“I don’t think you can even wrap your mind around how big it is to open a restaurant.” – Erin
Ah, Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. It has 1.4 million people, we’re told, the neighborhood of Fishtown, and one massively struggling restaurant called the Hot Potato Café.
From the intro to the episode alone, we’re lead to believe edition of Kitchen Nightmares is going to be a doozy. “A heartbreaking episode of Kitchen Nightmares” is heralded along with the dramatic announcement that “For the first time ever, Chef Ramsay chooses to leave.”
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And with that in mind, we meet Erin, one of the owners of the Hot Potato.
“Our intention when we opened Hot Potato was to make this a very comfortable, casual, friendly restaurant,” Erin – one of three sisters who own the restaurant – tells us. “We did the fund things, like oh, we’re picking out salt and pepper and all that cute stuff.”
Then she adds: “I don’t think you can even wrap your mind around how big it is to open a restaurant.”
A local food critic, Brian McManus of the Philadelphia Weekly, soon ripped the Hot Potato apart with a review entitled “Spuddy Hell,” and things went downhill from there.
Each thing we learn reveals a new level of naivete, such as Kathryn, another owner, saying, “We knew we didn’t have the experience that we needed in that kitchen, and we couldn’t afford to hire somebody.”
That leads to us learning that Danielle, a niece of the family, grudgingly agreed to be the chef even though she’s inexperienced and doesn’t really want to be a chef.
This amount of information is a really good reminder that when something seems iffy, off, or questionable about a restaurant, it’s an indicator that things may well be hanging together with a combination of spit, glue, and tongue depressor sticks behind the scenes.
And with that introduction, the tough lovin’ knight in shining armor (apron?) arrives to do his thing: chef Gordon Ramsay.
As Ramsay enters the restaurant and meets the owners, it’s clear that unlike some of the dumps that are featured on Kitchen Nightmares, the Hot Potato is spotless and cute inside, and the owners are focused and highly motivated to make things work. Gordon quickly figures out that the challenges include the young, inexperienced niece working the kitchen, and additionally that the three “top dishes” the owners recommend (including crab cakes and pierogies) do not include anything remotely potato-adjacent.
Things go awry quickly, and by that I mean that things go by Kitchen Nightmares routine when Ramsay is appalled seven ways from Sunday by his initial round of sampling the menu. For example, when he finds out that the potato spuds are not served fresh, he gets the opportunity rip off the quip, “The hot potato is a frozen potato.”
Because the three sisters who run The Hot Potato café seem like nice ladies who genuinely want to do the right thing and make things work, it feels like Gordon has to work up the energy to be overly dramatic in adding things like, “I feel like a potato organ donor.”
And indeed, when Kathryn and crew are ordered to try their own Sheppard’s Pie back in the kitchen, they agree that it’s food that one might expect in a cafeteria.
Then Ramsay just gets right down to it: “the food is s—.”
As Gordon digs deeper into the situation with the Hot Potato Café, he learns that the place is $250,000 in debt, and that it’s never made money in the two years of its operation.
“We had no idea what we were doing, obviously,” Kathryn admits. “I feel like if we shut the doors, we’re really screwed,” another sister adds.
Ramsay tells them that he wants to see “fight” in them during the evening’s dinner service. “I can’t work with corpses,” he says.
During the dinner service, one sister (Erin, I think) says that dinner coming out of the back “looks like a sloppy dog mess,” which is hilarious only because one of Ramsay’s pet phrases, so to speak, is, “This looks like a dog’s dinner!”
Another funny moment: the narrator noting that Kathryn “is just standing there, doing nothing” during the service.
Later that night, Ramsay predictably tells the staff that what he saw was embarrassing. And the fight he was looking for? Not so much. He then announces that he’s “done” and storms out. “I can’t do it,” he adds, as he reaches the street. This is the least dramatic moment of the episode as it occurs only around the half-way mark.
The sisters then follow him and (predictably) Gordon gives one of his tough love speeches now that the owners of the Hot Potato are crying and groveling for his help. Again, Ramsay tells them they need to fight, and will help them only if they are “200% committed.”
Which as we all know is a lot committed.
The next day, Ramsay helps the team to update the menu to focus on… fresh potatoes, which honestly makes an exceeding amount of sense. “Why didn’t we think of this before?” a sister asks.
Ramsay praises Daniel’s potato dish – a Potato Florentine which includes fresh vegetables and crispy potato skin, which reignites her passion to cook… at least for the time being.
The evening’s menu unveils Daniel’s dish as a special along with a much-upgraded version of the Shepard’s Pie. The big issue during the dinner service is that the portions are so enormous that the leftovers are enough for their own entrée. Not the worst thing to happen during a Kitchen Nightmares night by far, I’d say, but it does point to another reason why the Hot Potato is losing money. Again, Ramsay calls it “embarrassing.”
“You’re giving away double, bang,” he adds.
And then we cut to a gimmick where Ramsay takes everyone out back and has them smash plates against a brick wall because… that proves they can serve smaller portions from then on, I guess?
The reopening of the restaurant is much less dramatic than usual as the place looked pretty good to begin with, but the KN crew always does a very nice job with the upgraded décor. “This is potato heaven,” Ramsay declares.
The menu has been further overhauled (smaller, with each dish “fresh, exciting, and vibrant”) and chef Richard Marsh has been brought in to help mentor Danielle in the kitchen. And Ramsay also hooked up with the Idaho Potato Commission to get the Hot Potato three months of three spuds to boot.
The first dinner service with the new menu starts off well, but then we get a little twist as Brian McManus of the Philadelphia Weekly makes a return visit. “They normally don’t visit restaurants twice,” Ramsay reminds us.
McManus tries the potato soup and updates his “Spuddy Hell” byline to “potato-rific.” Maybe let’s workshop that one, Brian, but it’s nice to see him enjoying his dinner this time around. We later see his new review, entitled “New Star(ch).” Not bad on that one.
“It really is the greatest feeling,” Danielle says about the success of the night, and it’s one of the nicest moments I’ve yet seen on Kitchen Nightmares. And I’m reminded that the owners and staff of the Hot Potato Café is one of the most likable that have ever appeared on the show.
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Kitchen Nightmares, “Hot Potato Café”: is it still open?
And as it turned out after the heartwarming ending to the episode, the Hot Potato Café shut down just eight months after the episode aired. Bummer!
Despite the support from Gordon Ramsay, the rise in customers, and the renewed passion among the owners, Hot Potato Cafe closed in August 2010, 13 months after Danielle left and eight months after its “Kitchen Nightmares” episode aired. The restaurant’s lease ended on August 31. Claire, Kathryn, and Erin decided that Hot Potato Cafe had run its course, and it was time to get out of the restaurant business.
What took its place? The Lloyd Whiskey Bar, which is open to this day and has a four out of five star average on Yelp with 228 reviews as of this writing: “A whiskey bar with neighborhood appeal. Expertly made original and classic cocktails, free of
pretense.”
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares, “Hot Potato Café”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 2, Episode 1
AIRED ON – January 29th, 2010
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Food Shows
CAST – Gordon Ramsay