How many restaurants in general have closed in the last decade though? 20% surviving might not be that bad considering how expensive restaurant biz is, not to mention covid causing massive waves of failed businesses.
Plus the restaurants on the show were frequently months away from closing due to fundamental issues like owner burnout that aren't going to be fixed on a week or two.
You also have to remember that these restaurants were failing largely by their own owners hands. Not keeping kitchens clean, not having a clear vision of the restaurant(too big a menu without a consistent theme), infighting amongst staff/owners, etc.
You don't appear in the show if you're doing well. Even with the facelifts Ramsey provides, it's on the owners and staff to maintain the changes. If they fall back into old habits, then of course they will fail.
I think it's more impressive that 20% actually listened and succeeded during the pandemic.
Most of the owners were fucked in the head, they weren’t going to make it even if he gave every one of them lessons for 6 months and a million dollar investment
does not seem surprising given their criteria for being on the show was something that was going to 100% close and then of course there is the track record in general on restaurants.
I can't remember what sketch show it was, but one of them made that joke.
The end of the episode is always a packed restaurant, but that's just because Gordan Ramsey is cooking the food, and if the restaurant could have made food like that in the beginning, they wouldn't be on the show in the first place.
It was Mitchell and Webb! 😁
"Good, simple food, cooked simply! It's easy"
"It's easy because you did it, I'm clearly not very good at this if I'm on your show, and you've done things on your plate that might be simple to you, but may as well be magic to me! The only reason we have people in there now is because you're here!"
I have not watched one in awhile but I don't recall ramsey cooking in the end he just "convinced" (quotes because maybe behind the scenese insisted) them to have a new look and menu that the show paid for but the staff was the same outside of soemtimes having someone fired.
I seem to recall a retrospective where they did examine many of the restaurants he visited in Kitchen Nightmares. All of the ones that closed were due to the owners failing to follow the advice given, too deep in the red financially to climb out, or a rare instance of insight where the operators decided that running a food establishment wasn't for them.
I mean, they were all in bad shape and going to fail without Ramsay's help to begin with, so failing to follow an experienced chef and business operator's instructions on how to fix things is a surefire way to seal the business's fate.
The arrogance of some of those owners was astounding. Think of the hubris required to sit in your failing restaurant and argue with the most successful chef in the world about his opinion. Literally moronic.
I might be misremembering, but I think there was a similar show with the tall body builder guy who is a chef, and they would come in with a decorator and revamp struggling restaurants.
But the guy would sit down with the books and go through salaries, food costs, budgeting, and show them what they should be charging. They would look at the area restaurants to see what the competition was doing, and they would reset the flow of the floorspace to make room for enough guests to make it make sense.
Making good food isn't enough (although making bad food is enough to fail). Restaurants are a business, and while it's probably not good TV, most of them just need a financial review.
Also, many of the restaurants on the show are is very serious debt. Even if they really do turn around, they might still be unable to crawl out from under their mountain of debt in time.
all of the restaurants were already on the verge of closing. they all had a mountain of debt, serious management problems, problems with staff, with the food, with the sanitation in the kitchen, and always massive interpersonal drama between the owners and the staff that would prove terminal for any business. so, having anyone, no matter how brilliant, swoop in with a remodel and a menu refresh and a bit of team-building for a week isn't really going to turn places like that around, especially when they have deep-seated problems that have been brewing for years, even decades in some cases. frankly, a lot of those places should fail, and many should never have been in business in the first place.
if you want to blame Ramsay for anything, blame him for tricking the audience into thinking that these places ever had a chance of turning things around.