Today's Special (not the Nickelodeon show)

Because there is only so many times that one can watch a Big Ten team lose in a given day Kim and I spent much of this afternoon watching old episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. Now, I was originally a huge fan of the UK version of the show where Gordon Ramsay seemed to actually care about the restaurants that he visited and gave more advice than profanity. When I watched the first few episodes of the US version it was so horribly edited by Fox that I could barely consider it a reality show. But apparently we caught a patch of later episodes today that also featured restaurants in South Bend and LaGrange meaning that these were places that I could conceivably eat.

Given that we are in the internet age we immediately googled the restaurants. Four episodes, four restaurants, all now out of business. If this tells you anything it is that you should never, ever open a restaurant.

Now you could probably make the argument that given these restaurants were on Kitchen Nightmares, which implies that they were already really, really crappy restaurants that this isn’t a really representative sample. But having a top chef, a television crew and a hour long commercial that you can promote is the best chance that any restaurant can have of bringing people in the door. From what I can gather most of the restaurants failed from a combination of location and the economy. Given how much of a pounding the Midwest has taken over the past few years I could see struggling restaurants failing by dozen.

What amazes me though is that so many of these stories are exactly the same. You have a lovely couple or friends who decide that it is their lifelong dream to open a restaurant. So they take everything they have, sell the house, empty their IRAs and finance a business that is almost certainly going to fail. All I’ve ever heard about the restaurant business is that it is a wonderful way to go broke and I have a lot of friends who have been successful at it. I’ve known people who have run restaurants for generations but even they would recommend against it. Going into it because you like food is effectively like setting your money on fire except without the warmth.

Though I have to say watching this does make me hungry. And trust me, when I open up my bar I won’t have any of these issues.