The Restaurant, not just for food lovers

People who have never seen The Restaurant might expect a food show like many others, focussing on dishes, ingredients and buying the right sort of tablecloth. But The Restaurant is much more. A lot of the assignments the candidates get feature tasks on marketing, organization and financial management. Topped off with a boss (Raymond Blanc) who uses the aid of two assistants to help him decide which candidates to “fire” (which, in this case, means closing their restaurant), this show is actually a lot like The Apprentice, but focussed exclusively on one trade.

After the “pay what you think it is worth” evening at the different restaurants, where customers were asked to pay for their meal what they thought it was worth, three losing couples emerged. In a bid to save their restaurant, they had to serve lunch at a motorway service station. First couple to compete in the challenge were Mike and Harriet, a father and daughter. They came up with a lot of creative ideas but failed to impress Raymond Blanc when they cheated on their promotional photographs. Helen, one of the other contestants, advised them to prepare the food for the pictures using packaged food from the shop, as it would take them less time to cook. This led to weird dishes – Harriet drizzled their shop-bought brownie with olive oil to make it look shiny for the picture – but the photos looked rather good. They sold rather well too but Raymond Blanc was not amused, as promotional pictures like that are considered illegal.

The second couple cooking for survival were Michelle and Russell. This couple are rather easy-going but this led them into trouble as they couldn’t finish their promotional pictures in time. On the day they only had three dishes to promote instead of five and they needed to make handwritten posters to promote the other two. They did not seem to be bothered by this though and especially Michelle seemed to live in her own dream world during the entire task, handing out strange promotional stickers to people who were clearly in a hurry. Nevertheless their food was rated very highly by Sarah Willingham (one of Raymond Blanc’s inspectors).

Last couple in trouble were Richard and Scott, who had an extra challenge when Richard fell ill and was not able to work in the kitchen. Their start had been dodgy too though, as they had failed to do the right sort of preparation and had never bothered to check how many customers they could expect during lunch hours. This led to the chicken disaster, where they ordered 20 whole chickens and made coq au vin for 150 people when in fact they only sold about 17 portions.

In the end, Richard and Scott were the ones to go. They had clearly the least amount of business sense and when they closed up shop they admitted that running a restaurant had been much more challenging than they had ever thought. Next week will see the remaining contestants having to prove to Raymond Blanc that they can cook meat dishes from a whole animal without wasting too much food, which will force them to both think up creative dishes and even more creative ways to sell them.

The next episode is on BBC 2 on Wednesday at 20.00 – not just for food lovers, but for business lovers too.
In the meantime, come and see what it’s all about on our Restaurant Forum.