Kitchen Nightmares

Over the past week, I have been doing a marathon viewing of "Kitchen Nightmares" with Gordon Ramsey.   The basic idea is he comes in to help a failing restaurant turn around.

Usually, the food sucks even though the owners state it is great.  There are always some type of personality conflicts between the owners, the owners and the staff, and sometimes between the owners and the customers.

Often the people who bought the restaurant have wanted to run one but do not have the experience or its been in the family forever and no one is willing to make changes, fire the chef, or step back.  The process is for Gordon Ramsey to come in and try out the food which is bad.  As he's commenting on the food, he gets more info on what's wrong with the place from the servers because the owners know its not them.

Then he watches the dinner service, checks out the refrigerators and freezers often discovering the food in them is in bad shape, or they've mixed the raw and cooked foods together, or it was all made days ago, or they use purchased food.  Of course the owners are shocked into changing by their workers comments and Ramsey gives the restaurant a makeover before they redo the menu and have the grand reopening.

Somewhere in the middle of the fourth season (there were 7), I wondered how many of these restaurants were unable to survive and had to close.  According to a Business Insider article from 2014, more than 60 percent of the restaurants closed while 30 percent of those closed within one year.  I wondered how accurate those figures were.

I found a site by the Kitchen Nightmare people which listed updates for every restaurant helped during the seven seasons of the show.  According to them, 57 out of 77 places closed, 18 are still open, two moved and two were sold.  There is information on each restaurant whether open or closed.  If it closed, the author provides a bit more detailed information such as one place closed because the state seized it for nonpayment of taxes.

Another site also has information on which restaurants are open or closed.  It contains a bit more information than the other site but the other one has it all in one place. 

The nice thing about both sites is that it provides enough information for students to analyze.  They can look at the 57 closed businesses and break that information down further into how long after appearing on the show they closed.  Students could also look to see how many of those closed down after they were sold, or did they close for some other reason than just went out of business due to being too far in debt.  As stated earlier one business was closed by the state while another closed due to serving liquor due to an expired license. 

The majority of episodes include information for the amount in debt each restaurant is.  Students could calculate an average amount for the restaurants although one business went into debt due to the wife remodeling the place.  Instead of the 350,000, she ended up spending 950,000 because she didn't bother asking the cost for each thing she wanted and her husband not saying no.

They could even look at each season and see which seasons had more businesses going out of business or staying in business.  It will change from season to season but does averaging the seasons together match the same for the seven seasons?  Pose that question to the students and see what they come up with.

Let students write up a short article outlining their finding from this exercise so they can learn to write reports to communicate with others.