RESTAURANT EPISODE 2: OPENING NIGHT-MARES

The couples are all taken to see their restaurants. They are in a variety of locations and settings, from a super modern glass fronted one (yay!) in Brentford (boo!), to village pubs, high street shop fronts etc and so on. They have all the basic equipment and furniture, and have a week and £5,000 to get everything else they need and sort out staff etc. To rub their noses in it even more, they get treated to a night out in one of Raymond’s places, so they can look back and reflect upon what a superbly run restaurant is supposed to be like when (SPOILER) it all goes tits up in their own places. It seems that each restaurant has a full board of punters arranged for them, so all they have to do is phone them all up and confirm their bookings. That probably isn’t very realistic, but I suppose it’s better than having them completely empty on their opening nights.

Lots of montages of cleaning/painting etc. Team Sino-Cymru can’t decide on a name for their place that reflects its Chinese/Welsh cuisine (how about ‘inedible farrago’?), Team Father/Daughter have a nice city centre place in Oxford and ask their customers to order in advance so they can get a head start with the food. Something about the dad is beginning to remind me of Alan Partridge. Team Gay are sticking with their uber naff “Sorbets und Seasons” concept.

Team LOL (the crypto gay comedy ones who had a mashed potato disaster in episode one) are opening a fine dining restaurant called Gallery which will have art on the walls. There is a funny scene of the intense one telling the mild mannered one off for distracting him while he is trying to chat to another chef, then the mild mannered one does v-signs behind his back. All is going well until they discover a gas leak in the dining room. It can’t be fixed in time so they basically just can’t open – how annoying for them after all that preparation (and yes there is another scene of the mild mannered one hugging and comforting the intense one).

Opening night comes around – Team Twee (the ones with the flowers) aren’t quite ready and there are heaps of crap piled around everywhere, but they don’t feature much apart from that so they must do OK. Team English barely feature, so they must do OK too (but we later learn that their food was under seasoned, bland and average – a good representation of English cookery then). Another team get a bit of stick, because they make a big deal of where all their food is sourced, but then they can’t say what breed of pig their pork belly comes from. Doh.

Team Sino-Cymru call their place the Welsh Wok. Hmmm. They seem to have given up on the fusion concept, and instead have a mix of Welsh and Chinese dishes, or else a welsh meat dish with some stir fried veg. Lots of comedy shots of bemused locals being bemused. Sarah the sidekick visits. She is not as withering as Margaret Apprentice and seems smiley and pleasant most of the time, but when she is inspecting she is ruthlessly business like. There is a hilarious conversation where she discusses the menu with Mrs Welsh and it goes something like ‘I thought you were doing fusion food’, ‘We are!’, ‘But there are no fusion dishes on the menu’, ‘No, it’s a mix of Welsh and Chinese dishes’, ‘So, not fusion then’, ‘The fusion is in the menu’, ‘but I thought you were doing fusion food?’, ‘Yes but no but yes but no’.

In Team Gay, the front of house one seems to be doing OK, but the kitchen one is a bit wimpy and asks the sous chef to let him know if he’s doing anything wrong. Has he never seen Masterchef? Even I know that the head chef rules with a rod of iron. It is really clear who are the amateurs who can put on a nice dinner party, and who are the professionals in this show. David Inspector comes round and tuts at the kitchen hierarchy. He orders the signature sorbet, which is mint and pea (these two are obsessed with mint and peas) and says that it’s (a) nasty and (b) not even a real sorbet. No one else orders it all night.

In Team Father/Daughter's gaff (a classic brasserie called the Blue Goose), they are all smug because they have got their customers to pre-order. Father tells the waitresses the system for dealing with orders, and the waitress immediately tells the film crew that it won’t work. Sure enough it doesn’t – there is no way to track orders or to tell who has had their food and there isn’t even a proper table numbering system. It soon descends into complete chaos, with tables getting random dishes if they are lucky, and people leaving in droves after waiting for two hours without getting any food. Father gets really arsey with all the customers and insists that they pay for soft drinks they ordered while they were waiting. Unsurprisingly, lots of people don’t want to pay for anything. Sarah arrives at the height of the meltdown and chats with some irate people who are leaving after not getting any dinner. The whole evening is an Epic Fail.

Raymond debriefs the couples and offers some pithy advice to each one. Cymru-Welsh, Sourcing Shambles and the Gays come in for special criticism. Father/Daughter are left to last and think they are going to be deservedly eliminated, but Raymond says it would be unfair to shut them after one night (and also a huge waste of money), but they have to improve things and next week will have to do a Raymond Challenge and fight to keep their restaurant (although, because of his accent it sounds like he is telling them to fart to keep their restaurant, tee hee)

Next time: Raymond gives them some hints for making more money, and they have to do a night where people only pay what they thought their meal was worth (cue clip of a punter saying his steak and frites was worth about £4 – the same as a kebab. Heh)