Kitchen Nightmares

Kitchen Nightmares - Restaurant Makeover Or Yelling Contest?

Gordon Ramsay's show, Kitchen Nightmares, has brought hope to the greasy spoons and dirty dive restaurants across America (but mostly New York) for two seasons now. Ramsay made his name first as a soccer player, then gourmet restaurant owner, and now as a TV host to a variety of competitive cooking shows, most notably Hell's Kitchen.

For Fox's show Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay visits restaurants which are financially floundering and attempts to turn them around. Before the show starts, most Kitchen Nightmare restaurants are under a mountain of debt. Are heavily indebted restaurants doomed to bankruptcy, or is Gordon Ramsay not the miracle worker he's sold as?

Data was collected on the amount of debt, proportion of male owners, and whether each restaurant was still open. Of the restaurants shown in Season 1 of Kitchen Nightmares, 28.5% are still in business. For each additional $10,000 in debt before Ramsay arrives, the restaurant's chance of staying open decreases by 1% (holding constant whether the management is male or female).

Many owners on Kitchen Nightmares have taken second home mortgages, maxed their credit cards, and pressured friends or relatives into loaning them money. Restaurants with more male owners have an increased chance of staying open. This result is somewhat slanted because there was only one exclusively female-owned business featured in Season 1 of Kitchen Nightmares, and it went under. The advantage this model displays for men is almost certainly the result of quirky data in a small sample set, not any objective difference between men and women as restaurant owners.

Number of years in business was statistically irrelevant to a restaurant's chance of staying open. To predict a Kitchen Nightmares restaurant's chance of staying open, the formula is:

For an example, we can apply this to Campania's (Episode 9) which had $80,000 in debt and a male owner. To find out, I did the above calculations for all the Kitchen Nightmare restaurants I knew the debt total for. The numbers don't lie, right?

I might revisit this subject in a little while, after the restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares Season 2 have a chance to sink or swim. Basically, if you're a restaurant owner, don't bet your retirement on these scribblings (at least until you've paid me as a consultant). The restaurant business is about high standards.

Restaurants have inertia. When a restaurant is professionally managed, it closes down when cost exceeds profit for a sustained time. The service industry is hard work, and the glamor of owning a restaurant causes some people to forget that. You might see them later in Kitchen Nightmares Season 3.  By Nicholas Bormann - EzineArticles.com