Kitchen Nightmares in Denver

Gordon Ramsey, Help!!

About a month and a half ago, I landed a job at a local restaurant as the Director of Marketing and Events... are you impressed? I was sold the vision, the potential, and the endless possibilities of this new exciting opportunity. Well... plluugh to that! Couldn't be further from reality.

The owner of this restaurant, we'll call him "He", was originally the silent partner, but due to the asinine behavior of the active partner, "Y", "He" took over. The reputation of this restaurant is in the toilet because of "Y". On the flip side, "He" is an incredibly successful businessman that owns several software companies around the world with connections any self made millionaire would envy. The catch is.... he has very little knowledge about how to run a restaurant.

He fired the manager that hired me... the man that HE hired to turn this disaster of a restaurant around; hence the Kitchen Nightmares reference. Then, the ONLY other manager quit due to all the chaos!! His last day was Saturday. So, we have nobody to run the restaurant at this moment. The head chef, sous chef, and cooks are all out interviewing for jobs elsewhere. I know that the head chef and sous chef both have an offer on the table... so we'll see.

It has taken me 6 weeks to nail down a banquet menu for this place simply because it's taken that long to sit down with the head chef. Don't even get me started on the restaurant's website! Ugh! As I've been out "marketing" the new vision of this place (aka lying my ass off), potential clients often ask if I can send them a menu, or a banquet menu with our policies, or if they can get our banquet menu from our website... the answer to all of the above is NO!

Oh! Did I mention the comment from our head chef last week that Sysco Foods has " cut us off" because we haven't paid our bill? Oh yeah... that was good for a belly chuckle.

Oh! And we only have 3 servers. Funny right! I mean, are you kidding me?

So... with that very brief insight into my new job... you can only imagine how confident I am booking events for 50 - 100 guests for this restaurant. We'll see how it goes. In anticipation of the day I show up to work to find a "business closed" sign on the door, I am, of course, open to any other opportunities that may come my way.

Though the direction, stability, and future of this restaurant are completely unknown... One thing is for sure! It provides me continuous humor and sometimes the absurdity of the whole thing has me laughing so hard I have to wipe my eyes.

By the way... last week, the fleeing manager assured me that Mr. Owner will give us some notice that he's shutting the restaurant down. However, in the case that I do go to work and discover that "Business Closed" sign, I'm keeping good records of the events I'm booking so I can call them on my way to happy hour to let them know that... "So sorry to tell you that your event has been canceled because the restaurant has shut down."

I'm not even sure Gordon Ramsey can fix this mess!!

Keep you posted...