Kitchen Nightmares – Could you run a restaurant with your best friend?

Kitchen Nightmares got me thinking tonight. Could I run a restaurant with one of my closest friends? Or is that just a one way ticket to Crazyville for both parties involved?

Let me explain. This week, my Gordon Ramsay traveled to West Babylon, New York. It’s the home of, um … nothing much except this restaurant called “Classic American.” It’s run by two former longtime waitresses, who bought out their owner ten years ago for some 220K. Here, I scratched my chin. You regulars know that as a “performer,” I’ve lived through my own portion of Hell on Earth (I mean being your food server) for a lot longer than I’d care to admit. But somehow, I never did accrue a few hundred thou to buy out the Devil himself (um, I mean the restaurant owner), so this episode piqued my curiosity.

These two best ever girlfriends were going along swimmingly for awhile, when all of a sudden … tons of people got laid off and stopped going out for dinner. Plus! Their food was always mediocre at best, so now Colleen and Naomi find themselves “screwed” (that’s Gordon’s word not mine).

There’s no computers, menus, adequate leadership and a bunch of wait staff that would love to text and smoke instead of waiting on people. In addition, one of the owners, Colleen, cries so much that I’ve already e-mailed her the number to my therapist. And! The food isn’t fresh. It’s frozen or microwaved. And if you’ve been a follower of the G.R., he just hates that. So!

Colleen’s partner is Naomi, who is such a shrinking violet that I wanted to slap her. Ooops. Did I say that out loud? But really! Put on your “big girl pants” and deal. The two of them are 770K in debt. Stop crying and shivering and grow a pair people!

But. Then I thought. What if my friend Katie and I were in charge of a restaurant? What would happen to us? First of all, I can tell you that Kate and I have the same exact sense of humor. So, we’d be great just traveling from table to table kibbitzing with the clientele. And we both love decorating and music, so that’d be no problem. However, both of us struggle with conflict sometimes, and that happens in restaurants all the time. Cooks get so hot back there at 100 plus degrees that they turn into assholes. Waitresses yell at cooks who yell back. Books and payroll, oh my!

I’d like to think that Kate and I would hire good people around us to take care of things that would challenge us, and develop a well oiled machine. In a perfect world. But then we’d never meet Gordon, so I’d have to screw things beyond belief to ask for his help … huh.

What do you think? If you and your best friend had the task of owning and running your own restaurant, could you? Would you? What would be your challenges? Or is it best to just not go into business with a friend? Sound off puppies!

Clacked by Tara Shrodes
on Jan 29, 2011 @ 01:13 EST5EDT