“You’ve got insipid gloop.” – Gordon Ramsay
Welcome to Café Tavolini, located in Black Rock, Connecticut (about 60 miles away from New York City), where married couple Keith and Lisa Restivo purchased the place “having never worked in the business before.”
That’s like a key placement (red flag?) on your Kitchen Nightmares Bingo card right there.
In fact, Lisa was a “hairdresser by trade” while Keith was the owner of liquor stores. “We had no clue,” Lisa admits.
Apparently, things went well for a while, but now the place is a Ghost Town. Also: everyone seems to think that Keith is super lazy. Rick the server says that Keith watches the place via surveillance camera and “nitpicks” over the phone, and the vibe among the staff is that there’s no management or leadership.
Oh: and Café Tavolini is about $350,000 in debt, and Keith and Lisa’s marriage is on the brink. This is like some blaring PSA stuff about not buying a business with your spouse, especially when you have no idea what you’re doing going in.
When Ramsay pulls up to the restaurant, a young dude named Van pops out and gets into Gordon’s SUV. Van is kind of a tough talkin’ guy who also is a server at the restaurant, as well as the son to Lisa and stepson to Keith.
Speaking of Keith: Van immediately throws him under the bus, telling Ramsay that the only reason that his stepdad rolled out of bed and came into work is because “he heard that Chef Ramsay was showing up.”
Ramsay then heads into Café Tavolini and meets the Restivo clan, whereupon Van swiftly throws both adults under the best yet again, correcting their assertions that they were at the restaurant every night. “Four zero zero” he says, meaning that he himself works four nights a week, with zero on the board for both Keith and Lisa Restivo.
It’s right here that I realized that Van’s voice sounds a lot like Ray Liotta circa Goodfellas, and once that locked in, it caused me to focus on it every time he spoke.
As Ramsay sits down to order up some food from the kitchen, Keith immediately bailed out. “Oh what a surprise, he left,” Ricky the server deadpans. “He doesn’t have the concept of priorities,” Ricky adds.
Gordon starts out with Grandma’s Meatball Salad, which is this kind of odd dish (to me – and keep in mind I’m from Long Island and have been in an Italian restaurant or three in my day) that involves two enormous meatballs sitting on top of bunch of lettuce.
“Right now, that’s an insult to grandmothers,” Ramsay quips as he takes a bite. “That’s a mess,” he adds. “Gross.”
And then for good measure: “It’s a big, soggy, dirty pool of juice and crap underneath there,” he says to Van. My favorite part here is that when Van takes the plate away, Gordon says “thank you” politely before adding Jesus under his breath.
On the stuffed clams: “It looks like some dog shat in my shell.” And then it turns out that there are actually no clams in the stuffed clams.
The salmon dish is so undercooked that you can visually see that it’s raw in the center. And then on the rice it comes with: “You’ve got insipid gloop.”
Meanwhile, Keith returns and he and Van quickly get into an argument that you can get the sense happens all the time: “you’re never here,” “you don’t know what I do when I’m not here,” etc. And this then leads to Keith and Lisa screaming at each other, followed by Lisa storming out of the room.
When Ramsay checks in to see what’s going on, Lisa bursts into tears. Gordon uses this opportunity to lay this on the family: “Let me tell you, the menu was a f—ing disgrace. Hideous.”
Ramsay then sits down with Lisa to learn more Café Tavolini’s finances, and it’s pretty dire. Lisa explains that one night, there was “$40 in the till” at the restaurant, and the Restivo’s house has been foreclosed on. “Some days I just want to hand him divorce papers because I can’t take it,” she reveals.
At dinner service, Ramsay quickly susses out why meals are flying out of the kitchen so quickly: meals have been prepared in advance and then stored in the refrigerator. And therefore, the chicken for example is “hard as a rock” and “dry as the f—king Sahara Desert.” Gordon taps a piece on the metal shelf to emphasize his point.
Lisa tells the camera that she “didn’t really know that was a problem” which… therein lies the problem.
Meanwhile, as chaos builds in the kitchen and orders get backed up, Lisa and Keith have bailed out and are sitting together in a car outside for reasons that are presumably their own.
After dinner service, Ramsay tells the owners in front of the entire staff they’ve been “abusing” their own restaurant. “It’s a joke!” he adds. And then the family reverts to a massive amount of squabbling once again.
Which means it’s time for a gimmick! The next morning, Lisa and Keith drive up to Café Tavolini to find it boarded up, with “Closed” and “Out of Business” and “We Quit” written in spray paint. There’s “caution” tape surrounding the property for good measure.
Ramsay then shows up, and Lisa reads aloud a letter that she wrote for him last night. It’s heartfelt about how they need to make drastic changes to turn things around and hope that Gordon will continue to help them. But all the while I’m thinking about The Letter and thinking, what is this, Jersey Shore?
Meanwhile, Ramsay announces that “this is the wakeup call” and “today, we begin the comeback” if everyone is committed to change and so on.
The owners then apologize to the entire to the entire staff for their “negligence” and how they appreciate everyone hanging in there. Ricky the server tears up and then leans over and wipes his head on his sleeve. Even daughter Joli calls it a “breath of fresh air” to see her parents in so different a mode.
Then it’s time to unveil the new menu, which includes Tuscan bean soup, porchetta with roasted vegetables, and olive oil cake, all to be served family-style. The family-style set-up will also help out the staff who work out of a super tiny kitchen.
At dinner service that night, Lisa is put to work as a server, which surprises her but she gets into the rhythms of it pretty quickly. Meanwhile, the family-style dishes go well but the “regular menu” items are held up in the kitchen, causing stress and chaos to unfold quickly.
Meanwhile, Van vented to the cameras, Ray Liotta-style, about how Lisa and Keith just started “wandering around aimlessly” while the pressure built. And then Keith eventually bailed out of the back, as is his way it seems.
Back in the kitchen, Ramsay and staff rally and finally food flies out of the kitchen so that service is able to end somewhat successfully.
After service, Ramsay gathers the team and Keith is called for bailing out “when the s— hit the fan.” Ramsay quickly cuts to talking up the next day’s relaunch but calls out the need for Keith and Lisa to “relaunch themselves.”
Essentially, it’s pretty clear that Café Tavolini works just as well if not better without its owners than with them.
The next morning, the Café Tavolini renovation looks really good: clean and modern, along with new plates and other stuff. And then the kitchen was also demo-ed to clear out additional space for the staff.
The menu has also been overhauled, including dishes such as herb roasted chicken and Bronzino, with all meals available a la carte or family style.
On relaunch night, Keith actually seems to be making an effort as a host but doesn’t understand the menu well enough to explain dishes to customers. And meanwhile, there’s a holdup in the kitchen that holds up dishes from getting out to diners. This happens on almost every episode of Kitchen Nightmares at this point, which is not surprising considering the staff is working through a brand-new menu.
Overall, Keith and Lisa make an actual effort and things get moving, resulting in happy customers in the end. And speaking to the camera, Lisa even says that she thinks her marriage could end up working out if things continue to go this well.
Ramsay tells the Restivo’s and the staff after dinner service that they’ve done “a bloody good job.”
🍽 Want more? Check out Pop Thruster’s Kitchen Nightmares episode reviews (there’s a lot).
Kitchen Nightmares, “Café Tavolini”: is it still open?
Usually, episodes end with a little final segment that’s super positive about how well the featured restaurant has been doing in the weeks since Ramsay and crew did their thing.
But in this case, it’s all nightmare, sadly: everyone reverted to their old ways, the restaurant’s future is “uncertain,” and Lisa and Keith Restivo are on the outs.
And then things get even worse, if this bit, referring to a Facebook post, is to be believed:
Cafe Tavolini closed in December 2010, just after Christmas. The restaurant was investigated by the Attorney General for selling gift cards right before closing. The owners said they closed due to medical reasons.
Yikes.
Some stats and info about Kitchen Nightmares, “Café Tavolini”
TV SHOW – Kitchen Nightmares
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 4, Episode 9
AIRED ON – March 25th, 2011
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Food Shows
CAST – Gordon Ramsay