“You have these rumors going around. People say, ‘Ooh, the Vienna. They’re all swingers. It’s a big brothel.’” – Jessica
The Vienna Restaurant and Inn is located in Southbridge, Massachusetts, and not Vienna, Austria.
The Welcome to Southbridge road sign proclaims the city to be “The Eye of the Commonwealth,” which kind of has The Handmaid’s Tale vibes, but lets set that aside for the moment.
Jonathan and Lisa Krach bought the Vienna back in 2000. “Jonathan had the crazy idea of creating the Vienna as an Austrian restaurant and bed and breakfast,” Lisa says.
“We try to transport people and give them that feeling of being in Vienna,” she adds.
The servers at the restaurant seem quite excited to dish about the owners. David says that while the married couple seem gracious and charming on the surface, they are not “the perfect married couple” and “it’s quite a different story.” He later relates that you can often hear Lisa and Jonathan screaming at each other from all over the inn.
Melissa adds that Lisa is “emotional” and will “explode and she can’t help but be upset.”
And then this, from Jessica: “There was a time I called her a psycho bitch, because she was being a psycho bitch.” If that’s not enough, Jessica also feels that Lisa “fake cries” when she gets upset and is not “authentic.”
Jonathan tells the camera that Lisa “isn’t always so nice to me,” with a strange grin on his face. We then cut to a scene where Lisa snaps at her husband with, “Why do you always have to dress like a goddamn like bum?”
Then things get wild.
“You have these rumors going around,” Jessica says. “People say, ‘Ooh, the Vienna. They’re all swingers. It’s a big brothel.’”
Swingers, brothel?
To this, here’s what we get from the owners:
- Lisa: “It’s ridiculous.”
- Jonathan: “That being said, we’re very friendly people. Very friendly.”
Outside of all the friendliness going on afterhours, Jonathan notes that financially, the Vienna Restaurant and Inn is “hanging on by a thread.”
When Gordon Ramsay arrives and meets Lisa and Melissa, Ramsay learns that all of the staff are forced to purchase and wear sort of 19th Century Vienna-style costumes as uniforms that cost between $300-$400 apiece.
“And it reminds them to not gain weight,” Lisa says, with a smile on her face.
I’ll add that as Ramsay asks Lisa about the décor of the cramped dining room – which he rightly notes is cluttered with Austrian-style knickknacks and tchotchkes – Lisa gets weirdly flirty with him, turning Ramsay’s questions into opportunities for double entendres.
When Lisa shows Ramsay to his room, he quickly assesses that there’s a lock on the closet door – with a tiny, exposed area within the room itself set aside for him to hang/store his clothes. Ramsay compels Lisa to unlock the closet to discover that it’s jammed full of Lisa’s own personal clothes.
We also learn that the price tag for this room is $220.
Ramsay’s overall observation: “Everything looks dated… it looks very, very tired.”
I’ll add that the rooms at the Vienna Inn are far tidier and clean looking versus the vast majority of Hotel Hell situations, so it does have that going for it.
Down at the restaurant, Ramsay again points out to Lisa that every room of the inn is crammed full of antiques and/or junk. The British chef then orders up a number of Austrian-style dishes to sample.
Ramsay says of the scallops: “looks like the dog’s chewed them.” And overall: “tastes like s—.”
“The food is so dated, it’s extraordinary,” he adds.
When Ramsay chats up Melissa about her take on things (as Lisa hovers about, desperate to listen in), things get serious as the long-time employee tells Gordon that her worst experience at the Vienna Restaurant and Inn was the time that Lisa smacked her in the back of the head in front of customers.
Not only is that humiliating, it’s straight up abuse.
“Not hard, but demeaning,” Melissa adds.
After his meal, Ramsay assembles the owners and staff and tells them his feelings about how everything about the Vienna Restaurant and Inn is dated, shoddy, and sloppy.
A truly bizarre scene follows where the camera lingers on Lisa and Jonathan for what feels like an agonizing amount of time after Ramsay leaves the room. Lisa breaks down in tears, telling her husband that he let her down and how embarrassed she is.
Then she says this: “I always told you that we need to change things and we need to make them sexier, and you never wanna listen to me.”
And if you thought that was weird, we then see a shadowy scene where it looks like Lisa is confiding in another woman (who is also “pulling on her feet”), while meanwhile, Ramsay says via voiceover, “I’ve heard rumors around town that the basement is known as a swingers’ hangout and is used for late-night parties.”
Down in the basement, Ramsay discovers a massive wine and liquor cellar and also a mineral spa. “A dungeon for swingers,” he concludes.
During dinner service, Lisa genuinely seems like she’s on the verge of having some kind of meltdown. After Ramsay discovers that the roasted chicken had been prepared several days earlier, he relays this information to diners who are eating that very entrée. When one of those diners expresses her disappointment about this to Lisa, the Vienna co-owner snaps at her in a somewhat unsettling way.
Back in the kitchen, when Jonathan tells his wife that he’s stressed out, she responds, “You don’t have a heart – you can’t have a heart attack.”
Post-dinner service, Ramsay gives one of his standard speeches about how everything was terrible that night, after which Jonathan and Lisa scream at each other, hurling “F— you” back and forth as hotel guests can clearly overhear the heated argument.
Back inside, Lisa heads straight for the bar and pounds an enormous glass of bourbon in front of three of her staffers.
Soon, Ramsay is rather perceptive when he calls Lisa out for being performative with the constantly crying one moment, laughing the next. And meanwhile, Jonathan is more or less catatonic.
The next day, Ramsay purposefully sends the owners away so that he can have a meeting with the rest of the Vienna’s staff. Multiple tales of abusive, incompetent management emerge, including a pattern of Lisa drinking with guests with the expectation of be served as late as midnight.
And on top of that, there are consistent payroll problems that cause the Vienna’s employees to not get paid on time.
When Jonathan agrees that “it’s a mess,” Ramsay counters with, “You’re a mess.”
As Lisa tears up again, it makes me a bit eye roll-y, I’ll admit.
This leads to a typical Hotel Hell scene where Ramsay confronts the owners with a group of hotel guests who tell their own tales of their terrible experiences during their stay.
One unique aspect? One lady says, “I’ve heard that swingers stay here,” while others readily agree.
Oh, by the way, as one guy talks about how he’d be willing to come back to the restaurant regularly as he used to if things improved, Lisa starts crying so loudly that she interrupts him.
The next sequence is handled kind of oddly from an editing standpoint, but basically the standard renovation is unveiled, which includes a vast improvement and modernization to the guest rooms, and a new point-of-sale system to make operations more efficient.
What’s kind of funny here is seeing how disappointed the quirky Lisa is with the changes.
Speaking of performative, there are many times when Ramsay gets worked up or heated during a Kitchen Nightmares or Hotel Hell or Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back episode and you can feel – when you watch and recap as many of these as your humble narrator here – that he kind of has a set gear of passion that he’ll put on for television drama purposes.
But there are some people and some episodes where you feel that the owners have gotten under his skin in a legitimate way, and this is one of them. Ramsay’s anger boils over during relaunch night when he feels like the affable-meets-out-to-lunch Jonathan is being far too lazy and passive in the kitchen.
This manifests in Ramsay calling out the chef and repeatedly demanding, “I want four f—ing main courses at the same time!”
Usually, there are heartwarming moments of some sort near the end of an episode, but not here. As Ramsay says goodbye to Jonathan and Lisa, he sounds relieved more than anything to soon get away from them.
And when Lisa complains about the guest room renovation, Ramsay replies with a line that I honestly and truly adore: “It would be a great shame for you to sound ungrateful.”
Meanwhile, Ramsay drops on them that when a contractor was set to replace the kitchen’s stove, he could not proceed because the kitchen’s plumbing was not up to code and “on the verge of being illegal.”
Not shockingly, Ramsay says in a little epilogue segment, “Soon after I left, Lisa and Jonathan reverted to the old Vienna.” And by that, they literally went “back to the original décor and the original menu.”
Overall, Ramsay drops this: “Their reputation in the town remains the same.”
That’s another way of Gordon Ramsay trying to say: this hotel hell remains hellish.
Hotel Hell, “Vienna Restaurant and Inn”: is it still open?
According to Wikipedia: the Vienna Restaurant and Inn “was ultimately closed after a fire mysteriously broke out in November 2017.”
Wonder if it had anything to do with the kitchen not being up to code?
Some stats and info about Hotel Hell, “Vienna Restaurant and Inn”
TV SHOW – Hotel Hell
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 5
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX
EPISODE DESCRIPTION – The Vienna owner’s Jonathan and Lisa Krach are at their breaking point and have become trapped in their Austrian themed hotel, drowning in debt. Gordon discovers some shocking rumors about the owners and the real reason customers have stopped coming.
GENRE – Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV, Reality TV
CAST – Gordon Ramsay