljazeera documentary) /Khodorkovsky on netflix
- Read a book or two , both fiction and non fiction. Russia: Snowdrops (Fiction) , Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin.
- Then I dig deeper and try to see how the people there got to be like what they are now. Eg: Battle of Russia on Fandor, National Geographic's Engineering an empire( Russia).
Kitchen Nightmare's is a pretty good show, but not on par with the UK originals (Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares).
The original UK shows are far more "real" - no sensationalized voice overs, editing, or dramas. There's also no show-provided influx of cash to makeover the restaurants.
In addition the last 5 minutes of each episode are Ramsay himself returning after several months to reevaluate things - and some of the restaurants do indeed fail regardless of his help.